THE DICTIONARY OF LOST WORDS, BY PIP WILLIAMS

BOOK DISCUSSION 

IN-PERSON 

AND ON ZOOM:

TUESDAY, JULY 18

AT 2 PM

In 1901, the word ‘Bondmaid’ was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.

Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

SEA OF TRANQUILITY, BY EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL

 

Book Discussion: Tuesday, June 20,2023

At 2 PM

A novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.(GoodReads)

GILDED MOUNTAIN, BY KATE MANNING

 

Discussion On Wednesday, May 24, at 2 PM

Heroine Sylvie Pelletier recounts how she leaves her family’s snowbound cabin to work for the Padgetts—owners of the marble-mining company that employs her father. At first, Sylvie is awed by the luxury around her. She’s fascinated by her employer (the charming “Countess” Inge) and confused by the erratic affections of Jasper, heir to the family fortune. But Sylvie discovers that the Padgetts’ lofty ideals are at odds with the unfair labor practices that enrich them.

Outside the manor walls, the town of Moonstone is roiling with discontent. The editor of the local newspaper is publishing unflattering accounts of the Padgett Company. The Padgetts’ servants the Gradys are preparing to form a utopian community on the Colorado prairie. And a union organizer, along with labor leader Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, is stirring up the quarry workers. Sylvie must navigate between these vastly different worlds and find her way amid conflicting loyalties. (www.simonandschuster.com)