Book Talks with Sandra Didner

Wednesday, January 9

Wednesday, February 13

Wednesday, March 13

PARIS IN THE PRESENT TENSE

WARLIGHT

THE IMMORTALISTS

BY MARK HELPRIN

BY MICHAEL ONDAATJE

BY CHLOE BENJAMIN

Paris in the Present Tense is a modern-day story of love, music, and death.by the bestselling author of Winter’s Tale and A Soldier of the Great War. Mark Helprin’s powerful new novel is set in contemporary Paris which is caught between violent unrest and its well-known, magnificent glory. Its plot revolves around a septuagenarian cellist who faces his personal and professional losses in this nearly perfect novel which is a hymn to literature, music and art.

The internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of The English Patient has written a mesmerizing new novel that tells a dramatic story set in the decade after World War II through the lives of a small group of unexpected characters and two teenagers whose lives are indelibly shaped by their unwitting involvement. In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself - shadowed and luminous at once - we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth.

This new novel by Chloe Benjamin, is devoted to the awareness of life and its inherent sorrow, and the different ways human beings deal with it. Benjamin's characters are more aware of their death than most people. It is a sweeping book of remarkable ambition and depth which probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds. A sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.