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Description
The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal -- a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.
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Book Chat August 17: Black Cows and Cats
Book Chat December 17: Underdog Day
Book Chat September 21-23: Wife Appreciation Day
Book Chat December 17: Underdog Day
Book Chat September 21-23: Wife Appreciation Day
Description
Meet Ove. He's a curmudgeon; the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him 'the bitter neighbour from hell'. But must Ove be bitter just because he doesn't walk around with a smile plastered to his face all the time? Behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness. So when one November morning a chatty...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Description
If you had to pick five people to sum up your life, who would they be? If you were to raise a glass to each of them, what would you say? And what would you learn about yourself, when all is said?
At the bar of a grand hotel in a small Irish town sits 84-year-old Maurice Hannigan. He’s alone, as usual - though tonight is anything but. Pull up a stool and charge your glass, because Maurice is finally ready to tell his story.
Over the course of this...
Author
Description
"Bob Comet is a retired librarian, isolated but not lonely, living out his quiet days in a mint-colored house in Oregon, surrounded by his books and small comforts. One morning, out on his daily walk, he performs an act of kindness that brings him into contact with a nearby senior center, where he soon begins volunteering. Here, as a community of peers and friends gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from...
Author
Series
Visit from the Goon Squad volume 1
Description
Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs, confront their pasts in this story about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn, and how art and music have the power to redeem.
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His latest collection of novellas is Jim Harrison at his most memorable. In The Land of Unlikeness, a sixty-year-old divorced art history academic reluctantly returns to his family's Michigan farmhouse to visit his aging mother. Water Baby ventures into the magical as an Upper Peninsula farm boy, drawn to the water as an escape, sees otherworldly creatures there. The River Swimmer is a striking portrait of two richly-drawn, profoundly human characters....
Author
Series
Five people you meet in Heaven volume 2
Description
"In this enchanting sequel to the number one bestseller The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom tells the story of Eddie's heavenly reunion with Annie--the little girl he saved on earth--in an unforgettable novel of how our lives and losses intersect. Fifteen years ago, in Mitch Albom's beloved novel, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, the world fell in love with Eddie, a grizzled war veteran- turned-amusement park mechanic who died saving...
Author
Series
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Description
In this novel a mother and a daughter try to do right by a town and each other before it is too late. What is happening in Acker's Gap, West Virginia? Three elderly men are gunned down over their coffee at a local diner, and seemingly half the town is there to witness the act. Still, it happened so fast, and no one seems to have gotten a good look at the shooter. Was it random? Was it connected to the spate of drug violence plaguing poor areas...
Author
Series
Description
"Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination. It s a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers....
11) Bedside matters
Author
Formats
Description
"Walter had mastered the business world at an unaccounted cost to discover in old age and ill-health a degenerative disease that would eventually render his body useless. His mind, however, was trapped as it was, and had an unconventional final act to play to everyone's surprise, including his own. "You're just dying, Walter, Irma, his caretaker said. We all do." "I'm fine with dying, Irma. I'd just like to know when," he replied. But it wasn't true....
Author
Formats
Description
Two men---Seth Walker, a teenager trying to understand the genetic nature of his mother's early onset Alzheimer's, and Abel Haggard, an elderly hunchback who spends his days alone on the family farm thinking about the past--are linked by their mothers' stories of a fantasy world in which the lack of memory is a blessing.
Author
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Description
"Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was seven, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. When Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed...
Pub. Date
[2023]
Description
Based on the comical and moving New York Times bestseller, it tells the story of Otto Anderson, a grumpy widower whose only joy comes from criticizing and judging his exasperated neighbors. When a lively young family moves in next door, he meets his match in quick-witted and very pregnant Marisol, leading to an unexpected friendship that will turn his world upside down.
15) Last orders
Author
Formats
Description
The death of one of their friends causes a group of men who have been companions since World War II to take stock of their lives.
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Edition
First edition.
Description
Herb's charmed life with his dear wife, Susan, in their Key West house is coming undone. Susan, in her seventies, now needs constant care, and Herb is in denial about his own ailing health. The one bright spot is the arrival of an endlessly optimistic manicurist calling herself Renee. She sings to Susan during manicures, gets her to paint, and brings her a much-needed sense of contentment. But then Herb and Susan's adult children arrive to stage an...
Author
Series
Erlendur Sveinsson mysteries volume 1
Formats
Description
Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson finds himself following a very unusual trail of forensic evidence when he sets out to investigate the murder of an elderly man found dead in his Reykjavik apartment who was, many years earlier, implicated in a crime that remains unsolved.
18) A man called Ove
Pub. Date
[2016]
Description
Ove, a grumpy, isolated retiree who spends his days enforcing block association rules and visiting his wife's grave, decides to give up on life until an unlikely friendship develops with a boisterous young family that moves in next door.
19) The bucket list
Pub. Date
[2008]
Description
Corporate billionaire Edward Cole and working class mechanic Carter Chambers have nothing in common, except they both have been diagnosed with terminal illnesses. While sharing a hospital room together, they decide to make a Bucket List of all the things they have ever wanted to do before they die. In the process of completing the list, both of them heal each other, become unlikely friends, and ultimately find the joy in life.
20) Septology
Author
Pub. Date
[2022]
Description
What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Asle, an aging painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway, is reminiscing about his life. His only friends are his neighbor, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers--two versions of...
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