OFF-SEASON EVENTS
SBF RECENTLY HOSTED BESTSELLING, WORLD-RENOWNED AUTHOR, NICHOLAS SPARKS

THIS EVENT TOOK PLACE ON Tuesday, October 14, 2025
at the Trustees Theater
ABOUT THE MODERATOR
Kristy Woodson Harvey is the New York Times, USA Today, and Publisher’s Weekly bestselling author of a dozen novels including Beach House Rules and The Peachtree Bluff Series. A Happier Life is in development for film with MGM/Amazon, The Summer of Songbirds is in development for television with Hulu, and many of her other projects are also in various stages of option or development for film and television. Her work has received numerous accolades, including Good Morning America’s Buzz Pick, Southern Living’s Most Anticipated Reads, Katie Couric’s Featured Books, and Joanna Garcia Swisher’s The Happy Place Reads. Kristy won the Lucy Bramlette Patterson Award for Excellence in Creative Writing and is a finalist for the Southern Book Prize.
REMAIN:
A SUPERNATURAL LOVE STORY
BY NICHOLAS SPARKS WITH M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN
When New York architect Tate Donovan arrives in Cape Cod to design his best friend’s summer home, he is hoping to make a fresh start. Recently discharged from an upscale psychiatric facility where he was treated for acute depression, he is still wrestling with the pain of losing his beloved sister. Sylvia’s deathbed revelation—that she can see spirits who are still tethered to the living world, a gift that runs in their family—sits uneasily with Tate, who struggles to believe in more than what reason can explain. But when he takes up residence at a historic bed-and-breakfast on the Cape, he encounters a beautiful young woman named Wren who will challenge every assumption he has about his logical and controlled world.
Tate and Wren find themselves forging an immediate connection, one that neither has ever experienced before. But Tate gradually discovers that below the surface of Wren’s idyllic small-town life, hatred, jealousy, and greed are festering, threatening their fragile relationship just as it begins to blossom. Tate realizes that in order to free Wren from an increasingly desperate fate, he will need to unearth the truth about her past before time runs out . . . a quest that will make him doubt whether we can ever believe the stories we tell about ourselves, and the laws that govern our existence. Love—while transformative—can sometimes be frightening.
A story about the power of transcendent emotion, Remain asks us all: Can love set us free not only from our greatest sorrows, but even from the boundaries of life and death?
ABOUT THE SPARKS & SHYAMALAN
CREATIVE COLLABORATION
REMAIN is a supernatural love story that bestselling novelist Nicholas Sparks co-created with two-time Academy Award nominee M. Night Shyamalan. Shyamalan and Sparks are independently writing a screenplay and a novel, respectively, based on the same original love story. Both projects will be based on the same concept and set of characters but tailored to their respective mediums. REMAIN, the novel, was published in October 2025, and REMAIN, the film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Phoebe Dynevor, is slated for theatrical release in October 2026.
EVENTS
The four-day Savannah Book Festival centers around three main components: three ticketed Headliner Events, Free Festival Saturday, and our renowned SBF@Schools program. Drawing over 9,000 attendees annually, SBF strives to promotes reading, writing and civil conversation within each unique event. Read below to learn more about SBF offerings and how you can get involved for the 2026 Festival!
Headliner Events
Headliner Addresses are ticketed events presented in the Lucas Theater in Downtown Savannah. Headliners give a 45-minute presentation on their creative process and life as a writer, followed by a Q&A and book signing. The lineup for the 2025 Festival consisted of Anna Quindlen to provide the Opening Address, Sebastian Junger to provide the Keynote Address, and Ben Mezrich to deliver the Closing Address.
Festival Saturday
Our lineup of nationally-recognized authors from wide-ranging genres provide 30-minute solo presentations on their creative process, followed by a Q&A and book signing.
Presentations take place in museums, churches and theaters in the heart of Downtown Savannah. Food trucks will provide delicious refreshments between presentations.
SBF@Schools
Each year, SBF authors can choose to arrive a day early to the Festival to discuss their creative process, early educational experiences, and influences and successes in their writing lives with local middle-school, high-school, and college students. The SBF@Schools program brings both fiction and non-fiction authors writing about a vast array of subject matters to inspire and impassion students.