Growing up in Calcutta, born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead of them. It is the 1960s, and Udayan--charismatic and impulsive--finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty: he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes. Subhash, the dutiful son, does not share his brother's political passion; he leaves home to pursue a life of scientific research in a quiet, coastal corner of America.
But when Subhash learns what happened to his brother in the lowland outside their family's home, he comes back to India, hoping to pick up the pieces of a shattered family, and to heal the wounds Udayan left behind--including those seared in the heart of his brother's wife.
Suspenseful, sweeping, piercingly intimate, The Lowland expands the range of one of our most dazzling storytellers, seamlessly interweaving the historical and the personal across generations and geographies. This masterly novel of fate and will, exile and return, is a tour de force and an instant classic."
We will meet to discuss The Lowland on Thursday, December 3rd (because the last Thursday of November is Thanksgiving), at 7pm, at the Atlantic Highlands branch of the Monmouth County Library located at 100 First Avenue (inside Borough Hall) in downtown Atlantic Highlands.
The morning bookclub, The Book Lovers, will be joining us!
It's also time once again for our annual holiday party and book exchange! Please feel free to bring a savory or sweet treat to share with the group if you wish, as well as any *gently* loved/used books you'd like to donate to the exchange. (Any books leftover at the end of the party will be placed on the library's "free" cart).
We'll also be voting on our favorite and least favorite reads of 2015! For each book we've read this year, we vote thumbs up, thumbs down or meh. If you're unable to make it on December 3rd, but would like to have your votes counted, please email them to ahlebc@gmail.com. Here is the list of books we've read in 2015, in the order we read them:
The Invention of Wings by Susan Monk Kidd
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple
Pavilion of Women by Pearl S. Buck
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis
Middletown, America by Gail Sheehy
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
