Travel Bug Book Group

The Rabbit Hutch
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2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ

Blandine isn't like the other residents of her building.

An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents -- neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana.

Welcome to the Rabbit Hutch.

Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them, all searching for meaning in their lives.

Set over one sweltering week in July and culminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom.

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Discussion group is hosted in Travel Bug the first Tuesday of the month by Aimee Gwynne Franklyn, an independent curator, art historian and producer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Everyone welcome! A glass of beer or wine on us!

Every Exit Brings You Home
by Naeem Murr
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Every Exit Brings You Home, Murr’s first book in two decades — is a profound, bittersweet portrait of a Gazan immigrant’s heroic efforts to heal his community and birth love from tragedy.

As a financial crisis looms, Jamal “Jack” Shaban is trying to save his neighbors from bankruptcy. But who is Jack, really? For his flight attendant colleagues, he’s an object of desire, even love, particularly for his sweetly bawdy Wisconsinite best friend, Birdy. Birdy knows nothing about Dimra, Jack’s traditional Muslim wife, with whom Jack is desperate to have a child. Nor does Dimra know about Jack’s attraction to Marcia: an angry single mom new to the building. The resulting tangle of love, desire, and conflict returns Jack to the violence of 1980s Gaza, where a taboo affair nearly destroyed his life.

A man of many sides—adulterer, devoted husband, fixer, community leader, liar, and the survivor of human and cosmic cruelty in both the past and the novel’s present—Jack is a paragon of both desire and hope, someone who has committed to love because the alternative is utter darkness.

A gorgeous blend of gentle comedy and poignant tragedy, of blasted hopes and one man’s indomitable dedication to the well-being of others, this is a book to love and never forget.

“This is one of those rare stories that feels at once universal and impossibly strange, rooted in the ordinary challenges of the American Dream but lashed to horrors unfolding on the other side of the planet.”
— Wendy Smith
The Boston Globe

“This poignant, at times hilarious, at times tragic, always compelling novel knocked me out. It’s both intimate and expansive, digging deep into the emotional intricacies of love and into the devastation of war and the longing for family and home. As soon as I finished it, I bought the author’s other books, so loathe was I to leave his assured, even brilliant, company.”
— Ayelet Waldman
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Discussion group is hosted in Travel Bug the first Tuesday of the month by Aimee Gwynne Franklyn, an independent curator, art historian and producer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Everyone welcome! A glass of beer or wine on us!

Mother Mary Comes to Me
By Arundhati Roy
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Named One of The New York Times Book Review’s Top Ten Books of the Year

“As a child I loved her irrationally, helplessly, fearfully, completely, as children do. As an adult I tried to love her coolly, rationally, and from a safe distance. I often failed.”
— Arundhati Roy

A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Mother Mary Comes to Me, is an intimate chronicle, “full of precise imagery and blistering emotional intelligence” (The Washington Post), of the relationship between two women, a school teacher and a writer, who happen to be mother and daughter. Roy writes with a novelist’s unsettling ability to be inside her own story as well as outside it, simultaneously child and adult, attached and detached, protagonist and narrator. She describes how she came to be the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”

“Heart-smashed” by Mary’s death, yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.”

With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me “builds worlds that are revolutionary, made from the darkness that she spins into purpose” (The New Republic). An ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—Mother Mary Comes to Me is a memoir like no other.

Purchase Online from Travel Bug
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Discussion group is hosted in Travel Bug the first Tuesday of the month by Aimee Gwynne Franklyn, an independent curator, art historian and producer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Everyone welcome! A glass of beer or wine on us!