The Book Club meets on the third Tuesday of the month at 1:00 pm. Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, September 17th at 1:00pm. This month's selection is The Piano Maker, by Kurt Palka.
Please contact Joan Friendship-Gray for more information; send email or call (519) 822-8983.
The suspenseful, emotionally resonant, and utterly compelling story of what brings an enigmatic French woman to a small Canadian town in the 1930s, a woman who has found depths of strength in dark times and comes to discover sanctuary at last.
Helene Giroux arrives alone in St. Homais on a winter day. She wears good city clothes and drives an elegant car, and everything she owns is in a small trunk in the back seat. In the local church she finds a fine old piano, a Molnar, and she knows just how fine it is, for her family had manufactured these pianos before the Great War. Then her mother's death and war forces her to abandon her former life.
The story moves back and forth in time as Helene, settling into a simple life, playing the piano for church choir, recalls the extraordinary events that brought her to this place. They include the early loss of her soldier husband and the reappearance of an old suitor who rescues her and her daughter, when she is most desperate; the journeys that very few women of her time could even imagine, into the forests of Indochina in search of ancient treasures and finally, and fatefully, to the Canadian north. When the town policeman confronts her, past and present suddenly converge and she must face an episode that she had thought had been left behind forever.
Club Selections for 2024-25
The Piano Maker, by Kurt Palka (September)
The Maid, by Nita Prose
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, by Gabrielle Zevin
The Spoon Stealer, by Lesley Crewe
The Fortunes of Jaded Women, by Carolyn Huynh
The Last Chance Library, by Freya Sampson
The Sleeping Car Porter, by Suzette Mayr
The Four Winds, by Kristin Hannah
Bush Runner: the adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, by Mark Bourrie.