Verena Andermatt Conley Pen CREE: TO BELIEVE IN THE WORLD

"Materialism is an identity crisis," according to Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author Bryant H. McGill.

Verena Andermatt Conley, author and Long-Term Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard University, shows rather than tells this concept in her new novel Cree: To Believe in the World.

The novel centers on a newly divorced sociologist who, with her teenage children, visits the wilderness on a writing assignment to come to terms with her new life. The novel features creative renewal, family dilemmas, and romance as well as the fragile environment and the ethics but also the beauty of nature.

"A simple family romance and a brief romance are the frame for a mystical voyage that brings a woman, like so many experiencing the delusions of marriage and a certain kind of professional success, to reconsider who she is, why and for what goals she can live in this world, and how she can connect with her almost grown children," Conley said.

Conley was raised along the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland and has always craved the great outdoors, so it comes at no surprise that she should be interested in questions of the environment. In 2008 and 2009, she was a senior fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where she developed research for the relation of water with ecology and cultural theory.

"Engaging with literature because of my profession, I have always been interested in stories," Conley said. "Hence my desire to pair the question of the environment with a universal story of family relations and passion rather than the more common plot of a good environmentalist, often a lawyer, battling the villain, a corporation."

For more information, visit http://www.verenaconley.com.

Cree: To Believe in the World
By Verena Andermatt Conley
ISBN: 9781491748367
Available in softcover, hardcover, e-book
Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iUniverse

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Verena Andermatt Conley is Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard University. She teaches courses on literature, women and the environment. Born in Switzerland, she was raised along the shores of Lake Geneva and now maintains two ninety-year old log cabins near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area where she enjoys swimming, canoeing and hiking. Her previous writing includes academic work Ecopolitics, Spatial Ecologies, and Rethinking Technologies, and a memoir, The War Against the Beavers.

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**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE**
For review copies or interview requests, contact:
Jaymie Shook
317.602.7137
jshook(at)bohlsengroup(dot)com

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