John Warner: Author Pop-Up

Come on out Hub City Bookshop to meet author John Warner who will be signing copies of his novel The Tuesday Code.

About the Book

The election is the first Tuesday in November. The Tuesday Code is what you do next.

Fans of Station Eleven, One Second After, The Rose Code, and Leave the World Behind will enjoy a novel about power, conscience, and what one generation is willing to hand the next.

What happens if a contested national election splits the country and the power and communication grids go dark in the Great Gridlock? The question isn’t who governs the country anymore, but what do you do when no one is coming to save you?

Some people stop waiting. A street-wise teenager brings food to hungry students at an arts academy, taking supplies only from the stores abandoned by owners who aren't coming back. A National Guardsman measures every hard choice against his Rotary’s Four-Way Test. The Bensalem automotive plant becomes an Upcountry refuge, where a nurse opens a clinic to keep people healthy, and a teacher builds a school to turn children's restless energy toward learning. Engineers repurpose the plant into a hydroturbine so Bensalem can share its light with others.

None of them is a hero with a plan to save the country. Big-"D" democracy—elections, institutions, the machinery of power—only holds when ordinary people practice small-"d" democracy in their daily lives—showing up, taking responsibility, keeping faith with a neighbor, focusing on what they can control one action at a time.

The Tuesday Code arrives during the 250th anniversary of American independence, describing a world you can already imagine. In spite of the national crisis, ordinary people "shared our light, despite them." This novel offers no easy answers. No magic elixir. No single figure who fixes it all. What it offers is hope and a path that passes like a baton from one pair of hands to the next. This is where true democracy lives, and it’s underappreciated. For readers weary of being told the country is broken, be ready to remember what ordinary people can still do about it.

About the Author

John Warner is a member of Liberty One, the first Liberty Fellowship class, and an Aspen Global Leadership Network Fellow. He is an author, entrepreneur, and civic leader based in Greenville, South Carolina. He co-founded Capital Insights and InnoVenture, where he helped build companies and mentored hundreds of innovators and entrepreneurs. He is a former Senior Manager at KPMG, Chairman of Earth Fare, Vice President of KEMET Corporation, and co-founder, executive, and board member in numerous entrepreneurial, academic, not-for-profit, and governmental organizations. For twenty years, John delivered a weekly update on entrepreneurship and innovation on South Carolina Public Radio, where he became known as the Swamp Fox.

For decades, John has written about the quiet choices ordinary people make in extraordinary moments that ultimately determine their futures. After three nonfiction books, The Tuesday Code is a civic novel written for thoughtful, independently minded people worn out by partisan divisions and looking for a better way forward.

The novel grew out of a documentary John produced about unlikely entrepreneurs, among them Virginia Uldrick. She founded and built the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities to be, in her words, “one of the best arts high schools in the country, and perhaps the world.” She made bold promises to raise the resources and recruited a faculty of out-of-the-box thinkers. One was Stanislav Issaev, who had danced with the Moscow State Ballet and won the Nijinsky Prize as the world's finest male dancer, an honor previously given to Nureyev and Baryshnikov.

When John asked how she delivered promises with a faculty of out-of-the-box thinkers, she said she had policies and procedures. “Are you going to tell Stanislav how to teach dance?” he asked. “Of course not,” she answered. “He is going to tell me how to teach dance.” So he pressed her: “How do you balance the creative tension of being out-of-the-box while being accountable for results?” She leaned forward intensely and said, “I tell him what is essential for this school to exist. He has to give me that. When he does, I will build him a stage for his students to perform at the highest level.”

That insight into how a leader creates a powerful culture by building her team a stage to achieve a high standard and trusting them to meet it was the seed that became The Tuesday Code. In the deepest sense, it’s each Fellow’s story.