English Readers Club
Join the informal group of English readers in Uitikon every second month on Thursdays at 19.30h. We discuss all sorts of books: bestsellers, biographies, classics, thrillers etc.. The group is moderated and the books are proposed by Heidi Kunz, a native speaker, English teacher and avid reader. Heidi is also a long standing member at the Uitikon library.
The books can be purchased at the library. No registration is needed and you do not have to comit to attend each session or to even have fully read the book - we will simply be delighted to welcome you to an interesting evening!
Meeting January 9, 2025
Rebecca Makkai: "The Great Believers" (CHF 13.90)
In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico’s funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister.
Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.
Meeting March 6, 2025
Amanda Peters: "The Berry pickers" (CHF 18.00)
One family’s deepest pain. Another’s darkest secret. Who will they be when the truth comes out?
On a hot day in 1960s Maine, six-year-old Joe watches his little sister Ruthie, sitting on her favourite rock at the edge of the blueberry fields, while their family, Mi’kmaq people from Nova Scotia, pick fruit. That afternoon, Ruthie vanishes without a trace. As the last person to see her, Joe will be forever haunted by grief, guilt, and the agony of imagining how his life could have been.
In an affluent suburb nearby, Norma is growing up as the only child of unhappy parents. She is smart, precocious, and bursting with questions she isn’t allowed to ask – questions about her missing baby photos; questions about her dark skin; questions about the strange, vivid dreams of campfires and warm embraces that return night after night. Norma senses there are things her parents aren’t telling her, but it will take decades to unravel the secrets they have kept buried since she was a little girl.
