Tuesday, March 27, 2018

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, BY COLSON WHITEHEAD

BOOK DISCUSSION DATE AND TIME:

MONDAY, APRIL 23, 2018, AT 2:00 P.M. 

About this book:

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood--where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned--Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.  

In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor--engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that intially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

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Tuesday, February 27, 2018

THEY MAY NOT MEAN TO, BUT THEY DO, BY CATHLEEN SCHINE

BOOK DISCUSSION DATE AND TIME:
Monday, March 26, 2018, at 2:00 P.M.


The Bergman clan has always stuck together, growing as it incorporated in-laws, ex-in-laws, and same-sex spouses. But families don’t just grow, they grow old, and the clan’s matriarch, Joy, is not slipping into old age with the quiet grace her children, Molly and Daniel, would have wished. When Joy’s beloved husband dies, Molly and Daniel have no shortage of solutions for their mother’s loneliness and despair, but there is one challenge they did not count on: the reappearance of an ardent suitor from Joy’s college days. And they didn’t count on Joy herself, a mother suddenly as willful and rebellious as their own kids.
The New York Times–bestselling author Cathleen Schine has been called “full of invention, wit, and wisdom that can bear comparison to [ Jane] Austen’s own” (The New York Review of Books), and she is at her best in this intensely human, profound, and honest novel about the intrusion of old age into the relationships of one loving but complicated family. They May Not Mean To, But They Do is a radiantly compassionate look at three generations, all coming of age together.
(www.us.macmillan.com)

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

SHADOW TAG, BY LOUISE ERDRICH

DISCUSSION DATE AND TIME:

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2018
AT 2:00 P.M.

Shadow Tag is a stunning tour-de-force from Louise Erdrich, the bestselling author of The Plague of Doves and National Book Award-winner The Round House. When Irene America discovers that her artist husband, Gil, has been reading her diary, she begins a secret Blue Notebook, stashed securely in a safe-deposit box. There she records the truth about her life and marriage, while turning her Red Diary—hidden where Gil will find it—into a manipulative charade. 


Wednesday, December 20, 2017

EXIT WEST, BY MOHSIN HAMID

BOOK DISCUSSION DATE AND TIME: 

MONDAY, JANUARY 22, 2018 
at 2:00 P.M.



An astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city.

When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through.

Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time. (From the publisher.)


Tuesday, November 14, 2017

COMMONWEALTH, BY ANN PATCHETT

Book Discussion Date and Time: 

Monday, December 18, 2017, at 2:00 P.M.

The Cousins and the Keatings are two California families forever intertwined and permanently shattered by infidelity. Bert Cousins leaves his wife for Beverly Keating, leaving her to raise four children on her own. Beverly, with two children of her own, leaves her husband for Bert. The six children involved are forced to forge a childhood bond based on the combined disappointment in their parents. As adults, they find their families’ stories revealed in a way they couldn’t possibly expect. Patchett has written a family drama that perfectly captures both the absurdity and the heartbreak of domestic life. -- LibraryReads.


Tuesday, October 24, 2017

PACHINKO, BY MIN JIN LEE

BOOK DISCUSSION DATE AND TIME:

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2017, 
AT 2:00 P.M.

Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan.

So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity.
 


Tuesday, September 26, 2017

ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE, BY ELIZABETH STROUT


BOOK DISCUSSION DATE AND TIME:
MONDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2017, AT 2:00 P.M.

An unforgettable cast of small-town characters copes with love and loss in this new work of fiction by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout. Recalling Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity, Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others.

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H-WPL READERS DISCUSSION GUIDE