Homegoing (Yaa Gayasi) In Homegoing, a first novel that brims with compassion, writer Yaa Gyasi begins where the horrific Middle Passage began for so many, at the "glowing white" Castle, one of about forty commercial fortresses erected by Europeans on the Gold Coast. The structure looms like a curse over Gyasi's sprawling epic of African families exploited by — and at times exploiting — the traffic in human chattel, tracing the 300-year-long repercussions of an original sin.
Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into the Fante and Asante tribes of 18th century Ghana. The book follows their families, with successive chapters mining stories from each lineage. Effia's descendents remain in Africa, warring and intermarrying with members of different tribes. Esi is enslaved by an American planter. The contrapuntal lives of the African and African-American progeny shape the novel's compelling narrative arc; in the end, it is the Ghana-born Gyasi who so artfully accomplishes her own home-going. (NPR book review - Jean Zimmerman)
Upcoming selections:
August 14 The Daughters of Mars (Thomas Keneally) Is there more to say about World War I nurses and their patients after Hemingway's uber-classic A Farewell to Arms? The saga of ambulance driver Frederic Henry and his beautiful English nurse Catherine Barkley is generally thought to be an unrivaled fictional treatment of what was called, at the time, the Great War. Could a different novelist squeeze additional juice from this particular grape? Thomas Keneally handily manages the feat with his new historical novel, The Daughters of Mars. He does so by focusing on the lives of women... sharing a tale that is simultaneously sprawling and intimate.
The two Durance sisters, Sally and Naomi, farm girls from the fertile Macleay Valley of eastern Australia, journey from their home in 1914, volunteering as nurses for the war's duration. Sally is the younger country mouse to Naomi's more sophisticated Sydney persona. But the learning curve is steep for both of these barely-out-of-girlhood healers. Keneally tells us at the novel's start that "Sally was not sure what shrapnel was." She learns. We follow the siblings' intertwined experiences in the Mediterranean war theater. They serve aboard the hospital ship Archimedes and in Cairo. They treat survivors both from the Gallipoli campaign and the charnel house of the Western Front. The field hospitals move around a lot: The war is a movable bloodbath...At its heart this is a book about relationships, about two sisters who learn to accept each other's differences. (NPR book review - Jean Zimmerman) Enlarge this image
September 11 The Leavers (Lisa Ko) In The Leavers, Lisa Ko’s assured debut novel, Deming Guo, an 11-year-old Chinese boy living in New York City, experiences a child’s worst nightmare: His single mother, Polly, an undocumented immigrant, goes to work one day and doesn’t come home. That event is the catalyst for a timely story of immigrant families in America....The Leavers (winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver) is a thoughtful work about undocumented immigrants and the threats they endure. (bookpage.com)
October 9 The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov) An audacious revision of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilate, The Master and Margarita is recognized as one of the essential classics of modern Russian literature. The novel's vision of Soviet life in the 1930s is so ferociously accurate that it could not be published during its author's lifetime and appeared only in a censored edition in the 1960s. Its truths are so enduring that its language has become part of the common Russian speech. One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. The visitors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in either God or Satan. But they also bring peace to two unhappy Muscovites: one is the Master, a writer pilloried for daring to write a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate; the other is Margarita, who loves the Master so deeply that she is willing literally to go to hell for him. What ensues is a novel of inexhaustible energy, humor, and philosophical depth, a work whose nuances emerge for the first time in Diana Burgin's and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor's splendid English version.
Reverend Marcia Curtis invites you to participate in a Buddhism-based meditation in a group setting. Join us Sundays at 7:30pm in the church sanctuary. Newcomers welcome. 
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