Western Suburbs Walking Book Club

While walking the Chester Valley Trail (3 miles) we will discuss Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (fiction, 309 pages, 11 hrs audio). Audio and eBook available at The Free Library of Philadelphia.

Park at the Penn Medicine Valley Forge parking lot, 1001 Chesterbrook Blvd, Berwyn, PA. Meet at the trailhead. In the event of rain, we will meet at the trailhead, and then decide on moving indoors.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.

While walking the Chester Valley Trail (3 miles) we will discuss The Power by Naomi Alderman (science fiction, 386 pages, 12 hrs audio).

Park at the Penn Medicine Valley Forge parking lot, 1001 Chesterbrook Blvd, Berwyn, PA. Meet at the trailhead. In the event of rain, we will meet at the trailhead, and then decide on moving indoors.

In this stunning bestseller praised as "our era's Handmaid's Tale," a fierce new power has emerged—and only women have it.

The Power is a book within a book: a manuscript of an imagined history of the tumultuous 21st century period – now 5,000 years in the past – during which womankind became the dominant gender after developing and sharing the power to emit electricity from their hands.

The novel was adapted into a nine-episode Amazon Prime Video television series in 2023.