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If you are experiencing COVID-like symptoms or have come into contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19, we ask that you please do not attend in-person events. Instead, feel free to order the book over the phone so we can have it signed for you to pick up when you're out of the woods!

Charles King at the Crooked Steeple Literary Festival: Every Valley
Saturday, November 15, 2:00pm - 3:00pm
@ Falls Church Presbyterian, 225 E Broad St., Falls Church

Join us at Falls Church Presbyterian as their Crooked Steeple Literary Festival presents Charles King, renowned author of Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel's Messiah. From the bestselling historian and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, this is the moving untold story of the eighteenth-century men and women behind the making of Handel’s Messiah.

Hear about Charles' research going into this book, the history behind Handel's Messiah, and how it came about during such a turbulent time during the early Enlightenment. Not just for fans of the classics, this compelling work is perfect for history buffs and anyone who likes an immersive and gripping read. Bards Alley will be on-site selling copies of the book which releases in paperback on October 7th.

About EVERY VALLEY: George Frideric Handel’s Messiah is arguably the greatest piece of participatory art ever created. But this work of triumphant joy was born in a worried age. Britain in the early Enlightenment was a place of astonishing creativity but also the seat of an empire mired in war, enslavement, and conflicts over everything from the legitimacy of government to the meaning of truth. Against this turbulent background, prize-winning author Charles King has crafted a cinematic drama of the troubled lives that shaped a masterpiece of hope.

Every Valley presents a depressive dissenter stirred to action by an ancient prophecy; an actress plagued by an abusive husband and public scorn; an Atlantic sea captain and penniless philanthropist; and an African Muslim man held captive in the American colonies and hatching a dangerous plan for getting back home. At center stage is Handel himself, composer to kings but, at midlife, in ill health and straining to keep an audience’s attention. Set amid royal intrigue, theater scandals, and political conspiracy, Every Valley is entertaining, inspiring, unforgettable.

About the author: Charles King is the author of eight books, including Gods of the Upper Air, a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, and winner of the Francis Parkman Prize. His Odessa won a National Jewish Book Award. He is a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University.

Brian Goldstone: There Is No Place for Us
Monday, November 17, 6:30pm - 7:30pm
@ 1st Stage Theater, 1524 Spring Hill Rd. Suite LL, Tysons

Join us at 1st Stage Theater for a conversation with journalist and anthropologist Brian Goldstone about his nonfiction debut, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. In his book, Goldstone exposes the growing and troubling trend of the “working homeless” in cities across America through the unforgettable stories of five Atlanta families. He will be in conversation with Annemarie Cuccia, Editor in Chief of Street Sense Media.

This event is co-hosted with Shelter House, a community-based nonprofit serving Fairfax and Loudoun Counties, dedicated to preventing and ending homelessness and domestic violence. Shelter House provides crisis intervention, safe housing, and supportive services designed to help individuals and families stay safely housed and rebuild their lives with dignity, hope and lasting solutions. To learn more, visit www.shelterhouse.org.

About THERE IS NO PLACE FOR US: Brian Goldstone plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Maurice and Natalia make a fresh start in the country’s “Black Mecca” after being priced out of DC. Kara dreams of starting her own cleaning business while mopping floors at a public hospital. Britt scores a coveted housing voucher. Michelle is in school to become a social worker. Celeste toils at her warehouse job while undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. Each of them aspires to provide a decent life for their children—and each of them, one by one, joins the ranks of the nation’s working homeless.

This book follows parents and children sleeping in cars and squalid extended-stay hotel rooms in an increasingly unequal city where urban “revitalization” comes at the expense of its low-income residents. Described by Publisher’s Weekly as “a gripping, high-stakes account of America’s housing emergency,” this book offers a powerful look at the human cost of America’s housing crisis.

About the author: Brian Goldstone's reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, and Jacobin, among other publications. He earned his PhD from Duke University and was a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University. In 2021, he was a National Fellow at New America. He lives in Atlanta with his family.

Timothy M. Gay: RORY LAND
​Saturday, November 22, 2:00pm - 3:00pm
@ Mary Riley Styles Public Library, 120 N. Virginia Ave., Falls Church

Join us at Mary Riley Styles Public Library with Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Timothy M. Gay for a discussion of his most recent book, RORY LAND: The Up-and-Down World of Golf's Global Icon. Copies of the book will be available for purchase from Bards Alley at the event.

About RORY LAND: In RORY LAND’s original final chapter, written in the fall of 2024, Vienna, Virginia-based writer Timothy M. Gay predicted that the Masters would remain Rory McIlroy’s “Great White Whale” – the major championship that might forever elude him. It didn’t take long for Rory to prove Gay sadly mistaken. “I was never so happy to be so wrong in my life,” Gay told the UK’s Guardian newspaper.

McIlroy’s dramatic win at the 2025 Masters impelled Gay to write a new epilogue, which now appears in the UK/Ireland edition. “Practically the whole world became proud citizens of RORY LAND that Sunday,” Gay writes in his new finale, “although he drove us so ... crazy that, in mid-round, some of us contemplated extradition.”

The journey to achieving the career Grand Slam has not been an easy one for McIlroy. He’s become a lightning rod, getting into a profanity-laced smackdown at the ’23 Ryder Cup and, after his betrayal by PGA Tour brass, causing head-scratching confusion by going from an impassioned opponent of a deal with Saudi-backed LIV Golf to an outspoken proponent. 

McIlroy is from Northern Ireland, where politics and religion have been used as bloody cudgels for much of the past century. Both sides of his family were devastated by the North’s sectarian Troubles—ugly realities that McIlroy has been loath to acknowledge. Rory is, Gay believes, a man essentially without a country—someone who has, in effect, invented his own fiefdom, a place Gay calls “RORY LAND.”

About the author: Timothy M. Gay is the Pulitzer-nominated author of four award-winning books. His articles and essays have appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, the Boston Globe, the Daily Beast, and many other publications. He has been featured on PBS’ History Detectives, NPR, and various documentaries that have aired in both the US and Europe. The proud parents of three and the grandparents of two, Tim and his wife, Elizabeth, live in Vienna, Virginia. He is a graduate of Georgetown University.

Sophia Glock: Passport
Saturday, December 6, 2:00pm - 3:00pm
@ Mary Riley Styles Public library, 120 N. Virginia Ave., Falls Church

​Join us at Mary Riley Styles Public Library in Falls Church as author and artist Sophia Glock discusses Passport, her YA graphic memoir, about growing up overseas and discovering that her parents work for the CIA.

Learn about Sophia's creative process, and how she went from writing fairy tale comics to drawing a memoir of growing up internationally in a family full of secrets. She will discuss how she draws, writes, and mines her life for ideas for both long-form comics such as Passport, as well as shorter cartoons for publications such as The New Yorker.

Bards Alley will be on-site selling copies of Passport and taking preorders for Sophia's upcoming graphic novel Before We Wake, available February 24, 2026.

About PASSPORT: Young Sophia has lived in so many different countries, she can barely keep count. Stationed now with her family in Central America because of her parents' work, Sophia feels displaced as an American living abroad, when she has hardly spent any of her life in America.

Everything changes when she reads a letter she was never meant to see and uncovers her parents' secret. They are not who they say they are. They are working for the CIA. As Sophia tries to make sense of this news, and the web of lies surrounding her, she begins to question everything. The impact that this has on Sophia's emerging sense of self and understanding of the world makes for a page-turning exploration of lies and double lives.

About the author: Sophia Glock is a cartoonist who lives and draws in Austin, Texas. She attended the College of William & Mary and the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, Buzzfeed, and Time Out New York. She talks to her sister every day.