Book club

Status:Active, open to new members
Leader:
Pam O'Neill
Group email: Book club group
When: Fortnightly on Friday mornings
2nd & 4th Friday
Venue: Somni's Cafe

Do you love books? Are you often looking for people to discuss literature with? Lots of people love to read, but it can be hard to find someone to discuss the book you’re reading — especially if you love an uncommon genre.

If you’re having a hard time finding people to talk with about your reading material, you might want to consider joining our book club. They’re also great opportunities to meet new people and make new friends with common interests.

Reading is a solitary activity but when a book has moved or stimulated you it's natural to want to discuss it with someone else. A reading group gives you that opportunity. Also, a group encourages you to think a bit more about the books you read - why you like some, hate others. 

The club focuses on a different book each month - here are the latest books we're reading.

Our book for May

The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

In this gripping historical novel, the internationally bestselling author of The Mercies weaves a spellbinding tale of fear, transformation, courage, and love in sixteenth-century France.

Strasbourg, 1518. In the midst of a blisteringly hot summer, a lone woman begins to dance in the city square. She dances for days without pause or rest, and when hundreds of other women join her, the men running the city declare a state of emergency and hire musicians to play the Devil out of the mob. Outside the city, pregnant Lisbet lives with her husband and mother-in-law, tending the bees that are the family's livelihood. Though Lisbet is removed from the frenzy of the dancing plague afflicting the city's women, her own quiet life is upended by the arrival of her sister-in-law. Nethe has been away for seven years, serving a penance in the mountains for a crime no one will name.

It is a secret Lisbet is determined to uncover. As the city buckles under the beat of a thousand feet, Lisbet becomes caught in a dangerous web of deceit and clandestine passion. Like the women of Strasbourg, she too, is dancing to a dangerous tune. . . .

Set in an era of superstition, hysteria, and extraordinary change, and inspired by true events, The Dance Tree is an impassioned story of family secrets, forbidden love, and women pushed to the edge.

Our book for June

Trust by Hernan Diaz (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.
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