Hitchin Book Club

NOTE FOR NEW MEMBERS: We tend to sit on the tables near the TV. If you can't see us, please wait at the bar and we will come and show you where we are sitting. Please don't ask the bar staff where we are sitting as they don't know who we are.

Hitchin Book Club invites you to join us for some light hearted discussion. This event is a great introduction to the book club (especially if you have never been to a book club before). We always welcome new members of any level of reading experience.

Book Name: Stoner
Book Author: John Williams
Genre: Campus Novel
Published: 1965
Word Count: ~70k
Read Time Estimate: 4h40m
Date: Wednesday 22nd April 2026
Start Time: 19:30
End Time: approx 21:30
Location: The Albert Inn, 50 Walsworth Rd, Hitchin SG4 9SU - sitting at one of the tables inside. Any updates to location I will post in comments on the day.

Structure:
- Brief introduction and what you thought about the book
- Discussions based on a set of pre-prepared questions as prompts
- 5 to 10 minute break half-way through, option to join whatsapp group
- Opportunity to ask any questions to the group
- Closing thoughts and provide a rating for book out of 10
- Vote for the next book
- Book club formally ends - feel free to leave or stick around for general conversations

About book (from Goodreads):
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.