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Award-winning author Joan Thomas will read from her new novel, Curiosity, on Friday, Nov. 5, at 7 p.m. in the Ganong Hall Lecture Theatre. A former freelance journalist and book reviewer for The Globe and Mail and the Winnipeg Free Press, Joan Thomas published her first novel, Reading by Lightning, in 2009, winning the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the Amazon.ca First Book Award. “Curiosity” has recently been longlisted for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The reading is hosted by the Lorenzo Reading Series and the UNB Saint John Bookstore, and supported by The Canada Council for the Arts.  Admission is free and all are welcome to attend. For more information contact The University Bookstore at (506) 648-5540, inprint at (506) 648-2315, or email sjbooks@unbsj.ca. About the novel Curiosity More than 40 years before the publication of "The Origin of Species," 12-year-old Mary Anning, a cabinet-maker's daughter, found the first intact skeleton of a prehistoric dolphin-like creature, and spent a year chipping it from the soft cliffs near Lyme Regis. This was only the first of many important discoveries made by this incredible woman, perhaps the most important paleontologist of her day. Henry de la Beche was the son of a gentry family, owners of a slave-worked estate in Jamaica where he spent his childhood. As an adolescent back in England, he ran away from military college, and soon found himself living with his elegant, cynical mother in Lyme Regis, where he pursued his passion for drawing and painting the landscapes and fossils of the area. One morning on an expedition to see an extraordinary discovery — a giant fossil — he meets a young woman unlike anyone he has ever met. “Curiosity [is] a beautiful, erudite, and deeply pleasureable work.” The Walrus Contact:     Pat Joas, University Bookstore, UNB Saint John, (506) 648-5637, joas@unb.ca