Step Into Paula McLain’s World

Join the Friends of the Peachtree City Library for a special literary evening with Paula McLain, the New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Wife, Circling the Sun, and Love and Ruin. McLain’s richly researched and emotionally resonant novels have captivated millions of readers with unforgettable characters and sweeping historical settings.

On Friday, January 9, 2026, McLain will visit Peachtree City just days after the release of her highly anticipated new novel, Skylark (on sale January 6, 2025).

"In Skylark, Paula McLain returns to Paris, the setting of her most celebrated novel, to intertwine two eras of upheaval with masterful precision. In luminous prose that shimmers with sensory detail, McLain reveals how beauty and memory can be weapons of resistance, and how acts of defiance can echo across generations. Seductive, subversive, and impossible to put down, Skylark shines a light into the darkest corners of history, revealing the enduring strength of the human spirit." - Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Orphan Train

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Paula McLain is the author of the New York Times bestselling novels, The Paris Wife, Circling the Sun, Love and Ruin, and When the Stars Go Dark.

Paula McLain was born in Fresno, California in 1965. After being abandoned by both parents, she and her two sisters became wards of the California Court System, moving in and out of various foster homes for the next fourteen years. When she aged out of the system, she supported herself by working as a nurses aid in a convalescent hospital, a pizza delivery girl, an auto-plant worker, a cocktail waitress–before discovering she could (and very much wanted to) write. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996.

McLain’s essays have appeared in Town & Country, Good Housekeeping, Real Simple, O the Oprah Magazine, Huffington Post, The Guardian, the New York Times and elsewhere. She is also the author of the memoir, Like Family: Growing up in Other People’s Houses, two collections of poetry, and the debut novel, A Ticket to Ride. She lives with her family in Cleveland.