Thanks to all who have joined us for a book discussion so far! If you haven’t yet, you are more than welcome to jump in at any time.

This month’s book is Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.

We’ll meet on Tuesday, March 15th at noon for our next lunchtime discussion. I’ll send out an RSVP link closer to the date.

We have 3 IDE copies of the book to loan out — please contact me if you’d like to borrow one. Additionally, the Lebanon libraries have 2 copies (one book, one audio recording), Howe Library in Hanover has 2 copies available and an e-copy. The Norwich library has one too!

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Look forward to our conversation next month. And happy February!

Kara

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, from Amazon.com

In this brilliant, breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Meanwhile Asha, a woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route to the middle class. With a little luck, her beautiful daughter, Annawadi’s “most-everything girl,” might become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest children, like the young thief Kalu, feel themselves inching closer to their dreams. But then Abdul is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal. With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects people to one another in an era of tumultuous change,Behind the Beautiful Forevers, based on years of uncompromising reporting, carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds—and into the hearts of families impossible to forget.