ONLINE: A Zoom invitation link will be sent the Friday before each class session begins.
Using prepared questions and our own observations, the discussion each month will explore a book from current best-seller lists. Selected books for the Winter 2025 term are:
January The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
Please read before the first class session.
Published in 2022, 400 pages Historical Fiction
When a skeleton is found in the bottom of a well in Pottstown, PA in 1972, the investigation is hampered when the crime scene is washed away by Hurricane Agnes. The novel then returns to the 1920s and ‘30s to detail the lives of the residents in the mostly Black and Jewish neighborhood.
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February The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis
Published in 2008, 309 pages Mystery
First of a series with Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse, wife, and mother of two. When her estranged friend leaves her a key to a locker in the Copenhagen train station, she finds a suitcase containing a three-year-old boy, naked and drugged, but alive. Nina must decide what to do with this unknown child, while forces are trying to hunt both of them down.
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March H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
Published in 2014, 320 pages Non-fiction
This story of adopting and raising one of nature's most vicious predators explores grief, falconry, and the author's journey to train a goshawk. Fierce and feral, her goshawk's temperament mirrors Helen's own state of grief after her father's death.
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Please read The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store before the first class session.
The facilitators will send a list of discussion questions for each book to all registrants prior to each Book Club session.
Kathleen and William Hillegas are long-time members of both Elderwise and the Book Club. Both are avid readers, and look forward to a lively exchange of ideas, opinions, and interpretations.