We had a great discussion (over Zoom) of our September book, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin, which everyone seemed to like (so if you haven’t read it yet, consider adding it to your [probably very long] list of “Books I Want to Read”). We hope you will join us (either in person or by Zoom) for our October meeting on Wednesday, October 16, at 7:30 pm. We will be discussing Absolution, by Alice McDermott. Please don’t feel that you shouldn’t attend if you haven’t finished (or even started) the book—Book Club is mainly an opportunity for old and new friends to get together and chat and snack. All are welcome—we would love to have some new members join our group.

The Holliston Public Library reserves several copies of each book for us—they can be found (typically about a month ahead of each meeting) on the shelves along the windows on the right as you enter the library (now behind the circulation desk). For those who want to get a head start on next month, our November book will be Three Things About Elsie by Joanna Cannon. We meet the third Wednesday of each month. We hold most meetings in person but also have a Zoom option if you can’t attend. Please contact Debbie if you have any interest in hosting a meeting.

We are still looking for a few titles to fill our calendar for the rest of the year, so if there’s a book you’ve read (or want to read) that you think would make a good book club book, please bring your suggestions to the October meeting (or email suggestions to Debbie if you can’t make the meeting).

American women―American wives―have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam.

Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene’s altruistic machinations, and discovering how their own lives as women on the periphery―of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands’ convictions―have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.

A virtuosic new novel from Alice McDermott, one of our most observant, most affecting writers, about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world.