A Novel September 3 the Spectator Bird

September 3 The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner 204 pages, © 1976 Joe Allston is a retired literary agent who is "killing time before time gets around to killing me." His parents and his son are long dead, leaving him with neither ancestors nor descendants, tradition nor ties. He passes through life as a spectator. But a postcard from a friend causes him to return to the journals of a trip he had taken years before.

October 1 We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson 214 pages, © 1962 Shirley Jackson's beloved gothic tale of a family's dark secret takes readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, A deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.

November 5 Lost and Wanted: a Novel by Nell Freudenberger 315 pages, © 2019 Helen Clapp's breakthrough work on five-dimensional spacetime landed her a tenured professorship at MIT and she disdains notions of the supernatural in favor of rational thought and proven ideas. So it's especially vexing for her when she gets a phone call from a friend who has just died. As Helen is drawn back into Charlie's orbit, she is forced to question the laws of the universe.

December 3 Less by Andrew Sean Greer 261 pages, © 2018 Receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur, a failed novelist on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself, and making connections with the past. January 2 The Mothers May 7 The Worst Hard Time By Brit Bennett 278 pages, © 2016 by Timothy Egan 340 pages, © 2006 It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist brings together an oral rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty, when history of the American Dust Bowl that devastated the she takes up with Luke Sheppard the local pastor's son., a Great Plains during the Great Depression, following several 21 year old former football star whose injury has reduced families and their communities through the rise and fall of him to waiting tables at a diner. The pregnancy that results the region and their desperate struggle to persevere from this teen romance--and the subsequent cover-up--will despite the devastation. have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. February 6 We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves June 4 Your Duck is My Duck By Karen Joy Fowler 310 pages, © 2013 by Deborah Eisenberg 240 pages, ©2018 Coming of age in middle America, eighteen-year-old In this collection of six short stories Eisenberg pulls us as if by Rosemary evaluates how her entire youth was defined by gossamer threads through her characters--a tormented the presence and forced removal of an endearing woman whose face determines her destiny; a group of film chimpanzee who was secretly regarded as a family member actors shocked to read a book about their past; a and who Rosemary loved as a sister. privileged young man who unexpectedly falls into a love affair with a human rights worker caught up in an all- consuming quest that he doesn't understand. July 2 March 5 Blindness Never Caught: the Washingtons’ relentless by Jose Saramago 294 pages, © 1997 pursuit of their runaway slave, Ona Judge An epidemic of blindness strikes a city and the result is By Erica Armstrong Dunbar 253 pages, © 2017 chaos, the government issuing shoot-to-kill orders. Much of the action is seen through the eyes of a woman who claims The story of Ona Judge, George and Martha Washington's to be blind so she won't be separated from her husband. A runaway slave, who risked everything to escape the nation's look at how people behave under stress. capital and reach freedom.

April 2 Semiosis August 6 Shanghai Girls by Lisa See 322 pages, © 2009 By Sue Burke 333 pages, © 2018 In 1937 Shanghai, twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her Colonists from Earth wanted the perfect home, but they'll younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Both have to survive on the one they found. They don't realize are beautiful, modern, and carefree—until the day their another life form watches ... and waits ... Only mutual father tells them that he has gambled away their wealth. To communication can forge an alliance with the planet's repay his debts, he must sell the girls as wives to suitors who sentient species and prove that humans are more than have traveled from Los Angeles to find Chinese brides. tools. Along the way they make terrible sacrifices, face impossible *2020 Longwood Gardens Community Read* choices, and confront a devastating, life-changing secret.