Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/28/2019
5:30 pm - 6:45 pm
Location
Branches Books & Gifts
Categories
Please join us on Monday, October 28th at 5:30 PM for the Freedom Readers Book Club meeting. The October selection is Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver.
This book club is open to the public and will concentrate on fiction and non-fiction titles based around political or current cultural themes. We invite healthy debate and discussion! Topics & opinions discussed do not necessarily reflect Branches Books & Gifts employees viewpoints. Please call (559) 641-2019 or email anne@branchesbooks.com for more information.
New York Times bestseller
An NPR pick for Best Books of 2018
An O, The Oprah Magazine’s Best Book of 2018
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2018
One of Christian Science Monitor’s best fiction reads of 2018
One of Newsweek’s Best Books of the year
The New York Times bestselling author of Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, and The Poisonwood Bible and recipient of numerous literary awards—including the National Humanities Medal, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Orange Prize—returns with a timely novel that interweaves past and present to explore the human capacity for resiliency and compassion in times of great upheaval.
How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. The magazine where Willa worked has folded; the college where her husband had tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law and an exasperating, free-spirited daughter. When the family’s one success story, an Ivy-educated son, is uprooted by tragedy he seems likely to join them, with dark complications of his own.
In another time, a troubled husband and public servant asks, How can a man tell the truth, and be reviled for it? A science teacher with a passion for honest investigation, Thatcher Greenwood finds himself under siege: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting work just published by Charles Darwin. His young bride and social-climbing mother-in-law bristle at the risk of scandal, and dismiss his worries that their elegant house is unsound. In a village ostensibly founded as a benevolent Utopia, Thatcher wants only to honor his duties, but his friendships with a woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor threaten to draw him into a vendetta with the town’s powerful men.
Unsheltered is the compulsively readable story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vineland, New Jersey, navigating what seems to be the end of the world as they know it. With history as their tantalizing canvas, these characters paint a startlingly relevant portrait of life in precarious times when the foundations of the past have failed to prepare us for the future.
UPCOMING BOOK CLUB SELECTIONS:
November 25th – Sapiens – Yuval Noah HarariDecember – BREAK – Happy Holidays & see you in January!
