Program Description
Event Details
Mira Mesa Branch Library’s Banned Book Club will discuss the 2019 One Book, One San Diego selection, The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai.
In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico’s funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister.
Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.
One Book, One San Diego is a community reading program. The purpose of the program is to bring together our community and encourage residents to join together in the shared experience of reading and discussing the same book. For a list of One Book events, see here: https://www.kpbs.org/one-book/
The Mira Mesa Library’s Banned Book Club, a book group with a “freedom to read” theme, meets the last Tuesday of each month (no meeting in December), 6:30pm at the library, 8405 New Salem St.
The group focuses on books and authors that have been banned or challenged worldwide over the years, as well as other thought-provoking titles. All are welcome, “regulars” as well as “drop-ins” for a particular title!