Talk About Books

  Talk About Books meets at 5:30 every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library. For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard of Ireland is a condition of living. But now – just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity – the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed. As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world. Harking back to a simpler time, This Is Happiness is a tender portrait of a community – its idiosyncrasies and traditions, its paradoxes and kindnesses, its failures and triumphs – a...

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 5:30 at Guilford Free Library. All are welcome to contact the library, request a copy of the current book selection and join the discussion. F ranny Stone has always been the kind of woman who is able to love but unable to stay. Leaving behind everything but her research gear, she arrives in Greenland with a singular purpose: to follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their final migration to Antarctica. Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat, and she and the crew set sail, traveling ever further from shore and safety. But as Franny’s history begins to unspool—a passionate love affair, an absent family, a devastating crime—it becomes clear that she is chasing more than just the birds. When Franny's dark secrets catch up with her, how much is she willing to risk for one more chance at redemption? Epic and intimate, heartbreaking and galvanizing, Charlotte McConaghy's Migrations is an ode ...

Local Vermont Author, Peter Gould will join us on August 19th to read and discuss his latest novel, Part for the Hole . This meeting will take place at the Broad Brook Community Center at 7:00 pm. on Wednesday, August 19th. About the author:  Peter Gould is a beloved Vermont-based writer and physical comedy performer. His first novel Burnt Toast was a back-to-the land fantasy. His young adult novel Write Naked sends a heart-felt climate change  message and his memoir Horse-drawn Yogurt is widely known. Peter is also a Shakespeare scholar running the annual "Get Thee to a Nunnery" Shakespeare theatre camp for kids. The list is impressively longer. Part for the Hole begins; "Call me Bob, Bob B. I rescued the National Endowment for the Arts at gunpoint. Not a brag, and if you don't want to believe me, then don't. I'll push on anyway. When you have an urge to tell the truth, ignoring it can be harmful to the health."  A simple news story can seize your im...

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 5:30. All are welcome to contact the library, request a copy of the current book selection and join the discussion. Travels with Charley  is an intimate journey across America in 1962 as told by one of its most beloved writers, John Steinbeck. To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light--these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years. With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. Along the way he reflects on the American character, racial hostility, the particular form of American loneliness he finds almost everywhere, and the unexpected kindness of strangers.    

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 5:30 at Guilford Free Library. Let us know if you would like a copy of this selection.   The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline is an historical fiction novel set in 1840s Australia, focusing on the intersecting lives of three English female convicts and an orphaned Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, as they navigate hardship, oppression, and the search for freedom in a brutal penal colony . The story follows the women's journey from London's Newgate Prison to the penal colony in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) and explores themes of female friendship, resilience, and the devastating impact of colonization on the Aboriginal people.   The Exiles is  praised for its meticulous research and emotional depth, as  was Kline's previous success,  Orphan Train .    

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 5:30 at Guilford Free Library. All are welcome to join in the discussion. If this book interests you, contact the library for a copy. "Samantha Harvey, one of the most consistently surprising contemporary British novelists, becomes something like the cosmic artificer of our era with her slim, enormous novel Orbital , which imaginatively constructs the day-to-day lives of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Orbital is the strangest and most magical of projects, not least because it’s barely what most people would call a novel but performs the kind of task that only a novel could dare. It’s barely a novel because it barely tells a plotted set of human stories, and the stories it does tell barely interact with one another....But this minimal fictionality is not really the point; it’s merely the ransom paid to the genre in order to resemble the novelistic. The point is everything else: the alm...