LITERARY BOOK DISCUSSION GROUP
The winter selection for the Adult Reading Round Table Quarterly Literary Fiction Book Discussion Group is Still Life by Louise Penny. The discussion will take place on Wednesday, January 25, starting at 1:30 p.m. in the second floor Board Room of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library.
ARRT Steering Committee member Ted Balcom will lead the discussion. All ARRT members are invited to participate. To register, please contact Ted at tbalcom@wowway.com. Participants should secure their own copy of the book and read it before the discussion.
Still Life was published in 2005 and is the first novel in Penny’s celebrated Chief Inspector Gamache mystery series. It won the New Blood Dagger, Arthur Ellis, Barry, Anthony and Dilys awards. The series is set in a rural village south of Montreal called Three Pines. So far there are seven novels in the series, which features the wise and engaging Armand Gamache, called by Publishers Weekly “a twenty-first-century version of Hercule Poirot.”
This will mark the first time the discussion group has explored a mystery, and some of the talk will focus on aspects of both the mystery genre and the literary novel and look at how Penny has blended the two.
Here is what one critic said about this series: “An eternally lovely and deeply affecting series…that transcends the genre and works, as worthy literature should, on multiple levels…A treat for the mind and a lesson for the soul.”
