THE ESSEX SERPENT, BY SARAH PERRY

 

BOOK DISCUSSION 

IN-PERSON AND ON ZOOM

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 8th

at 2:00 PM

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Sarah Perry's award-winning novel, set at the end of the nineteenth century and inspired by true events.
Moving between Essex and London, myth and modernity, Cora Seaborne's spirited search for the Essex Serpent encourages all around her to test their allegiance to faith or reason in an age of rapid scientific advancement. At the same time, the novel explores the boundaries of love and friendship and the allegiances that we have to one another. The depth of feeling that the inhabitants of Aldwinter share are matched by their city counterparts as they strive to find the courage to express and understand their deepest desires, and strongest fears.

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HORSE, BY GERALDINE BROOKS

A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history

Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack.

New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.

Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse--one studying the stallion's bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.

Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism. (goodreads.com)

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Book Discussion on Wednesday, January 11, 2023

In Person and On Zoom

AT 2:00 pm

 

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, BY CARSON McCULLERS

HWPL READERS BOOK DISCUSSION

WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 14, 2022

AT 2:00 PM

ON ZOOM AND IN PERSON

It is hard to believe that The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was the first book of a 23-year-old author (who had started the novel at 19!). This tragic, small-town drama is so ambitious in its scope—presenting five radically different characters whose troubled lives intersect in the Depression-era South—it always seems like the work of a master storyteller.(National Endowment For The Arts)

Carson McCullers

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FRENCH BRAID, BY ANNE TYLER

Book Discussion Meets  Wednesday, November 16, at 2:00 PM

On Zoom And In-Person

Access from our calendar at 

www.hwpl.org 

  

- From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author--a funny, joyful, brilliantly perceptive journey deep into one Baltimore family's foibles, from a boyfriend with a red Chevy in the 1950s up to a longed-for reunion with a grandchild in our pandemic present.

The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family's orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation.

Full of heartbreak and hilarity, French Braid is classic Anne Tyler: a stirring, uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor that illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives, the impossibility of breaking free from those who love us, and how close--yet how unknowable--every family is to itself. 

THERE THERE, BY TOMMY ORANGE

 HWPL BOOK DISCUSSION ON ZOOM AND IN- PERSON

Join us Wednesday, October 12, 2022 

                    at 2:00 PM

Access Zoom Link from the Calendar and Schedule of Events  at www.hwpl.org

Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable. (www.goodreads.com)

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MOON TIGER, BY PENELOPE LIVELY

 

Book Discussion Wednesday September 15, 2022, at 2:00 PM

Claudia Hampton, writer of best-selling popular history books, lies in a London hospital bed and looks back on her own life, including an unforgettable love affair.

Winner of the 1987 Booker Prize in England, this novel has at its center historian and journalist Claudia Hampton, a woman who lies in a hospital bed dying of old age but who uses the immobility to stratify, like an outcropping, all the layers of her life. In many of her fine works, Lively  has written about history, its jokes and permutations, with the consistent knack of keeping personal scale while destiny goes blithely on--and Claudia is a good vehicle for this. Her incestuous relationship with brilliant brother Gordon, her marriage to shallow businessman Jasper, the mothering of her daughter (ambivalent at best), the great central affair of her life (with a British tank commander in North Africa during WW II)--they all illustrate the relative insignificance yet enormous pleasure of living consciously within time. Yet this isn't Lively's  best work. Though rich and varied, it's a little too much the tone poem, too much the elegiac, rueful, amused retrospective. Claudia in the hospital is a flashback machine (multiplied by small additional flashbacks that narrate an incident in the voices and heads of its participants). A certain innocence born of forward-facing narrative (what'll happen next?) is thus lost to the reader; the book is frozen motionless by the snows of yesteryear. Textured and artful, but a touch too portentous also. (Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 1988)

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND, BY ANTHONY DOERR

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• BOOK DISCUSSION 
• WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 14, 2022
• AT 2:00 PM
• ON ZOOM AND IN-PERSON
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• Set in Constantinople in the 15th century, in a small town in present-day Idaho, and on an interstellar ship decades from now, Anthony Doerr’s third novel is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope --- and a book. In CLOUD CUCKOO LAND, Doerr has created a magnificent tapestry of times and places that reflects our vast interconnectedness --- with other species, with each other, with those who lived before us, and with those who will be here after we’re gone.

Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Restless and insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the invading army. His path and Anna’s will cross.

Five hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. She has never set foot on our planet.

Like Marie-Laure and Werner in ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, Anna, Omeir, Seymour, Zeno and Konstance are dreamers and outsiders who find resourcefulness and hope in the midst of gravest danger. Their lives are gloriously intertwined. Doerr’s dazzling imagination transports us to worlds so dramatic and immersive that we forget, for a time, our own. Dedicated to “the librarians then, now, and in the years to come,” CLOUD CUCKOO LAND is a beautiful and redemptive novel about stewardship --- of the book, of the Earth, of the human heart. (www.readinggroupguides.com)