The Third Thursday Book Club meets a week later than usual in August. The group discusses THE RED HOUSE by Mark Haddon. Please call the library if you would like to reserve and borrow a copy of the book. All readers are welcome to join the discussion. The group will either meet outside or via a Zoom discussion (TBD.) Those who borrow the book will be notified of the meeting location in days prior to the meeting.
After his mother's death, Richard, a newly remarried hospital consultant, decides to build bridges with his estranged sister, inviting Angela and her family for a week in a rented house on the Welsh border. Four adults and four children, a single family and all of them strangers. Seven days of shared meals, log fires, card games and wet walks. But in the quiet and stillness of the valley, ghosts begin to rise up. The parents Richard thought he had. The parents Angela thought she had. Past and present lovers. Friends, enemies, victims, saviours. And watching over all of them from high on the dark hill, Karen, Angela's stillborn daughter. The Red House is about the extraordinariness of the ordinary, weaving the words and thoughts of the eight characters together with those fainter, stranger voices - of books and letters and music, of the dead who once inhabited these rooms, of the ageing house itself and the landscape in which it sits.