Register 12 Seats Remaining
In October, we are reading "Endling" by Maria Reva.
The Afternoon Book Club is open to everyone and all are welcome! We meet in the community meeting room and tea and cookies are provided. We will discuss the book for an hour, followed by half an hour of tea and social time.
The library has copies on a first-come-first-served basis.
You can purchase your own copy in person at Gather Bookshop or Book Mountain. Mention the Squamish Library book club to get 15% off your purchase!
Ukraine, 2022. Nastia and her sister, Solimaya, are entangled in the booming bridal industry, getting paid to entertain Western men who've come to Ukraine on "Romance Tours" to find their dream woman. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who's tried, and failed, to breed specimens from the region's dwindling snail population in her mobile lab. Nastia's obsession with finding her absent mother--a flamboyant protester who disappeared after years of public opposition to the romance tours--leads her to embark on the journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles along with three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a rare snail with one last shot at perpetuating his species. This journey, and these dreams, come to a screeching halt as Russia invades. In a stunningly ambitious and achingly raw metafictional spiral, Endling brilliantly balances the comedic stakes set in motion by the plot while drawing on Reva's personal experiences as a Ukrainian expat, forced to witness the hostilities from afar while tracking her family's delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and real life combine on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What is it like to leave behind one's home and possessions? Conversely, what is it like to stay and continue with the mundanities of life and work under military occupation? For those of us witnessing from overseas: how does our sense of reality change? Can normalcy and security be restored, or have they always been an illusion? Endling is a tour de force from an author on the cutting edge of fiction, telling a story of love, loss, humour, and devastation that only she could tell.
Registration required. Register online using the Register button, or you can phone the library at 604-892-3110.
Conveniently located downtown, the Squamish Public Library has a large meeting room, quiet study spaces, an outdoor pickup window, and an art gallery.