BOOKS & MORE

A perilous and fantastical satire of banned books, secret libraries, and the looming eye of an all-powerful government.

The new book censor hasn’t slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish―allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.

Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell’s 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, resulting in a dreadful twist worthy of Kafka. The Book Censor’s Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.

Please RSVP with both the bookstore (link below) and here on Meetup.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lily-king-author-of-heart-the-lover-an-in-person-boswell-event-tickets-1467057451329?aff=oddtdtcreator

We'll coordinate carpooling & possibly having dinner beforehand closer to the event date.

Boswell hosts an evening with Lily King, the New York Times bestselling author of novels including Euphoria and Writers & Lovers. King visits with her latest, Heart the Lover, a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, and the lasting impact of first love.

In their last year of college, three students meet in a 17th-Century Lit class, and in their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games, a charged and intricate triangle forms. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever. Written with King's superb wit and emotional sensitivity, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving love story that celebrates literature, forgiveness, and the transformative bonds that shape our lives.

From Daniel Goldin: "A young woman discovers the joy of intellectual stimulation (so many books!) with two newfound college friends, but soon the relation morphs to a complicated triangle of friendship and desire. Each of them – Sam, Yash, and Jordan, nicknamed such because she’s no Daisy Buchanan – will make choices, many of them bad, that will have repercussions years later. Lily King’s writing is so direct and piercing – even a seemingly silly card game can bring dramatic tension. Plus, the book packs an emotional wallop – I dare you not to weep at the end!"

Lily King is author of six novels and the story collection Five Tuesdays in Winter. Her work has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Kirkus Prize, the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Maine Book Award for Fiction, and a Whiting Award.

A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that haunts the survivors, unravels a community, and remains unsolved for nearly fifty years.

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

For readers of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.

Based on the novel of the same name by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

Emma (Phillipa Soo) and Jesse (Luke Bracey) are living the perfect life together, until Jesse disappears in a tragic helicopter crash on their first wedding anniversary. Four years later, Emma finds happiness again as she's about to marry her best friend Sam (Simu Liu). However, when Jesse miraculously resurfaces, Emma soon finds herself torn between two great loves.