Diverse Book Club

Our March selection is One Hundred Shadows by Hwang Jungeun (she/her), trans. Jung Yewon (she/her).

Our next meetings:

• April*: Early Riser by Jasper Fforde (he/him)
• May: The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years: A Novel by Shubnum Khan (she/her)
• June: Open Book Chat

*We're meeting on the second Sunday, not third!

From Penguin Random House:
“There is an unforgettable, curious beauty to be found here.” —Han Kang, Winner of the Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian
Han Kang’s Human Acts meets Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police in this understated South Korean novella in translation: a restrained yet emotional magical realist examination of futility in a capitalist society written in response to the 2009 Yongsan Disaster.
In a Seoul slum marked for demolition, residents’ shadows have begun to rise. No one knows how or why–but, they warn each other, do not follow your shadow if it wanders away.
As the landscape of their lives is torn apart, building by building, electronics-repair-shop employees Eungyo and Mujae can only watch as their community begins to fade. Their growing connection with one another provides solace, but against an uncaring ruling class and the inevitability of the rising shadows, their relationship may not be enough.
Winner of the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award and the Korean Bookseller’s Award, One Hundred Shadows is a tender working-class perspective with subtle and affecting social commentary. This edition features an introduction by Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Vegetarian, Han Kang, and an exclusive interview with the author.

This meeting occurs on the second Sunday this month!

Our April selection is Early Riser by Jasper Fforde (he/him).

Our next meetings:

• May: The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years: A Novel by Shubnum Khan (she/her)
• June: Open Book Chat
• July: Open Book Chat

From Penguin Random House:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “hilarious” (The Guardian), “blindingly inventive,” (The Seattle Times) and “wonderfully weird dystopian thriller” (Shelf Awareness) from the author of The Constant Rabbit and the Thursday Next series
“A cause for celebration . . . Fforde writes witty, chewy sentences, full of morsels, and delivers them deadpan. . . . [His] relentless imagination and his affection for his characters are contagious and irresistible.”—The New York Times Book Review

Every Winter, the human population hibernates.
During those bitterly cold four months, the nation is a snow-draped landscape of desolate loneliness, devoid of human activity.

Well, not quite.

Your name is Charlie Worthing and it’s your first season with the Winter consuls, the group responsible for ensuring the hibernatory safe passage of the sleeping masses. You are investigating an outbreak of viral dreams, which you dismiss as nothing more than an artefact born of the sleeping mind.

When the dreams start to kill people, it’s unsettling.

When you get the dreams too, it’s weird.

When they start to come true, you begin to doubt your sanity.

But teasing truth from Winter is never easy: You have to avoid the Villains and their penchant for murder, kidnapping, and stamp collecting; ensure you aren’t eaten by Nightwalkers; and sidestep the increasingly less-than-mythical Wintervolk.
But so long as you remember to wrap up warmly, you’ll be fine.

Our May selection is The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years: A Novel by Shubnum Khan (she/her).

Our next meetings:

• June: Open Book Chat
• July: Open Book Chat
• August: Yearly Town Hall

From Penguin Random House:
"Rich and swoony... an ambitious delight, with rich characters and some exceptionally lovely writing...This is the start of a major career." -- The New York Times Book Review

“A dark and heady dream of a book” (Alix E. Harrow) about a ruined mansion by the sea, the djinn that haunts it, and a curious girl who unearths the tragedy that happened there a hundred years previous

Akbar Manzil was once a grand estate off the coast of South Africa. Nearly a century later, it stands in ruins: an isolated boardinghouse for eclectic misfits, seeking solely to disappear into the mansion’s dark corridors. Except for Sana. Unlike the others, she is curious and questioning and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the history of the mansion: To the eerie and forgotten East Wing, home to a clutter of broken and abandoned objects—and to the door at its end, locked for decades.

Behind the door is a bedroom frozen in time and a worn diary that whispers of a dark past: the long-forgotten story of a young woman named Meena, who died there tragically a hundred years ago. Watching Sana from the room’s shadows is a besotted, grieving djinn, an invisible spirit who has haunted the mansion since her mysterious death. Obsessed with Meena’s story, and unaware of the creature that follows her, Sana digs into the past like fingers into a wound, dredging up old and terrible secrets that will change the lives of everyone living and dead at Akbar Manzil. Sublime, heart-wrenching, and lyrically stunning, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is a haunting, a love story, and a mystery, all twined beautifully into one young girl’s search for belonging.

Though we're on summer hiatus, we'll still have an open book chat to share what we've been reading lately!

Our next three meetings:

• July: Open book chat
• August: Town Hall Meeting
• September: Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead (he/him)