BY MARTHA WILLIAMS
In March 2023, Peter Mann landed in the Wood River Valley to begin a two-week residency with The Community Library at the historic Ernest and Mary Hemingway House. He had just released his first novel and was beginning work on a second.
Exactly three years later, nearly to the day, Mann returns to speak about that book, “World Pacific,” the story that was percolating and just beginning during that first residency.
“We were connected with Peter through a friend of the library and invited him to come for a two-week residency during his spring break from Stanford, where he teaches history and literature,” said Martha Williams, The Community Library’s director of programs and education. “We had the honor of hearing about this new book as it was under development, and we’ve been following Peter’s work (especially through his excellent comics Substack The Quixote Syndrome) ever since.
“We’re thrilled to have Peter back in the valley to share his newest work – which was supported by this community.”
While in town in 2022, Mann joined the library’s executive director Jenny Emery Davidson for an on-stage conversation about his first book, The Torqued Man (named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022 and Best Historical Fiction of the year by CrimeReads). That novel, a WWII-era historical spy thriller set in Berlin features two intertwined narratives from the journals of a German intelligence officer and his Irish agent, and explores themes of loyalty, betrayal, and the moral complexities of war through conflicting accounts.
During his second residency in March 2026, Mann will speak about the book he was writing while in Ketchum three years ago: World Pacific. The conversation will be held at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, March 19, at The Community Library in Ketchum.
Listed as a New Yorker Best Book of 2025, World Pacific is a darkly comic novel of intrigue, adventure, and the perils of self-invention, set in San Francisco and the Asian Pacific during the outbreak of the Second World War.
The novel opens with the disappearance of Richard Halifax, an “adventure writer of manly bravado,” whose journey across the Pacific has gone awry. Readers learn about Halifax’s journey through letters to subscribed young readers and are brought into a wider story through the alternating voices of Hildegard Rauch and Simon Faulk.
Hildegard is an émigré painter and the daughter of Germany’s greatest living writer in exile who finds her twin brother in a coma after an attempted suicide. He left a mysterious note that sends Hildegard on a search for the truth about her brother’s relationship with Richard Halifax and the dangerous secret he entrusted to the writer before his voyage. Faulk, a British intelligence officer, has been assigned to ferret out Nazi spies in California and learns of the arrival of a mysterious American agent from across the Pacific, part of a joint German-Japanese operation.
Told through the voices of these three characters, set against the growing threat of another world war and a World’s Fair dedicated to peace, World Pacific is a madcap tale that explores the many forms of shipwreck, exile, betrayal, and the stories we tell ourselves in the fight to stay afloat.
To save a seat, to to https://thecommunitylibrary.libcal.com/event/15195128. Iconoclast Books will have books on hand to purchase.
The program also will be livestreamed at https://vimeo.com/event/5776850 and recorded to watch later.