The Booker Bookies book club at the Ipswich Public Library welcomes those with a love (whether blossoming or cultivated) for English literature, especially recognizable works of "literary fiction" published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The selections for Booker Bookies are fiction titles that have either won the Booker Prize or were shortlisted entries. Booker Prize entries are often literature that feature diverse and challenging stories, characters, and settings. Book club members should be prepared to read and discuss novels that may feature mature content.

Join Stephen this month for a discussion of The Sea by John Banville, the 2005 Booker Prize winner. Physical copies will be available to pick up in the Library and an eBook version is also available through Boston Public Library's Libby offerings. 

"In this luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel among the finest we have had from this masterful writer." 

Background: "The Booker Prize is the leading literary award in the English speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades. Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. It is a prize that transforms the winner’s career. The winner receives £50,000 as well as the £2,500 awarded to each of the six shortlisted authors. Both the winner and the shortlisted authors are guaranteed a global readership and can expect a dramatic increase in book sales."

Registration encouraged.