March 17th6:30pm
Are you overwhelmed by the pressure to keep up with the continuous barrage of new book releases? Are you interested in reading beyond the margins of today’s contemporary literary discourse? Do you want to inject a bit of surprise and intrigue into your reading life? Our club is centered around books that have been largely forgotten, the reissued classics and rare finds that have slipped from the mainstream and are waiting to be discovered by a new set of readers.
This month we'll discuss Dinah Brooke's ferocious comedy of middle-class dysfunction, Lord Jim at Home.
"How bracing to read something as odd, nasty, unpredictable, funny and just downright different as Lord Jim at Home . . . A perfect martini with a razor blade at the bottom of the glass."— Jayne Taylor
“If it weren’t such a pleasure to read, I’d say that Lord Jim at Home—read by a novelist, like me—was an instrument of torture. It’s that good.”— Ottessa Moshfegh
When Dinah Brooke’s second novel, Lord Jim at Home, was first published in 1973, it was described as “squalid and startling,” “nastily horrific,” and a “monstrous parody” of upper-middle class English life. It is the story of Giles Trenchard, who grows up isolated in an atmosphere of privilege and hidden violence; who goes to war, and returns; and then, one day—like the hero of Joseph Conrad's classic Lord Jim—commits an act that calls his past, his character, his whole world into question.
Out of print for nearly half a century (and never published in the United States), Lord Jim at Home reveals a daring writer long overdue for reappraisal, whose work has retained all its originality and power. As Ottessa Moshfegh writes in her foreword to this new edition, Brooke evokes childhood vulnerability and adult cruelty “in a way that nice people are too polite to admit they understand.”
Reserve your place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the book club meeting on any product in store.