AMERICANAH, BY CHIMAMANDA NGOZIE ADICHIE

 I hope you enjoy ‘Americanah’ – which I like to think of as a book about love, immigration, race, hair, and so much more.”-Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie

Join our discussion on Monday, October 28, 2019

at 2:00 P.M.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's third novel, Americanah is the story of two Nigerian émigrés who love and lose each other across continents and years. It is a book about leaving, and loneliness and the intersection between class and race, all of which makes it sound rather hard work – unjustly so. It is a book about hair: straight versus afro; and discreet tensions, not just between white Americans and Nigerian immigrants, but between Africans and African Americans, between the light- and dark-skinned, between new and established immigrants, and its frankness – in particular on the subject of gender – has upset some people. "I knew that was coming," says Adichie. "I can't write a book like that and then go, 'Oh my God, they're upset.' But my intention wasn't to upset." She smiles. "It's just that I'm willing to if that's what it takes to write the book." Review from The Guardian

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INHERITANCE: A MEMOIR OF GENEALOGY, PATERNITY, AND LOVE, BY DANI SHAPIRO

HWPL READERS BOOK DISCUSSION

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2019

AT 2:00 P.M.

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What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us?

In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history–the life she had lived–crumbled beneath her.

Inheritance is a book about secrets–secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman’s urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in–a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.

FOREST DARK, BY NICOLE KRAUSS

JOIN OUR NEXT HWPL READERS BOOK DISCUSSION 

TUESDAY MORNING

AUGUST 20, 2019

AT 10:30 A.M.

Jules Epstein, at 68, is a force to be reckoned with. In the wake of his parents’ deaths, his divorce from his wife of more than thirty years, and his retirement from the New York legal firm where he was a partner, he’s felt an irresistible need to give away his possessions, alarming his children and perplexing the executor of his estate. With the last of his wealth, he travels to Israel, with a nebulous plan to do something to honor his parents. In Tel Aviv, he is sidetracked by a charismatic American rabbi planning a reunion for the descendants of King David who insists that Epstein is part of that storied dynastic line.

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THE LAST WATCHMAN OF OLD CAIRO, BY MICHAEL DAVID LUKAS

Book discussion date and time: Tuesday, July 16, 2019, at 10:30 A.M.

A Berkeley literature student of Jewish-Muslim heritage receives a mysterious package that draws him into a quest to uncover his ancestors' tangled history as watchmen for Old Cairo's storied Ibn Ezra Synagogue. Written across three different time periods, from three different perspectives, the result is an intricate history of Jewish people in Cairo and throughout Egypt.

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ASYMMETRY, BY LISA HALLIDAY

Book Discussion Date and Time:

Tuesday, June 18, 2019, at 10:30 A.M.

A singularly inventive and unforgettable debut novel about love, luck, and the inextricability of life and art, from 2017 Whiting Award winner Lisa Halliday.

Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice.

The first section, "Folly," tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War, "Folly" also suggests an aspiring novelist’s coming-of-age.

By contrast, "Madness" is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow.

These two seemingly disparate stories gain resonance as their perspectives interact and overlap, with yet new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda.

A stunning debut from a rising literary star, Asymmetry is an urgent, important, and truly original work that will captivate any reader while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself. (From the publisher.)

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ABIDE WITH ME, BY ELIZABETH STROUT

Monday, May 13, at 2:00 P.M. 

Everyone is welcome to join us for a lively book discussion--Refreshments will be served.



In her luminous  novel, bestselling author Elizabeth Strout welcomes readers back to northern New England in the late 1950's.
Tyler Caskey has come to love West Annett. The short, brilliant summers and the sharp, piercing winters fill him with awe–as does his congregation, full of good people who seek his guidance and listen earnestly as he preaches. But after suffering a terrible loss, Tyler finds it hard to return to himself as he once was and his congregation begins to question his leadership and propriety.
In prose clear and saturated with feeling, Elizabeth Strout draws readers into the details of ordinary life in a way that makes it extraordinary. All is considered–life, love, God, and community — and all is made new by this writer's boundless compassion and graceful prose.

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Elizabeth Strout is the author of Olive Kitteridge, Amy and Isabelle, and other highly acclaimed novels.

THE FEMALE PERSUASION, BY MEG WOLITZER

LONG ISLAND READS 2019

BOOK DISCUSSION DATE AND TIME:

MONDAY, APRIL 8, 2019

2:00 P.M.

An electric, multilayered novel about ambition, power, friendship, and mentorship, and the romantic ideals we all follow deep into adulthood, not just about who we want to be with, but who we want to be.

To be admired by someone we admire—we all yearn for this: the private, electrifying pleasure of being singled out by someone of esteem. 

But sometimes it can also mean entry to a new kind of life, a bigger world.

Greer Kadetsky is a shy college freshman when she meets the woman she hopes will change her life. Faith Frank, dazzlingly persuasive and elegant at sixty-three, has been a central pillar of the women's movement for decades, a figure who inspires others to influence the world. 

Upon hearing Faith speak for the first time, Greer—madly in love with her boyfriend, Cory, but still full of longing for an ambition that she can't quite place—feels her inner world light up.

And then, astonishingly, Faith invites Greer to make something out of that sense of purpose, leading Greer down the most exciting path of her life as it winds toward and away from her meant-to-be love story with Cory and the future she'd always imagined.

Charming and wise, knowing and witty, Meg Wolitzer delivers a novel about power and influence, ego and loyalty, womanhood and ambition. At its heart, The Female Persuasion is about the flame we all believe is flickering inside of us, waiting to be seen and fanned by the right person at the right time.

It's a story about the people who guide and the people who follow (and how those roles evolve over time), and the desire within all of us to be pulled into the light.

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