Secret Garden

Probably best known for her Jane Austen mystery series, local author Stephanie Barron (who also publishes under the pen name Francine Matthews, though her birth name is Francine Stephanie Barron) is back in the literary limelight with the critically lauded English period novel The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf. Although literary icon Virginia Woolf most definitely walked into the River Ouse with pockets full of stones in March of 1941 (her skeletonized body washed up weeks later), Barron’s signature blend of fact and fiction calls this supposed certainty into question, imagining a reality where present-day gardener Jo Bellamy discovers a copybook containing diary entries that seem to be written by Woolf but are dated after the writer’s death. While Bellamy is trying to authenticate the diary — and thus quash more than six decades of historically accepted truth — the book is stolen, leading Bellamy and a host of other characters with vested interests, romantic and otherwise, on an artifact chase à la The Da Vinci Code.

Barron will read from and sign the less-than-month-old White Garden at 7:30 p.m. this evening at the Tattered Cover, 2526 East Colfax Avenue. Get more information at www.tatteredcover.com/event/stephanie-barron-white-garden or by calling 303-322-7727.

Tue., Oct. 20, 7:30 p.m., 2009