Hello book club members,
For the month of August our theme is "mystery."
The following are the three book choices for the next meeting. Please
review the choices below and email me your preferences by COB (5:30
pm) tomorrow, Saturday, July 21.
I'll send an email out letting everyone know which book was chosen
this weekend, and copies will be available for checkout on the
Petworth HOLDS shelf by Wednesday, July 25.
The White Devil by Justin Evans
From Publisher's weekly:
Harrow, the elite English boys school, provides the setting for
Evans's gripping second novel (after A Good and Happy Child). Andrew
Taylor, a 17-year-old American expelled from a Connecticut prep school
for heroin use, gets into Harrow thanks to his father's generous gift
to the school, one of whose more illustrious alumni is Lord Byron. In
a cemetery on nearby Harrow-on-the-Hill, Andrew is horrified to
witness the murder of a fellow student and resident of the Lot, a
dilapidated dormitory reputed to be haunted, at the hands of a pale
skeletal figure in an old-fashioned frock coat. Soon plagued by
nightmares, Andrew learns that someone resembling this gaunt figure
appeared in a performance of John Webster's Jacobean tragedy, The
White Devil, at Harrow in 1803. Meanwhile, cast in the role of Lord
Byron in a play written by drunken and bitter housemaster Piers
Fawkes, Andrew finds himself adopting Byron's exotic lifestyle amid a
love affair, a TB epidemic, and various bizarre elements in this
disturbing gothic thriller.
http://justinevans.com/thewhitedevil/
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
From the publisher:
For 60 years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in
the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the
wake of the Holocaust and the 1948 collapse of the state of Israel.
Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream
is coming to an untimely end.
Homicide detective Meyer Landsman has enough problems without worrying
about the upcoming Reversion. He and his partner, Berko Shemets, can't
catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new
supervisor is the love of his life, who just happens to be his ex-
wife. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has
committed a murder—right under Landsman's nose.
Despite orders from on high not to pursue the case, Landsman decides
to investigate. Before long, he finds himself contending with the
powerful forces—faith, obsession, hope, evil, and salvation—that make
up his complicated heritage.
http://www.harpercollins.com/author/authorExtra.aspx?isbn13=9780007149827&displayType=readingGuide
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
From Barnes and Noble:
The "complex and moving"(The New Yorker) novel by Pulitzer Prize-
winner Geraldine Brooks follows a rare manuscript through centuries of
exile and war. Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is a novel
of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an
acclaimed and beloved author. Called "a tour de force"by the San
Francisco Chronicle, this ambitious, electrifying work traces the
harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully
illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century S pain.
When it falls to Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, to
conserve this priceless work, the series of tiny artifacts she
discovers in its ancient binding-an insect wing fragment, wine stains,
salt crystals, a white hair-only begin to unlock its deep mysteries
and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art forgers
and ultra-nationalist fanatics.
http://geraldinebrooks.com/the-books/people-of-the-book/
Our next meeting will be held on Monday, August 20th at 7 pm.
Thanks,
Elsbeth Purdy, Petworth Librarian
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