Welcome to the Holmes Afternoon Book Club blog where we talk about books online. Read the monthly selection along with us and add your comments to the discussion posts using the Post Comments box at the end of each post. Put your email address in the Follow by Email box to get an email notification whenever there's a new blog post.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

This Month's Selection: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce


The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

by Rachel Joyce

From Random House:
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST

“[Rachel] Joyce’s beguiling debut is [a] modest-seeming story of ‘ordinary’ English lives that enthralls and moves you as it unfolds.”—People (four stars)
 
Meet Harold Fry, recently retired. He lives in a small English village with his wife, Maureen, who seems irritated by almost everything he does. Little differentiates one day from the next. Then one morning a letter arrives, addressed to Harold in a shaky scrawl, from a woman he hasn’t heard from in twenty years. Queenie Hennessy is in hospice and is writing to say goodbye. But before Harold mails off a quick reply, a chance encounter convinces him that he absolutely must deliver his message to Queenie in person. In his yachting shoes and light coat, Harold Fry embarks on an urgent quest. Determined to walk six hundred miles to the hospice, Harold believes that as long as he walks, Queenie will live. A novel of charm, humor, and profound insight into the thoughts and feelings we all bury deep within our hearts, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry introduces Rachel Joyce as a wise—and utterly irresistible—storyteller.
Have you read this book, or are you reading it now? Tell us your thoughts in a comment!

Thursday, January 16, 2014

This Month's Selection: The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker


Combined Book Club Potluck
Tuesday, February 4 (Snow Date)

Dinner at 6:00 p.m.
Discussion at 6:30 p.m.


The Age of Miracles

by Karen Thompson Walker

On an ordinary Saturday, Julia awakes to discover that something has happened to the rotation of the earth. The days and nights are growing longer and longer, gravity is affected, the birds, the tides, human behavior and cosmic rhythms are thrown into disarray. In a world of danger and loss, Julia faces surprising developments in herself, and her personal world—divisions widening between her parents, strange behavior by her friends, the vulnerability of first love, a sense of isolation, and a rebellious new strength.

With a voice as distinctive and original as that of The Lovely Bones, and for the fans of the speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood, Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles is a luminous and unforgettable debut novel about coming of age set against the backdrop of an utterly altered world.