On Sunday, January 25, at 2 p.m. at the Plaza Branch, 4801 Main St., local author Martha McCarty will discuss her book Five Island Diaries: Stories of Love Lost and Found.

McCarty, winner of Kansas City’s 2008 Thorpe Menn Award for Five Island Diaries, pens a collection that revisits America between World War II and the war in Vietnam. In the opening story, a troubled playmate sets the narrator’s brother on fire with a lighted match and lawnmower gas and all that seems a fairy tale collides with reality. Twelve linked stories then unfold against the blissful summers and brittle winters of a northern landscape that is as contradictory as the heart.

The book is described as “a lively memoir filled with life, love, laughter, and seasoned with tragedy and death, but never sunk by loneliness.”