Chaucer’s Books will host author Gregory Orfalea for a book talk and signing of the novel “Wonder + Shame,” 6 p.m. Wednesday, June 3 at 3321 State St.

In the book, Orfalea said, Frank Matter, seasoned by failure, has a great notion: organize a baseball team of Syrian refugees in a hostile refugee camp.

An historian disillusioned with his country during the presidential campaign of 2016, Frank learns his family’s ancestral village has just been destroyed in a chemical weapons attack.

He travels to Syria to rescue a deaf cousin with whom he had been in love as a young man.

Known as “the Seamstress of Damascus,” cousin Dayzi escapes with Frank from her predator-clients on both sides of the war, and together they flee to the largest Syrian refugee camp in the world (half a million).

There, Frank purports to teach orphans the American game of baseball. Everyone and everything resist it.
 
Orfalea was born and raised in Los Angeles and is the author or editor of 11 books, including “Journey to the Sun: Junipero Serra’s Dream” and the “Founding of California,” (Scribner) and the just-released novel “Wonder + Shame.”

He has taught writing and literature at the Claremont Colleges, Westmont College, Santa Barbara City College, and his alma mater Georgetown University, among others.

His collection of memoirs, “Angeleno Days,” was a finalist for the PEN USA Prize and won the Arab American Book Award.