The NEPM Book Club
Do you love to read? So do we! Join us for the NEPM Book Club — a quarterly virtual meet-up dedicated to bringing NEPM friends together to chat about new, diverse and interesting fiction.
Our next meeting will be Thursday, Jan. 25 at 7 p.m. Our first read of the new year will be "Tom Lake" by Pulitzer Prize finalist Ann Patchett.
The NEPM Book Club is sponsored by Whalen Insurance and Broadside Bookshop in Northampton.
ABOUT THE NOVEL
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
"Tom Lake" is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.
MEET THE BOOK CLUB HOST
Erin O’Neill is a dedicated bibliophile and NEPM’s digital marketing and social media manager. A lifelong obsessive reader and lover of stories, Erin hosts and organizes NEPM Book Club meetings — and comes up with discussion questions!
GET THE BOOK
Need to get your copy of the latest Book Club selection? Please consider buying from one of our local NEPM Book Club partners:
Broadside Bookshop in Northampton »
Massive Bookshop, an online bookseller in Greenfield »
Olive Tree Books-n-Voices in Springfield »
UPCOMING MEETINGS
NEPM Book Club members can help select books for us to read. Do you have a favorite novel? Is there a piece of fiction that’s on your to-read list? Email your suggestions to bookclub@nepm.org!
Though our meetings have been on Zoom, we’re looking forward to the time when we may be able to congregate in person. As we like to say at NEPM, “Stay tuned!”