Book Club – The House Girl by Tara Conklin
Led by Marcy Manas and Liz Morley
16:00 Tuesday 27 January
Our Book Talk meets once a month. Books are available to borrow from the Gura Family Memorial Library.
Our January choice is The House Girl by Tara Conklin. This is a stunning debut novel of love, family, and justice that intertwines the stories of an escaped house slave in 1852 Virginia and an ambitious young lawyer in contemporary New York. Seventeen-year-old Josephine Bell decides to run from the failing tobacco farm where she is a slave and nurse to her ailing mistress, the aspiring artist Lu Anne Bell.
New York City, 2004: Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in an elite law firm, is given a difficult, highly sensitive assignment that could make her career. She must find the “perfect plaintiff” to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves. It is through her father, the renowned artist Oscar Sparrow, that Lina discovers Josephine Bell and a controversy roiling the art world: are the iconic paintings long ascribed to Lu Anne Bell really the work of her house slave, Josephine? A descendant of Josephine’s would be the perfect face for the reparations lawsuit – if Lina can find one. While following the runaway girl’s faint trail through old letters and plantation records, Lina finds herself questioning her own family history and the secrets that her father has never revealed: How did Lina’s mother die? And why will he never speak about her?
Moving between antebellum Virginia and modern-day New York, this searing, suspenseful and heartbreaking tale of art and history, love and secrets, explores what it means to repair a wrong and asks whether truth is sometimes more important than justice.
Members NIS 25
Non-Members NIS 35
For tickets contact the Box Office 09-8330950 or pay at the door.