December 18th6:30pm
Have you ever watched a woman blow up her life, and thought, good for her? This is a book club for those who seek to disrupt notions of domestic bliss - we want batshit plots, women who don't settle, and eleventh hour plot twists. We want all this packaged into a very literary 300 pages or less. This book club will explore should-be and to-be classics by literary hotties of centuries past. Leave the dirty dishes at home and come indulge with us.
This month we'll discuss Iris Murdoch's novel in which a motley assortment of characters seek peace and salvation, The Bell.
"In my late teens, A Severed Head and The Bell opened my eyes to another world. I took them as a rather elegant form of social realism, and I loved the new world they opened up to me." —Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement
"Funny, sad, and moving . . . The Bell is a novel about people who have ideas, people who think, people whose thoughts change their lives just as much as their impulses or their feelings do." —A. S. Byatt
A lay community of thoroughly mixed-up people is encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an order of sequestered nuns. A new bell is being installed when suddenly the old bell, a legendary symbol of religion and magic, is rediscovered. And then things begin to change. Meanwhile the wise old Abbess watches and prays and exercises discreet authority. And everyone, or almost everyone, hopes to be saved, whatever that may mean. Originally published in 1958, this funny, sad, and moving novel is about religion, sex, and the fight between good and evil.
Reserve your place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the book club meeting on any product in store.