Quan Barry

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Jim Barnard

A person looks out a window.

Amy Quan Barry

The Unveiling, the highly anticipated, genre-bending work of social satire and literary horror by Quan Barry, arrives in bookstores Oct. 14. Barry appears at Madison’s Central Library as part of the Wisconsin Book Festival's year-round programming that same day to launch the book. Set in Antarctica, The Unveiling follows Striker, a Black film scout on a mission to photograph potential locations for a big-budget movie about Ernest Shackleton’s doomed Antarctica expedition in the mid-1910s. She’s joined by a gaggle of insanely wealthy (and mostly white) tourists seeking adventure and absolution. A freak kayaking incident in the Southern Ocean maroons Striker and her fellow travelers on a remote island along the Antarctic Peninsula, where the real and supernatural worlds quickly collide. Read Michael Popke’s interview with the author here.

Wisconsin Book Festival.

media release: Striker isn’t entirely sure she should be on this luxury Antarctic cruise. A Black film scout, her mission is to photograph potential locations for a big-budget movie about Ernest Shackleton’s doomed expedition. Along the way, she finds private if cautious amusement in the behavior of both the native wildlife and the group of wealthy, mostly white tourists who have chosen to spend Christmas on the Weddell Sea.

But when a kayaking excursion goes horribly wrong, Striker and a group of survivors become stranded on a remote island along the Antarctic Peninsula, a desolate setting complete with boiling geothermal vents and vicious birds. Soon the hostile environment will show each survivor their true face, and as the polar ice thaws in the unseasonable warmth, the group’s secrets, prejudices, and inner demons will also emerge, including revelations from Striker’s past that could irrevocably shatter her world.

With her signature lyricism and humor, Quan Barry offers neither comfort nor closure as she questions the limits of the human bonds that connect us to one another, affirming there are no such things as haunted places, only haunted people. Gripping, lucid, and imaginative, The Unveiling is an astonishing ghost story about the masks we wear and the truths we hide even from ourselves.