Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
 |  Special to Cape Cod Times

Three authors with multiple best-sellers, and a writer whose debut novel was the September pick for actress Reese Witherspoon’s book club, will explore a “Love & Joy” theme over two weekends for the Cape Cod Book Festival.

Founder Lois Cahall calls the second annual event “small but mighty” because while there are fewer 2025 authors — due to arts funding cuts and constraints from Cahall’s tour for her third novel, “The Many Lives & Loves of Hazel Lavery” — the four participants are heavy-hitters. The headliner is “An Evening With Mitch Albom,” at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 24, with Cahall interviewing the author of “Tuesdays With Morrie” and “The Stranger in the Lifeboat” about his new book, “Twice.”

The event takes place at the 900-seat Sandwich High School auditorium because of Albom’s longtime popularity. “Twice,” his website says, is a “love story about magical second chances that dares to explore how our unchecked desires might mean losing what we’ve had all along.”

Cahall previously interviewed Albom for the Palm Beach Book Festival she ran in Florida for 10 years before relocating to the Cape. “We’ve gotten the audience crying, then laughing,” she says of their interviews, and notes how well the author’s work fits with this year’s festival theme. “In music, songs fall into three categories — looking for love, being in love and losing love — and I think the same could be said about every iconic Mitch Albom book.”

A Cape connection this year is Joseph Finder, the Boston-based bestselling writer of 17 suspense novels (“House on Fire,” “Paranoia”) and a part-time Truro resident who says by email that he loves early fall on the Cape “because it’s so beautiful then, and you can actually turn left on Route 6.” He’s particularly honored to be the only thriller author so far in the festival.

Cahall will interview Finder at 2:45 p.m. Oct. 25 at Cotuit Center for the Arts, discussing the January-published “The Oligarch’s Daughter.” The story follows a rising Wall Street star whose romance with a photographer sends him on the run from Russian operatives until he can solve a decades-old conspiracy. It’s his first time writing about Russia since his debut, “The Moscow Club.”

“I remember reading about Russia’s new oligarchs, those billionaires who were sort of merchant princes, a kind of royalty in Russia, and I wondered what their relationship to Putin might be like,” Finder says. “Since I’m a novelist, I began to wonder what it would be like to marry into an oligarch’s family. And since I write thrillers, I knew it had to be a fraught, tense relationship, ultimately frightening.”

The first half of the festival’s Oct. 25 “double-header,” with a discounted ticket for both events, will be Eliana Ramage interviewed at 1:30 p.m. about her just-out debut novel, “To the Moon and Back,” by Lizz Schumer, People magazine’s senior books editor. The story is about a young woman’s quest to become the first Cherokee astronaut, a push that will alter the fates of people she loves. Ramage is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Cahall says she reached out to the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe about Ramage’s event, and tribal elders plan to attend. “There’s something about this book, beyond the diversity factor, that won me over,” she says. “It just feels good, and (the subject) fits under our banner of love and joy.”

The festival opens Oct. 18, with an 11 a.m. talk by Susan Orlean (“The Orchid Thief,” “The Library Book”) at the Cotuit center just days after her memoir ,“Joyride,” is published. Leigh Haber, former Oprah Winfrey Book Club editor, will interview Orleans about her life from journalist to her books becoming movies, plus romances and family life.

“Susan finds stories in places where no one would find stories, like orchid thieves or bullfighters, and comes up with a subject she can write a whole book about,” Cahall says. “This one is a fun Cinderella story — from hoping she’d be a staff writer at The New Yorker to walking the red carpet at the Oscars.”

Cahall began her own career writing at Cape newspapers and raised her daughters on Cape Cod, then returned regularly after moving elsewhere to write for magazines, work for mega-selling author James Patterson, and other jobs. Unexpected encounters with book-lovers while writing at a Yarmouth inn encouraged Cahall to start the book festival last year before moving back earlier this year. 

Festival tickets will be made available to many students “to honor our mission in keeping literacy alive,” she says. Books will be available for purchase, and only books bought there will be signed. More information: www.capecodbookfestival.com. 

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