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Book Club Picks April 2025 |
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Twist : a novel
by Colum McCann
"Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the story of the underwater cables that carry the world's information. The sum of human existence-words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses-travels through the tiny fiber optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break at an unfathomable depth. Fennell's literary adventure brings him to the west coast of Africa where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own journey to London. When the boat is sent up the west coast of Africa to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?"
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The secret history of Audrey James : a novel
by Heather Marshall
In 2010, grieving Kate Mercer seeks a fresh start at a remote guest house in Northern England, where she uncovers secrets about her past and the mysterious owner, while in 1938 Berlin, aspiring musician Audrey James risks everything to shield her friend Ilse from the Nazis and joins the anti-Hitler resistance.
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Tom Lake : a novel
by Ann Patchett
Recalling the past at her daughters' request, Lara tells the story of a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance with, which causes her daughters to examine their own lives and reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
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The river knows your name : a novel
by Kelly Mustian
"From the acclaimed author of The Girls in the Stilt House comes a long-awaited novel both atmospheric and lyrical, a haunting Southern story about memory, family secrets, and fierce and fragile love. For nearly thirty years, Nell has kept a childhood promise to never reveal what she and Evie found tucked inside a copy of Jane Eyre in their mother's bookcase-a record of Evie's birth naming a stranger as her mother. But lately, Nell has been haunted by hazy memories of their early life in Mississippi, years their reclusive mother, Hazel, has kept shrouded in secrecy. Evie recalls nothing before their house on Clay Mountain in North Carolina, but Nell remembers abrupt moves, odd accommodations, and the rainy night a man in a dark coat and a hat pulled low climbed their porch steps with a very little girl-Evie-then left without her. In dual storylines, Nell, forty-two in 1971, reaches into the past to uncover dangerous, long-buried secrets, and Becca, a young mother in the early 1930s, presses ahead, each moving toward 1934, the catastrophic year that would forever link them. From a windswept ghost town long forgotten, to a river house in notorious Natchez Under-the-Hill, to a moody nightclub stage, Evie's other mother emerges from the shadows of Depression-era Mississippi in a story of hardship and perseverance, of betrayal and trust, and of unexpected redemption in a world in which the lines between heroes and culprits are not always clearly drawn"
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