Page & Palette Bookstore and the Fairhope Public Library Board of Trustees will kick off a new monthly event, Read It and Eat, with author Charles Shields reading and signing his latest novel, Mockingbird.

The program will be held Tuesday, April 24, from 6:30-8:30 p.m., in the Giddens Room in the new Fairhope Public Library — located at the corner of Fairhope Avenue and Bancroft Street.

Shields’ wildly successfully biography of Harper Lee is the first book ever written about the Pulitzer-prize winning author.

To Kill A Mockingbird, the 20th century’s most widely read American novel, has sold 30 million copies and still sells a million yearly.

Yet despite the book’s perennial popularity, its creator has become a somewhat mysterious figure. Shields’ tantalizing biography draws on interviews with 600 of Lee’s acquaintances, but was compiled without cooperation from its subject. Lee stopped granting interviews in the mid-1960s.

After years of research, Shields has brought to life the warmhearted, high-spirited, and occasionally hardheaded woman who gave us two of American literature’s most unforgettable characters, Atticus Finch and his daughter, Scout, and who contributed to the success of her lifelong friend Truman Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood.

At the center of Mockingbird is the story of Lee’s struggle to create her famous novel. But her life contains many other highlights as well; her girlhood as a tomboy in overalls in tiny Monroeville, Ala.; the murder trial that made her beloved father’s reputation and inspired her great work; her journey to Kansas as Capote’s ally and research assistant to help report the story of the Clutter murders; and the surrogate family she found in New York City.

Invite a friend and meet at the Fairhope Public Library for an evening of good food and great literature. Read It and Eat is a free event, open to the public, and hors d’ oeuvres and drinks will be served.

For more information, call Page & Palette at 928-5295 or visit online at www.pageandpalette.com.