Monogamy, by Sue Miller

Wednesday, January 27, 2021

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Graham and Annie have been married for almost thirty years, a loving, successful marriage. Graham is a bookseller, and a large man in every sense – big as a bear, gregarious, a lover of life and the host of frequent, lively parties at the home he shares with Annie. At the moment the narrative begins, Graham has had a short, impulsive affair, one he regrets almost instantly and is determined to end.

Annie is smaller, more reserved, maybe more unknowable, something her daughter Sarah has accused her of in her adolescence. She’s a photographer, about to have her first show in five years, anxious that her best years professionally may be behind her. 

Graham’s sudden death and Annie’s discovery of his infidelity propel the action of the book, which traces her in her pain and confusion; and follows also the others affected by Graham’s death – his first wife, Frieda, and Lucas, his son with her; as well as Sarah, Graham and Annie’s child together. 

This is a novel about marriage, then, and loss. About family, and the secrets they keep from one another. About the transformative power of memory, and the triumph of love over death itself. 

 

CIRCE, BY MADELINE MILLER

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WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 16, 2020 

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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch, whose  commanding  narrates Miller's  dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe , a nymph who turns Odysseus' crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: "When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist." (from Kirkus)

THE SPLENDID AND THE VILE: A SAGA OF CHURCHILL, FAMILY, AND DEFIANCE DURING THE BLITZ, BY ERIK LARSON

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WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 18th

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On Winston Churchill's first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold his country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally--and willing to fight to the end.

In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows how Churchill taught the British people "the art of being fearless." It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it's also an intimate domestic drama, set against the backdrop of Churchill's prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London. Drawing on diaries, original archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports--some released only recently--Larson provides a new lens on London's darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and his family: his wife, Clementine; their youngest daughter, Mary, who chafes against her parents' wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; Pamela's illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the advisers in Churchill's "Secret Circle," to whom he turns in the hardest moments.  (www.penguinrandomhouse.com)

OLIVE, AGAIN, BY ELIZABETH STROUT

 

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Wednesday, October 21  

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Ten years after Elizabeth Strout won a Pulitzer Prize for her eponymous collection of linked stories about Olive Kitteridge, a difficult but endearing, retired but not retiring middle school math teacher, she returns to coastal Maine with an update — which is just as wonderful as the original.

You don't have to have read Olive Kitteridge to appreciate Olive, Again, but you'll probably want to. Like a base coat of paint, it adds depth and helps the finish colors pop. Explaining the genesis of her sequel, Strout has written, "That Olive! She continues to surprise me, continues to enrage me, continues to sadden me, and continues to make me love her."  (NPR)

THE NIGHT WATCHMAN, BY LOUISE ERDRICH

 

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Wednesday, September 23, 2020

At 2:00 PM

 From readinggroupguides.com

Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather --- who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C. --- this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity, and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel-bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953, and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination” that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run”?

Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.

Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.

Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit and intelligence, THE NIGHT WATCHMAN is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.

ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT, BY JEANETTE WINTERSON/ WEDNESDAY AUGUST 19 AT 2:00 PM

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About The Book

When it first appeared, Jeanette Winterson’s extraordinary debut novel received unanimous international praise, including the prestigious Whitbread Prize for best first fiction. Winterson has gone on to fulfill that promise, winning the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and producing some of the most dazzling and admired novels of the past decade. Now required reading in contemporary literature, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a funny, poignant exploration of a young girl’s quirky adolescence.

Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into an evangelical household in the dour, industrial North of England and finds herself embroidering grim religious mottoes and shaking her little tambourine for Jesus. But as this budding missionary comes of age, and comes to terms with her unorthodox sexuality, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household dissolves. Jeanette’s insistence on listening to truths of her own heart and mind—and on reporting them with wit and passion—makes for an unforgettable chronicle of an eccentric, moving passage into adulthood.

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AFTERLIFE, BY JULIA ALVAREZ

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 Tuesday July 14, 2020, at 1:00 P.M.

