Talk About Books

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library and via zoom. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War is a historic nonfiction narrative Nathaniel Philbrick. The narrative outlines the reasons for the Mayflower’s historic voyage, before giving a realistic account of the Pilgrims in the New World during their first fifty-five years. Perhaps most important in Philbrick’s assessment is the tenuous relationship between the Pilgrims and their Native American neighbors; with this cooperative relationship in mind, Philbrick investigates several other, “superficial” assessments of the Pilgrims, including the view that the Pilgrims were “good” while their Native American neighbors were “bad”. Ultimately, Philbrick shows the reader that this particular episode in American history was not black and white; the history of beginnings never is. Mayflower highlights how the Pilgrims and their neighbors, the Pokanokets, came to establish a relationship based...

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library and via zoom. In the ruins of Germany in 1945, at the end of World War II, American soldier Henry Sachs takes a souvenir, an old music manuscript, from a seemingly deserted mansion and mistakenly kills the girl who tries to stop him. In America in 2010, Henry’s niece, Susanna Kessler, struggles to rebuild her life after she experiences a devastating act of violence on the streets of New York City. When Henry dies soon after, she uncovers the long-hidden music manuscript. She becomes determined to discover what it is and to return it to its rightful owner, a journey that will challenge her preconceptions about herself and her family’s history—and also offer her an opportunity to finally make peace with the past. In Berlin, Germany, in 1783, amid the city’s glittering salons where aristocrats and commoners, Christians and Jews, mingle freely despite simmering anti-Semitism, Sara Itzig ...

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library and via zoom.   Amsterdam is the story of a euthanasia pact between two friends, a composer and a newspaper editor, whose relationship spins into disaster.   On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a London crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence: Clive is Britain's most successful modern composer, and Vernon is a newspaper editor. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister. In the days that follow Molly's funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact with consequences that neither could have foreseen…

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. Book selection for the following month is made by group consensus. On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a London crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence: Clive is Britain's most successful modern composer, and Vernon is editor of the newspaper The Judge. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister. In the days that follow Molly's funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact with consequences that neither could have foreseen. Each will make a disastrous moral decision, their friendship will be tested to its limits, and Julian Garmony will be fighting for his political life.

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday at 6:30 at the Library. This novel is about an Englishman named Christopher Banks. His early childhood was lived in the Shanghai International Settlement in China in the early 1900s, until his father, an opium businessman, and his mother disappear within a few weeks of each other when the boy is about ten years old. Christopher is sent to live with his aunt in England. He becomes a successful detective; now he will turn his skills to solve the case of his parents' disappearance. Though he knows a young woman named Sarah (also orphaned at age ten), Christopher never marries; he adopts an orphaned girl in England named Jennifer. His fame as a private investigator soon spreads, and in 1937 he returns to China to solve the most important case of his life. The impression is given that if he solves this case, a world catastrophe will be averted, but it is not apparent how. As Christopher pursues his investigation, the boundaries b...

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at the Library at 6:30. Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior transfixes from its opening scene, when a young woman's narrow experience of life is thrown wide with the force of a raging fire. In the lyrical language of her native Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver bares the rich, tarnished humanity of her novel's inhabitants and unearths the modern complexities of rural existence. Characters and reader alike are quickly carried beyond familiar territory here, into the unsettled ground of science, faith, and everyday truces between reason and conviction. Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a ...

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. Books are selected for the next month by  group consensus at the meeting. Days Without End by Sebastian Barry is the story of  Thomas McNulty, aged barely seventeen who, having fled the Great Famine in Ireland, signs up for the U.S. Army in the 1850s. With his brother in arms, John Cole, Thomas goes on to fight in the Indian Wars—against the Sioux and the Yurok—and, ultimately, the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, the men find these days to be vivid and alive, despite the horrors they see and are complicit in. Moving from the plains of Wyoming to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry’s latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. An intensely poignant story of two men and the makeshift family they create with a young Sioux girl, Winona, Days Without End is a fresh and haunting portrait of the most fateful years in American history.