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The Everything Book Club, DAYTIME IN PERSON

"Fellowship Point" by Alice Elliott Dark

A live, lively librarian-led book club discussion about a wide range of titles and genres. Register here for DAYTIME IN PERSON or on Thursday, September 19, for EVENING ZOOM! Registration required.

ABOUT THE BOOK CLUB

If you like everything bagels, you'll probably like The Everything Book Club. We read the best of fiction and non-fiction, literary novels, mysteries, historical fiction, memoirs and more.

We generally meet on the third week of the month at two convenient times and venues:  Evening Zoom on Thursday at 7 p.m. and Daytime in Person at 1 p.m. in the Tower Room on the 2nd floor. Registration is required.

ABOUT THE BOOK

"Fellowship Point" by Alice Elliott Dark. An instant classic about lifelong friendship, long-lost connections, and the fate of one of the last pristine places of beauty on earth. Excitingly, Alice herself, who lives in Montclair, has agreed to come for the last 15 minutes of each book club so we can ask her questions. It's a long one so get started now! 

This book is long, beautifully written, and reads almost like a 19th-century novel. Every character is fully fleshed out even if they appear only briefly. And yet the themes are very current: conservation, feminism, decisions about caregiving, decisions to remain chaste. There are stories within stories and secrets within secrets. The main story is about Agnes, an elderly writer with cancer, who has chosen to live alone all her life, and Polly, her lifelong best friend who is widowed during the course of the narrative, and the sanctuary of an unspoiled tract of land in Maine where they have always summered and which they want to turn into an official nature preserve, despite resistance from Polly’s adult children and other residents of the area. They are from Philadelphia and Quakers and occasionally break into thees and thous. There’s also a subplot about Maud, a single mother who is an editorial assistant and wants to get Agnes to write her memoirs. And in the end, much to my surprise, it all ties up neatly in a surprisingly satisfying bow.

Click on the links to order the book in print or eBook on Libby/OverDrive. Or just ask for a copy at the circulation desk in the Main Branch after July 26. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels F"ellowship Point" and "Think of England," as well as two collections of short stories, In the Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry: Prize Stories, among others. Her award-winning story “In the Gloaming” was made into two films and was chosen for inclusion in Best American Stories of the Century. Dark is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is an associate professor at Rutgers-Newark in the MFA program. She is a longtime Montclair resident and serves on the Open Book / Open Mind advisory committee. 

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