Wilmette Reads Book Discussion: Ghost Music by An Yu
Saturday, January 11, 11am-12pm, Adults, Auditorium
Please join us for a special book discussion led by creative writing professor and author, Nami Mun.
For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. With her marriage, she gave up on her own career as a concert pianist, but her husband Bowen has long rebuffed her desire to have a child.
Instead, she must accommodate her mother-in-law, newly arrived from the province of Yunnan and bringing with her long-buried family secrets. Soon strange parcels start to show up on the doorstep and Song Yan's dreams become troubling and claustrophobic. Striking out alone through the winter city, she finds herself pulled into the ancient hutongs to confront the source of her unease.
In a silent room within a timeless house, can she find the notes she needs to make sense of all the pain and beauty in her life? (From the publisher)
Nami Mun is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Loyola University. She is also the author of the bestselling novel Miles from Nowhere, which received a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award.
Copies of the book can be found here. Ebook and audiobook copies are available through Digital Library of Illinois or the Libby App and always available through Hoopla.
For those who would like to purchase a copy of Ghost Music, please support our local independent bookstore, The Book Stall.
This program is part of our 2025 Wilmette Reads community reading series. Learn more about how you can take part, including sign-up information, this year’s swag, and a full list of our associated programs.
Classics & Contemporary Book Discussion: This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tuesday, January 14, 10:30-11:30am, Adults, Auditorium
Considered scandalous (and brilliant) when it was published in 1920, This Side of Paradise describes the intellectual, spiritual, and sexual education of young Amory Blaine in the tumultuous America of the early twentieth century. Highly sophisticated yet hopelessly romantic, Amory flounders from prep school to Princeton to glittering Jazz Age New York, confident that he is destined for greatness but unsure how to go about it. Fitzgerald’s razor-sharp re-creation of a defiant, disillusioned generation “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken” makes This Side of Paradise a timeless autobiographical novel of youth and alienation. It moves from tenderness to cynicism to hope with the grace and power that make Fitzgerald one of the greatest of American writers. (From the publisher)
Copies of the book are available here. Ebook copies are available through Digital Library of Illinois or the Libby app. Both ebook and audiobook copies are always available through Hoopla.
For those who would like to purchase a copy of This Side of Paradise, please support our local independent bookstore, The Book Stall at 811 Elm Street in Winnetka. Copies may also be available at Books Down Under on the Lower Level of the library. Proceeds benefit the Friends of the Wilmette Public Library.