BOOK CLUB MEETING

BOOK CLUB MEETING

Our next meeting will be Sunday, August 31 at 10:00am in the comfort of your own home via Zoom!
We will be discussing Jai Chakrabarti’s: A Play for the End of the World

JOIN ZOOM MEETING

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83866972141?pwd=Cy4pQVJV8acFsoYyzhNUhO7W1i3Z2S.1

Meeting ID: 838 6697 2141
Password: 1955

SYNOPSIS

A dazzling novel—set in early 1970’s New York and rural India—the story of a turbulent, unlikely romance, a harrowing account of the lasting horrors of World War II, and a searing examination of one man’s search for forgiveness and acceptance.

“Looks deeply at the echoes and overlaps among art, resistance, love, and history … an impressive debut.” —Meg Wolitzer, best-selling author of The Female Persuasion

New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk’s oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India.

Travelling there alone to collect his friend’s ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest against the government—the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis. Torn between the survivor’s guilt he has carried for decades and his feelings for Lucy (who, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant with his child), Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves.

An unforgettable love story, a provocative exploration of the role of art in times of political upheaval, and a deeply moving reminder of the power of the past to shape the present, A Play for the End of the World is a remarkable debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.

AWARD 2021 Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers

LONGLIST 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World, which won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction, was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award and short-listed for the Tagore Prize. He is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness. His short fiction has received both an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize and has been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories and performed on Selected Shorts by Symphony Space. His nonfiction has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and elsewhere. Born in Kolkata, India, he now lives in New York with his family.