Online Book Launch: All Flowers Bloom by Kawika Guillermo

Join us for a special online book launch in celebration of Kawika Guillermo’s “All Flowers Bloom” with a reading and discussion moderated by Doretta Lau. This free event will be hosted online via Zoom.

“A defiant and tender call for the power of love, across a thousand lifetimes and lands. Guillermo’s imagination is breath-taking, and he shows the power of the written word as at once the most high-fidelity and stylized of mediums.”
—Ken Liu, author of The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Grace of Kings

“Kawika Guillermo has achieved an ambitious feat. All Flowers Bloom is a lover’s discourse on desire, its multiple masks and power to make lovers and strangers, and traitors and rescuers out of us.”
—R. Zamora Linmark, author of Rolling the R’s and Leche
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Kawika Guillermo is the author of Stamped: an anti-travel novel, and the non-fiction books Transitive Cultures and Open World Empire.

Doretta Lau is the author of the short story collection How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?
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In a cruise ship stateroom, a soul awakens in the afterlife, still dressed in the Roman servant garbs of his previous life.

He can’t remember much, but a silent woman stands out in his memory: his first and only love.

Unable to cope with an eternity without her, he leaps from the ship and back into the depths of the life stream.

Five hundred years later, he awakens again in the same stateroom, alone and fueled with new memories of her.

In his past lives she was a male insurgent, an elderly wise woman, an unruly servant.

For a millennia the pair are tethered together, clashing in love and fear, betraying each other in times of war and famine.

Before memory drives him mad, he vows to rescue her from the stream — even if it takes a thousand lifetimes more.
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Zoom info:
Time: Jul 9, 2020 06:00 PM Vancouver
Join Zoom Meeting
https://ubc.zoom.us/j/94075132533
Meeting ID: 940 7513 2533

This event is taking place on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tseil-Waututh Nations.