Wednesday, August 8, 2018

From the Boswell Book Club Newsletter - Hotel Silence

Did you know the Boswell book club flyer is right at your fingertips? The link is right here. Every season we look at new releases for books we've liked that are perfect for discussion. Of course we'd still love for you to visit Boswell to pick one up and browse our recommendations. Don't forget about our book club wall at the front of our store. It shows what registered book clubs around Milwaukee are reading next.

Here's one more book that we think every book club has to read that didn't make summer flier. Hotel Silence was discovered by Boswellian Lynn, the first to write a recommendation. Friend-of-Boswell (and one-time Boswellian) Melissa saw the rec and book and convinced her book club to read it. The book club includes Melissa's spouse Jason, who also happens to be our adult buyer. He passed it to me. I passed it to Jane. Jane passed it to Jen. Now we've got a copy going to Conrad.

The story begins with Jonas's life in tatters. His marriage has ended and his ex-spouse tells him his daughter is not his own. He decides to end his life and takes a voyage to a war-torn country, partly because he won't know anyone and maybe also because nobody will notice. He travels light, ready to finish the job off with his tool box. But after settling in to Hotel Silence, it turns out that tool box is going to change the course of his life. We love that Isabel Berwick in The Financial Times says "Olafsdottir's writing is at once profoundly Icelandic - focusing the reader on all the particularity of life on that isolated island - and universal."

It's also on our A Gentleman in Moscow table, and it's got some shades of A Man Called Ove, and not just because it's translated from Icelandic with the original title Ör. Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir has written a short but powerful, sometimes funny novel about connectivity and finding purpose, no matter where you are in life.

Read the rest of the Boswell book club newsletter here.

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