A Summer for Moths

“IF YOU'VE EVER WISHED BARBARA KINGSOLVER WROTE A BOURNE FILM, THIS YOUR NOVEL" –Rebecca Handler, MacDowell Fellow and award-winning author

A lyrical, high-stakes romance thriller inspired by The Great Gatsby.

A Summer for Moths is the ballad of Booth Baker, working musician and songwriter hiding out in the guise of a handyman and terrorized by the death in high school that forced him to flee his hometown.

When Booth receives the call from his estranged brother with a summer job offer helping maintain rental properties in Connecticut, he’s thrust into the secret world of the “Gold Coast.” There he meets Abby Evers – beautiful, transfixing, and haunted by her own demons. His desire brings him, moth-like, closer to the flames. Soon, Booth is caught in a web woven much tighter than he could’ve imagined. And when he discovers the truth behind Abby’s husband and his business partners’ dealings, he’s forced to place everything on the line: the chance to reconcile his past, his and Abby’s life in the present, and their chance at a future together.

Henry Rivers is the not-so-secret pen name of children’s author and illustrator J.R. Potter best known for his award-winning supernatural series Thomas Creeper that follows the adventures of a mortician’s apprentice turned detective for the dead. His graphic novel work has been published by Image Comics, and in 2024 he received the Denis Diderot Emerging Artist Award to spend two weeks as writer-in-residence at Chateau Orquevaux in France.

Passionate about literacy and sharing wonder, Potter was recently hired by Heinemann Publishing, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, to create stories about empathy to be used in schools across the country. As a working musician and songwriter by day (and night), he loves to play at the intersection of words and music. He lives in Upperville, Virginia.

A Summer for Moths is the opportunity to combine those two loves in a synesthetic experience that will mix live readings with live music.