The group selected Grace’s recommendation for Tom Lake by Ann Patchett and we met at Carolyn’s to discuss it on Friday, October 27, 2023. Members who had read some of Ann Patchett’s other books considered this a minor work. Some of us raised credibility issues with the number of coincidences in the storyline and/or with…
Refuge transforms tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual grace, resulting in a work that has become a classic. Author Terry Tempest Williams is an American author, conservationist and activist. Williams writing is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by the arid landscape of her native Utah in which she…
Drawing on the diaries of a midwife and healer in eighteenth-century Maine, this intimate history illuminates the medical practices, household economies, religious rivalries, and sexual mores of the New England frontier. Author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University. She is the author of Good Wives: Image and Reality in the…
A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter – a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment. Author Toni Morrison (born Chloe…
A warm, vivid portrait of the harsh West Virginia mining town of his youth, evoking a time of innocence and promise, when anything was possible, even in a company town that swallowed its men alive. Author Homer Hickam is the best-selling author of the “Coalwood” series of memoirs, the “Josh Thurlow” series of World War…
Haunting, harrowing, moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. Author Rick Bragg (1959) is an American journalist and…
The bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war. Author Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and the author of SAY NOTHING, THE SNAKEHEAD, and CHATTER. He lives…
ORDINARY LOVEAt a reunion with her grown children, a woman recalls the long-ago affair that ended her relationship with their father–and changed all their lives irrevoccably.GOOD WILLDespite the carefully self-sufficient life he has designed for his small family, a man discovers that even the right choices have unexpected consequences–sometimes heart-breaking ones. Discussed September 10, 2016…
An affecting story spanning the twentieth century of a widow and her daughter and the nuns who serve their Irish-American community in Brooklyn. We begin deep inside Catholic Brooklyn, in the early part of the twentieth century. Decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man’s brief existence. Yet a suicide, although never spoken of,…
