THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, BY PHILIP ROTH

 BOOK DISCUSSION:  IN-PERSON AND ON ZOOM: TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2024, AT 2:00 PM

In an astonishing feat of narrative invention, the great American novelist, Philip Roth, imagines an alternate version of American history. In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.

For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh's election is the first in a series of ruptures that threatens to destroy his small, safe corner of America - and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.

THIS OTHER EDEN, BY PAUL HARDING

 

HWPL READERS BOOK DISCUSSION

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2024,

AT 2:00 PM

IN-PERSON AND ON ZOOM

See our calendar of upcoming events for link (www.hwpl.org)

Set at the beginning of the twentieth century and inspired by historical events, This Other Eden tells the story of Apple Island: an enclave off the coast of the United States where waves of castaways - in flight from society and its judgment - have landed and built a home.

Benjamin Honey- American, Bantu, Igbo- born enslaved- freed or fled at fifteen- aspiring orchardist, arrived on the island with his Irish wife, Patience, and discovered they could make a life together there. More than a century later, the Honeys' descendants remain, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours. Then comes the intrusion of 'civilization': officials determine to 'cleanse' the island, and a missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities' institutions or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah's Ark.

Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding's This Other Eden explores the hopes and dreams and resilience of those seen not to fit a world brutally intolerant of difference.

(www.goodreads.com)

I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU, BY REBECCA MAKKAI

 

Book Discussion Date:

Tuesday August 6, 2024, at 2:00 PM

In-person and on Zoom

(access link via upcoming events at  www.hwpl.org)

When a successful film professor and podcaster returns to visit her   boarding school in New Hampshire, she finds herself  inexorably drawn back to  an old murder case and its increasingly apparent flaws.

 

 

THE SHADOW OF THE WIND, BY CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Book Discussion 

Tuesday, July 2, 2024

at 2 PM

In-person at the library 

or

ACCESS ON ZOOM

Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals from its war wounds, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer's son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julian Carax. But when he sets out to find the author's other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax's books in existence. Soon Daniel's seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona's darkest secrets--an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.

THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE, BY JAMES McBRIDE

 BOOK DISCUSSION IN-PERSON AND ON ZOOM 

TUESDAY, JUNE 4, 2024

at 2:00 PM

FOR ZOOM LINK:

GO TO  SCHEDULE OF UPCOMING EVENTS FOR JUNE 4

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighbourhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.

As these characters' stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town's white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community-heaven and earth-that sustain us.

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, by David Grann

 

Book discussion in-person and via Zoom

Date: Tuesday, May 7, 2024 at 2:00 PM

Meeting ID: 825 2956 4522
Passcode: 141003

Click here for Zoom Link

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then … six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang. (penguinrandomhouse.com)

TRUST, BY HERNAN DIAZ

 

Discussion Date and Time:

Tuesday, April 9, 2024

Join us in-person or on Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83220939251?pwd=am5RcjA0TFplcTFpWVVQWDhncnlmdz09

About Trust

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts. (goodreads.com)