Thursday Night Book Group

Our Thursday Night Book Club meets every fourth Thursday of the month and is open to any and all readers. Led by Laura, our discussions are good, varied and – for the most part – stay on point. But we have a lot of laughs, too. Stop in, try us out, meet some new friends and read some great books. It’s a fun night spent in good company.

JULY
LITTLE BEE by Chris Cleave
Thursday, July 22, 7 p.m.

“This book is one of my recommends. Told in alternating voices, it’s a present-day story that will seem very foreign to us. I found the story very tragic, but there was a lot of humor in it, too. I think this will be a very good discussion.”

A violent incident on a Nigerian beach has tragic echoes in posh London in Cleave's beautifully staged second novel. British couple Andrew O'Rourke and his wife, Sarah, are on vacation when they come across two sisters, Little Bee and Nkiruka, on the run from the killers who have massacred everyone else in their village—and what happens there with this unlikely encounter, is the mystery that propels the novel. Two years later, Little Bee, in possession of Andrew's license, shows up at Sarah's house to learn that it is the day of Andrew's funeral. He's committed suicide. Sarah is determined to help Little Bee get refugee status despite Little Bee's later revelation concerning Andrew's death. Cleave has a sharp cinematic eye and humanizes disturbing issues around refugees and the situation in Africa.

AUGUST
LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN by Colum McCann
Thursday, August 26, 7 p.m

“This book has been on the bestseller list for a long time and I always thought it was a 9/11 novel. Apparently, I am totally wrong. Barb just read it for a book group – she loved it – and she says it starts during the Vietnam war and goes from there. By the way, this book won the 2009 National Book Award. I can’t wait!”

In the dawning light of the late summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. . . . It is August, 1974, and a tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter-mile in the sky. In the streets below, ordinary lives become extraordinary as award-winning novelist Colum McCann crafts this stunningly realized portrait of a city and its people.

Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among prostitutes in the Bronx. A group of mothers, gathered in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn the sons who died in Vietnam, discovers how much divides them even in their grief. Further uptown, Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenaged daughter, determined not only to take care of her “babies” but to prove her own worth.

Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful novel comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the tightrope walker’s “artistic crime of the century.”

SEPTEMBER
LAST NIGHT AT TWISTED RIVER by John Irving
Thursday, September 23, 7 p.m

“Although many of us have already read John Irving’s latest, we all knew we HAD to discuss it at book group. In addition to being a great yarn and, in my opinion, a return to his better story-telling days, the book has so much in it about writing. I can’t wait to discuss!”

A long, delicious trip to the land of Irving is hands-down the best way to start the fall. A trio of tragic events (though the prize for most hell-shocking goes to the third) exiles widower and camp cook Dominic Baciagalupo and his son Danny from a mid-century logging outpost called Twisted River. They leave behind the Bunyan-esque lumberjack Ketchum--a gruff, eccentric, dyed-in-the-wool Yankee--who remains their sole connection to the past. What's next neither father nor son knows: their rootless existence moves swiftly in and out of New England, tied ostensibly to jobs for Dominic and schools for Danny, but it seems one foot is always back in those New Hampshire woods. Theirs is a restless, richly observed journey, crowned by a reckoning no one could predict. Few writers can match John Irving's knack for denouement, and in Last Night in Twisted River, his extraordinary ending is made all the more powerful by a story that feasts on language, life, and love.