Immigrant writer Antonia Vega was looking forward to retirement from her college professorship, but her husband has died unexpectedly. Then her generous if rocky sister disappears, the undocumented migrant teenager who's come her way happens to be pregnant, and Antonia's beloved books aren't giving her answers now. From the author of In the Time of the Butterflies

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Writers & Lovers, by Lily King

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THURSDAY JUNE 11, 2020 

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CITY OF GIRLS, BY ELIZABETH GILBERT

"AN ABSOLUTELY DELIGHTFUL  AND TRANSPORTING   NOVEL, FULL OF  NEW YORK CITY HISTORY AND MEMORABLE CHARACTERS. IT WILL MAKE   YOU FORGET  WHAT'S HAPPENING OUTSIDE!"

-HWPL STAFF LIBRARIAN

Zoom Book Discussion With Edna Ritzenberg  

Thursday May 14 at 1:00 P.M.

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Eighty-nine-year-old Vivian recounts her life after being kicked out of Vassar College, living in Manhattan with her Aunt Peg and the personal mistake that resulted in a professional scandal.

Someone told Vivian Morris in her youth that she would never be an interesting person. Good thing they didn't put money on it. The delightful narrator of  Gilbert's (Big Magic, 2015, etc.) fourth novel begins the story of  her life in the summer of  1940. At 19, she has just been sent home from Vassar. "I cannot fully recall what I'd been doing with my time during those many hours that I ought to have spent in class, but—knowing me—I suppose I was terribly preoccupied with my appearance." Vivian is very pretty, and she is a talented seamstress, but other than that, she is a silly, naïve girl  who doesn't know anything about anything. That phase of  her life comes to a swift end when her parents send her to Manhattan to live with her Aunt Peg. Peg is the proprietor of  the Lily Playhouse, a grandiose, crumbing theater in midtown that caters to the tastes and wallets of  the locals with week after week of  original "revues" that inevitably feature a sweet young couple, a villain, a floozy, a drunken hobo, and a horde of  showgirls and dancers kicking up a storm. "There were limits to the scope of  the stories that we could tell," Vivian explains, "given that the Lily Playhouse only had three backdrops": 19th-century street corner, elegant parlor, and ocean liner. Vivian makes a close friend in Celia Ray, a showgirl so smolderingly beautiful she nearly scorches the pages on which she appears. "I wanted Celia to teach me everything," says Vivian, "about men, about sex, about New York, about life"—and she gets her wish, and then some. The story is jammed with terrific characters, gorgeous clothing, great one-liners, convincing wartime atmosphere, and excellent descriptions of  sex, one of  which can only be described (in Vivian's signature italics) as transcendent. There are still many readers who know Gilbert only as a memoirist. Whatever Eat Pray Love did or did not do for you, please don't miss out on her wonderful novels any longer. A big old banana split of  a book, surely the cure for what ails you. (Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2019)

THE NICKEL BOYS, BY COLSON WHITEHEAD

Book discussion date:

Monday, February 24, 2020

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The story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South in the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called The Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides "physical, intellectual and moral training" so the delinquent boys in their charge can become "honorable and honest men."

THE DUTCH HOUSE, BY ANN PATCHETT

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Patchett's eighth novel is a paradise lost tale dusted with a sprinkling of Cinderella, The Little Princess and Hansel and Gretel. Two siblings, Maeve and Danny Conroy, bond tightly after their mother leaves home when they're 10 and 3. Home is the eponymous Dutch House, a 1922 mansion outside Philadelphia that their father, Cyril, a real estate mogul, bought fully furnished in an estate sale as a surprise for his wife in 1946, when Maeve was 5. The house, built by a Dutch couple who made their fortune in cigarettes, is grand, with an ornate dining room ceiling, six bedrooms on the second floor, and a ballroom on the third floor. His wife, Elna, hates it, aesthetically and ethically. After she flees, ostensibly to India to devote herself to the poor, her family suffers, as if "they had all become characters in the worst part of a fairy tale," Patchett writes.

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