Announcing a new Meetup for The Glasgow Book Club!

What: July Main Meetup

When: July 7,[masked]:30 PM

Where: (A location has not been chosen yet.)

Meetup Description: There was no competition for the winning books voted for reading and debate for July's main meetup, making it a photo finish between:-

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamit (nominated by Eleanor) At a caf? table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful encounter?
Changez is living an immigrant?s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by the elite valuation firm of Underwood Samson. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore.
But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned and his relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez?s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a riveting, brilliantly unsettling exploration of the shadowy, unexpected connections between the political and the personal.

and....

K-Pax by Gene Brewer (nominated by Luke) - Mental disease, as an escape from trauma, manifests itself in many ways---delusion of being an alien from another planet is one of them. This is the plot of K-PAX.
The novel features a semi-autobiographical psychiatrist Gene Brewer who meets a strange patient named prot (claiming to be) from the planet K-PAX in the constellation of Lyra. prot eats fruit, hold forth on cutting edge physics, and has a therapeutic effect on the other mental patients at Brewer's hospital.
As Brewer investigates the strange man further, he comes to believe that prot is really an alternate personality of a man named Robert, who had killed the murderers of his wife and daughter, and then attempted suicide. Robert concocts prot to help him imagine a Utopia free of the troubles that plagued his own childhood and adult life---K-PAX has no government, property, work-for-earning-a-living, crime, poverty, disease, or sex.
Although the novel does leave open a tiny bit of room for prot to really be an alien inhabiting a human body, Brewer presents a reasonable psychiatric analysis of how alien visitation may be just another form of coping that a traumatized mind uses.

Both books offer characters with a story to tell and for the reader to judge their integrity and identity. So, come along and have your say in the worthiness of these intriguing novels.

Happy reading

Lesley / Mhairi / Janice

Learn more here:
http://bookclub.meetup.com/634/calendar/10566790/