Fellowship Point, by Alice Elliott Dark

BOOK DISCUSSION 

in-person and virtual

(zoom link is on our events calendar at www.hwpl.org)

 WEDNESDAY APRIL 19, AT 2:00 PM 

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Celebrated children’s book author Agnes Lee is determined to secure her legacy—to complete what she knows will be the final volume of her pseudonymously written Franklin Square novels; and even more consuming, to permanently protect the peninsula of majestic coast in Maine known as Fellowship Point. To donate the land to a trust, Agnes must convince shareholders to dissolve a generations-old partnership. And one of those shareholders is her best friend, Polly. (goodreads.com)

Polly Wister has led a different kind of life than Agnes: that of a well-off married woman with children, defined by her devotion to her husband, a philosophy professor with an inflated sense of stature. She strives to create beauty and harmony in her home, in her friendships, and in her family. Polly soon finds her loyalties torn between the wishes of her best friend and the wishes of her three sons—but what is it that Polly wants herself?

Agnes’s designs are further muddied when an enterprising young book editor named Maud Silver sets out to convince Agnes to write her memoirs. Agnes’s resistance cannot prevent long-buried memories and secrets from coming to light with far-reaching repercussions for all.

The Netanyahus, by Joshua Cohen

Winner Of The  2022 Pulitzer Prize

Book Discussion Wednesday March 15, 2023

THE ESSEX SERPENT, BY SARAH PERRY

 

BOOK DISCUSSION 

IN-PERSON AND ON ZOOM

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 8th

at 2:00 PM

https://hwpl.evanced.info/signup/eventdetails?eventid=17004&lib=0&return=

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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JOIN ZOOM MEETING

 

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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