The Literary Wineaux Society

'Falling' by T.J. Newman - You just boarded a flight to New York.
There are 143 other passengers on board.
What you don’t know is that thirty minutes before the flight, your pilot’s family was kidnapped.
For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die.
The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane.
Enjoy the flight.
Amazon Link

Book Details:
Page Count: 304
Publish Date: July 6, 2021
Audiobook: 8 hours and 26 minutes. Narrated by Steven Weber

Additional Reading and Viewing:
Read: Go Into the Story - Q&A with author T.J. Newman
Read: NPR - Fasten Your Seatbelts Flight Attendant Turned Novelist Shares Stories From The Sky
Watch: CBS Mornings - Author T.J. Newman on "Falling"
Watch: Tamron Hall - Author T.J. Newman was Rejected 41 Times

Location:
Mise En Place. Lynn, the owner, will guide us in a wine tasting of 4 wines. $25 per person. Includes light charcuterie bites.

RSVP - Please kindly update your RSVP ahead of the event if you are unable to make it. I appreciate your courtesy to the venue.

About the Author: Caro Claire Burke received her Master's in Fine Arts from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is the co-host of Diabolical Lies, a politics and culture podcast. Yesteryear is her first novel.

It's another meeting of the marvelous minds and this time we are brunching at Valentine PHX - Check out their brunch menu!

Capote Brunch Society: Be part of the small group that meets the last Sunday of the month to discuss current hot topics as written in a long-form article that I will provide the Thursday before the event (think Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal)

RSVPs: Due to the small group, please make sure to update your RSVP ahead of time if you can not make it to allow the waitlist to open up.

Thank you for your courtesy!

1. 'The Road to Tender Hearts' by Annie Hartnett - At sixty-three years old, million-dollar lottery winner PJ Halliday would be the luckiest man in Pondville, Massachusetts, if it weren’t for the tragedies of his life: the sudden death of his eldest daughter and the way his marriage fell apart after that. Since then, PJ spends both his money and his time at the bar, and he probably doesn’t have much time left—he’s had three heart attacks already. But when PJ reads the obituary of his old romantic rival, he realizes his high school sweetheart, Michelle Cobb, is finally single again. Filled with a new enthusiasm for life, PJ decides he’s going to drive across the country to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona to win Michelle back. Amazon Link

2. 'The Lincoln Highway' by Amor Towles - In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction—to the City of New York.
Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.

3. 'Between Two Kingdoms' by Suleika Jaouad - In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.
A trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed.
Jaouad then embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again. Amazon Link

4. 'West With Giraffes' by Lynda Rutledge - Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling the unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave.
It’s 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California’s first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. Behind the wheel is the young Dust Bowl rowdy Woodrow. Inspired by true events, the tale weaves real-life figures with fictional ones, including the world’s first female zoo director, a crusty old man with a past, a young female photographer with a secret, and assorted reprobates as spotty as the giraffes.
Part adventure, part historical saga, and part coming-of-age love story, West with Giraffes explores what it means to be changed by the grace of animals, the kindness of strangers, the passing of time, and a story told before it’s too late. Amazon Link

5. 'Travels with Charley' by John Steinbeck - An intimate journey across America, as told by one of its most beloved writers
To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years. His course took him through almost forty states: northward from Long Island to Maine; through the Midwest to Chicago; onward by way of Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana (with which he fell in love), and Idaho to Seattle, south to San Francisco and his birthplace, Salinas; eastward through the Mojave, New Mexico, Arizona, to the vast hospitality of Texas, to New Orleans and a shocking drama of desegregation; finally, on the last leg, through Alabama, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey to New York
With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. Along the way he reflects on the American character, racial hostility, the particular form of American loneliness he finds almost everywhere, and the unexpected kindness of strangers. Amazon Link

6. 'The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise' by Louise Oakley - An unforgettable pairing of a college dropout and an 84-year-old woman on the run from the law. 21-year-old Tanner Quimby needs a place to live. Her options are limited, so when an opportunity to work as a live-in caregiver for an elderly woman falls into her lap, she takes it.
Louise Wilt’s daughter demands that Louise have a full-time nanny living with her. Never mind that she can still walk fine and pour the two fingers of vodka she drinks every afternoon. Bottom line: Louise wants a caretaker even less than Tanner wants to be one.
The two start off their living arrangement happily ignoring each other until Tanner starts to notice weird things. Like, why is the local news fixated on the suspect of one of the biggest jewelry heists in American history who looks eerily like Louise? And why does Louise suddenly appear in her room, with a packed bag at 1 a.m insisting that they leave town immediately?
Thus begins the story of a not-to-be-underestimated elderly woman and an aimless young woman who—if they can outrun the mistakes of their past—might just have the greatest adventure of their lives. Amazon Link

7. 'Here and Gone' by Haylen Beck - It begins with a woman fleeing from Brooklyn on a four-day road trip through Arizona and ultimately to San Diego with her kids in tow, trying to escape an abusive marriage. When she's pulled over by an unsettling local sheriff, things soon go awry, and she is taken into custody. Only when she gets to the station, her kids are gone. And then the cops start saying they never saw any kids with her, that if they're gone than she must have done something with them...
Meanwhile, halfway across the country a man hears the frenzied news reports about the missing kids, which are eerily similar to events in his own past. As the clock ticks down on the search for the lost children, he too is drawn into the desperate fight for their return. Amazon Link