On Friday, August 14, author Heather Abel will give a talk at the West Tisbury Library about her new book, The Emilys. At the heart of her new novel is a 40-something woman named Eve, who’s living in leafy Northampton and caring for her two children, Lev and Sophy. The Emilys is an intensely readable feast, a colorful and wildly ambitious book that manages to be at once a challenging examination of motherhood, a knowing assessment of close friendship and the grandest response readers have seen yet to the COVID-19 pandemic, to say nothing of Lyme disease. Eve’s life in Northampton is complicated by two intertwined things. And second, people with Persephone’s condition, nicknamed “The Emilys” in a nod to the reclusive Emily Dickinson, seem to be multiplying.