One Book | One Minnesota Program announces its next title: Evidence of V: a Novel in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions
Great River Regional Library is participating in the fourteenth chapter of One Book | One Minnesota. This statewide book club invites Minnesotans of all ages to read a common title and come together virtually to enjoy, reflect, and discuss. The title for the program is Evidence of V: a Novel in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions bySheila O'Connor. Presented in partnership with State Library Services, a division of the Minnesota Department of Education, the program aims to bring Minnesotans together and highlight the role of libraries as community connectors.
From August 4 through September 28, Minnesotans will be invited to read the featured book selection, access reading guides, and participate in virtual book club discussions through their local libraries.
Readers can access the ebook for free on EBooks Minnesota for eight weeks. Click here to start reading the ebook. (There is no wait time or limit! Start reading now!)
In addition to the digital format, hard copies of the book will be available in the Great River Regional Library catalog. Request your copy from the catalog.
Reading with your book club? Reading and discussion guides are available to use on the One Book One Minnesota website.
All Minnesotans are invited to participate in a statewide discussion with the author of the book:
Virtual Author Conversation
Wednesday, September 17 at 7:00 p.m.
Conversation with Sheila O'Connor and Mubanga Kalimamukwento
Free and open to the public | Register for free
About the Book
In a blend of fact and fiction, including family secrets, documents from the era, and a thin, fragmentary case file unsealed by the court, Sheila O’Connor tells the riveting story of V, a talented fifteen-year-old singer in 1930s Minneapolis who aspires to be a star. Drawing on the little-known American practice of incarcerating adolescent girls for “immorality” in the first half of the twentieth century, O’Connor follows young V from her early work as a nightclub entertainer to her subsequent six-year state school sentence for an unplanned pregnancy. As V struggles to survive within a system only nominally committed to rescue and reform, she endures injustices that will change the course of her life and the lives of her descendants.
About the Author
Sheila O’Connor is the award-winning author of six novels. Her work has been widely anthologized and published in many magazines and journals. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded two Bush Fellowships, Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grants, and a McKnight Fellowship. She has been a residency fellow at Yaddo, The Studios of Key West, Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Tyrone Guthrie Center, and elsewhere. She is a professor of Creative Writing at Hamline University.
Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian attorney and writer. She is the winner of the 2025 Minnesota Book Award for Obligations to the Wounded, the 2022 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest, the 2019 Dinaane Debut Fiction Award, and the 2019 Kalemba Short Story Prize. Her first novel, The Mourning Bird, was listed among the top fifteen debut books of 2019 by Brittle Paper.
About One Book | One Minnesota
One Book | One Minnesota is presented by The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library, as the Minnesota Center for the Book, in partnership with State Library Services and sponsored by SPIRE Credit Union. Program partners also include the Council of Regional Public Library System Administrators; Mackin VIA; Minitex; the Minnesota Department of Education; and the University of Minnesota Press. This program is made possible in part by the voters of Minnesota, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, as well as through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Links to resources and more information can be found at thefriends.org/onebook.
