Join First Light Books for an evening with internationally bestselling novelist Téa Obreht, whose new book drops a young woman named Nina Terzić into a lake in the Wyoming mountains and leaves her to survive the wilderness alone.​

A reception with the author will take place from 6:30 to 7:00 PM, followed by the conversation at 7:00 PM and a signing to close the evening. Tickets include a copy of the book and a reserved seat. Unreserved seats are available on a first come, first served basis. Free RSVPs are also encouraged.

"I've loved every book Téa Obreht has written but I might love this one the most. It's tense and beautifully constructed, and it features Obreht's signature precision when it comes to both language and emotion. Please put this book into the hands of everyone you know." —Liz Moore, New York Times bestselling author of The God of the Woods

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About the book

Sunrise is Téa Obreht's second novel set in the American West, after Inland. When Nina Terzić crashes into a mountain lake and washes up in the Wyoming wilderness, she stumbles onto the abandoned town of Sunrise. A manuscript and a skull turn her fight for survival into a far stranger, multigenerational mystery.

​Obreht spent more than three years researching the territory the book covers, traveling the old wagon roads from Texas to Wyoming and from Arizona to California and back. It arrives just as the Western has come roaring back into the culture, and it is unmistakably Obreht: mythic and propulsive.

​Sunrise will be published by Random House on August 11. It has been named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Esquire, Literary Hub, Today, Good Housekeeping, and The Boston Globe.

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About the author

Téa Obreht is the New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger's Wife, Inland, and The Morningside. The Tiger's Wife won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and became an international bestseller. Inland won the Southwest Book Award and was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and The Morningside was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Climate Fiction Award.

Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, Vogue, and Esquire. She was a National Book Award Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, was named by The New Yorker one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty, and in 2013 was the Rona Jaffe Foundation fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, Obreht now lives in Wyoming, the landscape at the heart of Sunrise.

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About the conversation partner

Lucas Schaefer is the author of The Slip, his debut novel, set in an Austin boxing gym in the summer of 1998. A national bestseller, it won the Kirkus Prize, was a finalist for the NBCC John Leonard Prize, and landed on both the New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books and the Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2025, which called it a sweaty masterpiece. He lives in Austin.

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