Join us for a conversation with the author of the 2025 One Book One Town (OBOT) selection Beautyland,  Marie-Helene Bertino. 

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.

Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of Beautyland, Parakeet, 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas, and the story collection Safe as Houses. She was the 2017 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. She has received the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Mississippi Review Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, and New York City’s Center for Fiction, and her work has twice been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and Mississippi Review 30. She is the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University.

Registration for free tickets to the OBOT Author Event will start the first week in Februrary on the Fairfield Public Library's website. Event to take place at the SHU Community Theater, 1420 Post Road, Fairfield, CT 06824.

What is One Book One Town?

The town of Fairfield chooses a book each year and encourages the whole town to read it and engage through dialog and programming. The One Book One Town (OBOT) committee is run by the Fairfield Public Library (FPL) and consists of librarians and staff from FPL as well as the Pequot Library, Fairfield Museum & History Center, Fairfield Public Schools, Experience Fairfield, WSHU Public Radio, Sacred Heart University's Library, and the DiMenna-Nyselius Library, Fairfield University.