Get Them While They're Hot!
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Are you ready to dive into a juicy, action-packed discussion with your book group? You're in luck! Our five new Book Club in a Bag selections are chock-full of family drama and great stories. Read on below for more about these new selections, including Ann Patchett's latest!
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The Dearly Beloved
by Cara Wall
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Charles and Lily, James and Nan. They meet in Greenwich Village in 1963 when Charles and James are jointly hired to steward the historic Third Presbyterian Church through turbulent times. But their personal differences threaten to tear them apart. Charles is destined to succeed his father as an esteemed professor of history at Harvard, until an unorthodox lecture about faith leads him to ministry. How then, can he fall in love with Lily--fiercely intelligent, elegantly stern--after she tells him with certainty that she will never believe in God? And yet, how can he not? James, the youngest son in a hardscrabble family, spent much of his youth angry at his alcoholic father and avoiding his anxious mother. Nan grew up in Mississippi, the devout and beloved daughter of a minister and a debutante. James’s escape from his circumstances leads him to Nan and, despite his skepticism, her gentle, constant faith changes the course of his life.
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The Dutch House
by Ann Patchett
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At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from, and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures.
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The Gifted School
by Bruce Holsinger
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Set in the fictional town of Crystal, Colorado, this is a keenly entertaining novel that observes the drama within a community of friends and parents as good intentions and high ambitions collide in a pile-up with long-held secrets and lies. Seen through the lens of four families who have been a part of one another's lives since their kids were born over a decade ago, the story reveals not only the lengths that some adults are willing to go to get ahead, but the effect on the group's children, sibling relationships, marriages, and careers, as simmering resentments come to a boil and long-buried, explosive secrets surface and detonate.
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The Other's Gold
by Elizabeth Ames
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Assigned to the same suite during their freshman year at Quincy-Hawthorne College, Lainey, Ji Sun, Alice, and Margaret quickly become inseparable. The leafy green campus they move through together, the idyllic window seat they share in their suite, and the passion and ferocity that school and independence awakens in them ignites an all-encompassing love with one another. But soon they find their bonds--forged in joy and fused by fear--must weather threats that originate from beyond the dark forests of their childhoods, and come at them from institutions, from one another, and ultimately, from within themselves. The novel follows the four friends as each makes a terrible mistake, moving from their wild college days to their more feral days as new parents, interrogating the way that growing up forces friendships to evolve.
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Searching for Sylvie Lee
by Jean Kwok
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The story begins with a mystery. Sylvie, the beautiful, brilliant, successful older daughter of the Lee family, flies to the Netherlands for one final visit with her dying grandmother--and then vanishes. Amy, the sheltered baby of the Lee family, is too young to remember a time when her parents were newly immigrated and too poor to keep Sylvie. Seven years older, Sylvie was raised by a distant relative in a faraway, foreign place, and didn’t rejoin her family in America until age nine. Timid and shy, Amy has always looked up to her sister, the fierce and fearless protector who showered her with unconditional love. Now, terrified but determined, Amy retraces her sister’s movements. But instead of simple answers, she discovers something more valuable: the truth...however painful that may be.
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Haverford Township Free Library | 610-446-3082 Ext. 503 | reference@haverfordlibrary.org
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