A vicious local storm, summer vacations that were already underway, and illness almost forced us to postpone our meeting. We were therefore a small group as Carla, Linda, Betty and Shirley met at our host Colette’s and Beth, whose book choice we were discussing, attended by zoom.
Colette provided some special cheeses (particularly the creamy, dreamy Chateau Bourgogne from Jacobsons) representing countries visited by the characters in the book as well as samosas to spice things up followed by fresh strawberry shortcake.
Our book this month was The End of the Alphabet by Canadian author, C.S. Richardson. This was Richardson’s first novel, and it won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. Richardson was for many years the VP and Creative Director at Random House where he won the Alcuin Society Award for book cover designs many times. His sparse prose is a definite reflection of his thoughtful and creative cover designs.
The book is a new take on tackling bucket lists or the plot device of a character with one month to live. Here we never know why our main character, Ambrose Zephyr, has suddenly been given one month ‘give or take’ to live. Faced with this news, Ambrose and his wife Zaporra (Zipper) embark on a whirlwind tour of all the places he has most loved or has always longed to visit, alphabetically from A to Z, Amsterdam to Zanzibar.
This is a very short, spare novel; there are no long descriptions of place, character or emotions, no flowery words. Ambrose and Zipper were a very devoted but insular couple, and we understand that the life sentence given to Ambrose is given to Zipper in almost equal measure.
The book certainly brought forward thoughts of mortality. What would we do under the same circumstances? Travel the world? Curl up in a ball? Rage against the unfairness of it all? We had a thoughtful discussion of what we would do, and we ended the discussion with a reminder to make end of life decisions … prior to end of life.
While one member of our group wanted a ‘happily ever after’ ending to the book, the book was well written, spare and beautiful. Thank you, Beth, for this thoughtful selection
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