Los Angeles Literature Enthusiasts

For our May book club meetup, we'll be discussing The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry.

Winner of the British Book Awards Fiction Book of the Year

London, 1893. When Cora Seaborne’s husband dies, she leaves the metropolis for coastal Essex. There she hears rumors that after 300 years, the mythical Essex Serpent has returned. When a man is killed on New Year’s Eve, the community’s dread transforms to terror. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist is certain that what locals think is a magical sea beast may be a previously undiscovered species.

Told with grace and intelligence, The Essex Serpent explores questions of science and religion, skepticism and faith, but is most of all a celebration of love, and the many different guises it can take.

https://amzn.to/3VLmCrJ

If you'd like to join the book discussion, please RSVP. We'll send out the Zoom link by Sunday morning of the event. Please be sure to check your spam or junk mail folder, since Meetup messages often end up there.

Note: if you sign up and don't get the message, please email Teresa at tmcastelli@gmail.com at least an hour before the meeting time.

We hope you can join us, but if your plans change, please be considerate and change your RSVP on the event page as early as possible so someone on the waiting list can take your place. No shows will be removed from the group.

For our June book club meetup, we'll be discussing Go Went Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck.

Go, Went, Gone is the masterful new novel by German writer, Jenny Erpenbeck. The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. He lives a routine existence until one day he spies African refugees staging a hunger strike in. Curiosity turns to compassion and an inner transformation, as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates.

https://amzn.to/3W34ARX

If you'd like to join the book discussion, please RSVP. We'll send out the Zoom link by Sunday morning of the event. Please be sure to check your spam or junk mail folder, since Meetup messages often end up there.

Note: if you sign up and don't get the message, please email Teresa at tmcastelli@gmail.com at least an hour before the meeting time.

We hope you can join us, but if your plans change, please be considerate and change your RSVP on the event page as early as possible so someone on the waiting list can take your place. No shows will be removed from the group.

For our July book club meetup, we'll be discussing The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them. When workers dig the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expect to find is a skeleton at the bottom of a well.

Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side. As these characters’ stories overlap, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive.

https://amzn.to/3xAUpd2

If you'd like to join the book discussion, please RSVP. We'll send out the Zoom link by Sunday morning of the event. Please be sure to check your spam or junk mail folder, since Meetup messages often end up there.

Note: if you sign up and don't get the message, please email Teresa at tmcastelli@gmail.com at least an hour before the meeting time.

We hope you can join us, but if your plans change, please be considerate and change your RSVP on the event page as early as possible so someone on the waiting list can take your place. No shows will be removed from the group.

For our August book club meetup, we'll be discussing Tom Lake by Ann Patchett.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew. In this moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

https://amzn.to/4cVoN1S

If you'd like to join the book discussion, please RSVP. We'll send out the Zoom link by Sunday morning of the event. Please be sure to check your spam or junk mail folder, since Meetup messages often end up there.

Note: if you sign up and don't get the message, please email Teresa at tmcastelli@gmail.com at least an hour before the meeting time.

We hope you can join us, but if your plans change, please be considerate and change your RSVP on the event page as early as possible so someone on the waiting list can take your place. No shows will be removed from the group.