Novels & Nibbles

Join us on Friday, July 17th at 7:00 PM at Sotto Sotto in Inman Park as we take on the first half of Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, reading Parts I through VII. That carries us through the section titled "Snake Fence" and stops right before Part VIII, "Fox and Geese," which is approximately 230 pages or ~50% of the book. Come hungry and ready to talk, and we'll grab a table together.

Here's the setup for this month: Alias Grace is built around a real case from 1843, when a teenage servant named Grace Marks was convicted in the murders of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. Years into her life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the day the killings happened, and opinion is split on whether she's innocent, calculating, or something harder to pin down. A doctor named Simon Jordan, working in the still-young field of mental illness, begins meeting with her to coax out those missing memories, and the book moves between his sessions and the story Grace tells him about her own life.

Since we're only reading to the halfway point, let's keep the conversation to that stretch and resist the urge to look up how the real case turned out or how Atwood handles it later. There should be plenty to get into with Grace as a narrator and how much we trust what she's telling Simon along the way.

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