Portland Public Library hosts Friday Night Book Club Next up: Friday, March 27th for “Lucky Us” by Amy Bloom‏

Portland Public Library hosts Friday Night Book Club

5:30-7:00pm in Meeting Room #5

Next up: Friday, March 27th for “Lucky Us” by Amy Bloom 

Portland, Maine - Portland Public Library hosts the Friday Night Book Club on Friday, March 27, in Meeting Room 5 at the Main Library. Doors open at 5:30; discussion starts at 5:45 and generally goes till 7:00 p.m. Friday Night Book Club is for those interested in reading and discussing contemporary fiction written or translated within the last twenty years. Discussions are led by library staff members.  
This month the club will discuss the novel “Lucky Us" by Amy Bloom. Light refreshments provided.

About the book:

“My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.”  So begins the story of teenage half-sisters Eva and Iris in this brilliantly written, deeply moving, and fantastically funny novel by the beloved and critically acclaimed author of Away. Disappointed by their families, Iris, the hopeful star, and Eva, the sidekick, journey across 1940s America in search of fame and fortune. Iris’s ambitions take the sisters from small-town Ohio to an unexpected and sensuous Hollywood, across the America of Reinvention in a stolen station wagon, to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island. With their friends in high and low places, Iris and Eva stumble and shine through a landscape of big dreams, scandals, betrayals, and war. Filled with memorable characters and unexpected turns, Lucky Us is a thrilling and resonant novel about success and failure, good luck and bad, and the pleasures and inevitable perils of family life. From Brooklyn’s beauty parlors to London’s West End, these unforgettable people love, lie, cheat, and survive in this story of our fragile, absurd, heroic species.

About the author

Author of two novels, three collections of short stories, and a nominee for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Her most recent novel, Away, was an epic story about a Russian immigrant.   Her recent collection of short stories, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, came out in January 2010.  Her next novel, Lucky Us, (Random House) will be out in early 2014.  She lives in Connecticut and taught at Yale University for the last decade.  She is now Wesleyan University’s Distinguished University Writer in Residence.

New members are always welcome! Please email hartsig@portland.lib.me.us or call the Reader’s Advisory desk at 871-1700, ext. 705, if you have any questions about the group. This program is free and registration is preferred.