The Newberry currently offers two member-led virtual book groups that meet on the third Thursday of every month--one during the day and one in the evenings. The groups are open to Annual Fund donors who contribute $100 or more. For more information about virtual book groups, please contact Vince Firpo at firpov@newberry.org.
Associates Book Group
Dr. Morayo Da Silva is one of the most memorable characters you are likely to encounter on the page - intelligent, indomitable, author and survivor of a large life. In dreamlike prose, Manyika dips in and out of her present, her past, in a story that argues always for generosity, for connection, for a vigorous and joyful endurance. --Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, shortlisted for 2014 Man Booker Prize
If aging be a lamp, then Morayo, the protagonist in Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun is a mesmerising glow. Astute, sensual, funny, and moving. --NoViolet Bulawayo, author of We Need New Names, shortlisted for 2013 Man Booker Prize
From the instant you pick it up, you know that you will privy to the most intimate secrets. A beautiful, important new novel. --Peter Orner, author of Love and Shame and Love
Morayo Da Silva, a cosmopolitan Nigerian woman, lives in San Francisco. Almost seventy-five, she has a zest for life and enjoys road trips in her vintage Porsche. But when Morayo has an accident, crushing her independence, she is prompted to reassess her relationships and recollect her past life and loves. A humorous, joyful read.
Sarah Ladipo Manyika teaches literature at San Francisco State University. Her first novel, In Dependence, has sold over 1.5 million copies in Nigeria. Sarah sits on the boards of Hedgebrook and San Francisco's Museum of the African Diaspora and was the Chair of Judges for the Etisalat Prize for Literature in 2015.
The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction--to the City of New York. Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.
In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers--one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy--has been shattered. Fifty years later, one of those boys--now a grown man--tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who has the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.
In Still Life, bestselling author Louise Penny introduces Monsieur L'Inspecteur Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec, a modern Poirot who anchors this beloved traditional mystery series
Winner of the New Blood Dagger, Arthur Ellis, Barry, Anthony, and Dilys awards.