Welcome to Book + Bottle’s Fiction Book Club! We get together with a diverse group of folks to read great books and talk about them over glasses of wine. We started with an online Facebook group so we could connect before the store opened, and now that the store is open, we’re meeting and talking in person! And it’s just lovely. I love watching members gather and become friends after just one meeting. We have members who have never been in a book club before and members who are in three other book clubs! All are welcome.
Schedule
We meet on the last Thursday of each month in the store from 6 - 7:30PM. We do announcements and intros, grab drinks, and get settled from 6 - 6:30 PM, then discussion runs promptly from 6:30-7:30. The store is open till 9PM so you can continue the conversation with your new friends!
The fiction book club is very popular and gets extremely crowded. Please arrive as early as possible to snag a seat, knowing that we may run out of space in our little shop.
This month discussing: We Spread by Ian Reid
The author of the “evocative, spine-tingling, and razor-sharp” (Bustle) I’m Thinking of Ending Things that inspired the Netflix original movie and the “short, shocking” (The Guardian) Foe returns with a new work of suspense following an elderly woman trapped in a mysterious facility.
Penny, an artist, has lived in the same apartment for decades, surrounded by the artifacts and keepsakes of her long life. She is resigned to the mundane rituals of old age, until things start to slip. Before her longtime partner passed away years earlier, provisions were made for a room in a unique long-term care residence, where Penny finds herself after one too many “incidents.”
Initially, surrounded by peers, conversing, eating, sleeping, looking out at the beautiful woods that surround the house, all is well. She even begins to paint again. But as the days start to blur together, Penny—with a growing sense of unrest and distrust—starts to lose her grip on the passage of time and on her place in the world. Is she succumbing to the subtly destructive effects of aging or is she an unknowing participant in something more unsettling?
At once compassionate and uncanny, told in spare, hypnotic prose, Iain Reid’s “exquisite novel of psychological suspense” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) explores questions of conformity, art, productivity, relationships, and what, ultimately, it means to grow old.