UPCOMING EVENTS

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• LM271 Booker Books: Book "The Land in Winter," by Andrew Miller

  • When
    27 Mar 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Upstairs at Le Nelson's, 16 Rue Coquillière, 75001
  • Spaces left
    5

  Register

  

  The Land in Winter is a quietly powerful novel set during the brutal winter of 1962–63, one of the coldest on record in England. In a snowbound village in the West Country, two married couples—each carrying private disappointments, desires, and unspoken tensions—find their lives increasingly entangled as the weather isolates them from the outside world. Against this frozen landscape, small decisions and chance encounters begin to reverberate in unexpected ways.

  As the cold deepens, the novel becomes an intimate study of marriage, longing, and moral uncertainty, exploring how people endure emotional isolation as much as physical hardship. Andrew Miller’s prose is restrained and atmospheric, using the extreme conditions of the winter to strip his characters down to their essential vulnerabilities. Subtle, humane, and quietly devastating, the novel examines how moments of crisis can expose both the fragility of relationships and the possibility—however tentative—of change.

  The Land in Winter won the 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered by five days prior to the meeting, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  Registration for the March meeting opens on Saturday, 28 February.

  
  

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• LA241 Booker Books: "The Rest of Our Lives," by Ben Markovitz

  • When
    24 Apr 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Upstairs at Le Nelson's, 16 Rue Coquillière, 75001
  • Spaces left
    11

  

  The Rest of Our Lives is a quiet, meticulously observed "state-of-the-nation" novel that transforms the standard mid-life crisis into a profound meditation on the "slow erosion of the will". The story follows Tom Layward, a fifty-five-year-old law professor who has spent twelve years harboring a secret resolution: to leave his wife, Amy, the moment their youngest child leaves for college. After dropping his daughter off at university in Pittsburgh, Tom chooses not to return to his New York home, instead continuing to drive west in a "vague, peripatetic" quest to revisit the ghosts of his past.

  Moving across the American landscape from New Jersey to California, the narrative is structured around Tom’s encounters with old flames, estranged friends, and his own brother, punctuated by pickup basketball games where he briefly recaptures his youthful vitality. Yet, beneath the familiar tropes of the American road novel lies a deeper, more clinical tension: Tom is keeping secrets not only from his wife but from himself, including a looming career crisis and a mysterious, worsening medical condition that he refuses to acknowledge. Markovits employs a "disarmingly plain-speaking" voice to peel back the layers of a thirty-year "C-minus marriage," exploring how resentment and love can exist in the same stagnant air.

  Often compared to the works of Richard Ford and John Updike, The Rest of Our Lives is a "wry, poignant" study of masculine vulnerability and the "unreliable edges" of self-narration. A strong discussion angle for the group is Tom’s insistence on "grading" his life and relationships—and whether his cross-country flight is a rational pursuit of freedom or a desperate, pathological retreat from a reality he can no longer control.

  Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered by one week prior to the meeting, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  Registration for the April meeting opens on Saturday, 28 March.

  
  

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• LY221 Booker Books: "Creation Lake," by Rachel Kushner

  • When
    22 May 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Upstairs at Le Nelson's, 16 Rue Coquillière, 75001
  • Spaces left
    11

  Creation Lake is a coolly brilliant, genre-bending novel that masks a profound philosophical treatise within the sleek framework of a spy noir. The narrative is led by "Sadie Smith," a thirty-four-year-old American undercover agent of "ruthless tactics and clean beauty," who has been hired by shadowy corporate interests to infiltrate a radical eco-activist commune in the Guyenne region of rural France. Tasked with inciting provocation to justify a government crackdown, Sadie maneuvers through a landscape of ancient farms and "real Europe" distribution warehouses, viewing the idealistic activists with a detached, cynical eye.

  The novel’s propulsive energy is regularly punctuated by the intellectual ruminations of Bruno Lacombe, the commune’s eccentric mentor who lives in a prehistoric cave and communicates only via email. As Sadie intercepts and reads Bruno’s missives, she becomes unexpectedly mesmerized by his theories on Neanderthals, whom he believes were a superior, more empathetic species than Homo sapiens. These "counter-histories" begin to erode Sadie’s carefully maintained detachment, forcing her to confront a "piercingly moral" awakening as she realizes she may be the architect of a catastrophe that threatens her own humanity.

  Written in taut, "vaulting" sections, Creation Lake is both a high-stakes thriller and a meditation on the "failures of self-liberation" in a world dominated by late-stage capitalism. A strong discussion angle for the group is the contrast between Sadie’s performative identity and Bruno’s search for an authentic, ancient past—and whether Sadie’s ultimate "salt," her core essence, is as hard and nihilistic as she initially claims.

  Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.

  

  
  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered by one week prior to the meeting, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  Registration for the May meeting opens on Saturday, 25 April.

  
  

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• LU261 Booker Books: "Flashlight," by Susan Choi

  • When
    26 Jun 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Upstairs at Le Nelson's, 16 Rue Coquillière, 75001
  • Spaces left
    11

  

  Flashlight is a sprawling and ambitious historical saga that mines the "tides of 20th-century history" to explore the enduring ripples of family trauma. The narrative is set in motion during a summer in a coastal Japanese town, where ten-year-old Louisa and her father, Serk—a Korean émigré and academic—take a walk out on a breakwater. When Louisa wakes hours later, washed up on the beach, her father has vanished, an event that shatters her small family and leaves a void that reverberates across decades and continents.

  The novel skillfully criss-crosses between the post-war Korean immigrant community in Japan, the rigid North Korean regime, and the quiet suburbs of America. As the mystery of Serk’s disappearance slowly unravels, the story expands to include Anne, Louisa’s secretive and increasingly isolated mother, and Tobias, the son Anne was forced to give up for adoption years earlier, who eventually drifts back into their lives. Choi balances these "intimate dramas" with "geopolitically bold" themes, moving from a poignant family mystery into a riveting exploration of identity, race, and national belonging.

  Elegantly written and emotionally profound, Flashlight is described by critics as both a "capacious" historical reconstruction and a high-concept meditation on the "unreliable edges" of memory. A strong discussion angle for the group is Choi’s use of "narrative layers" and how the characters are shaped more by what they cannot see or remember than by the objective truths of their past.

  Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered by one week prior to the meeting, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  Registration for the June meeting opens on Saturday, 23 May.

  
  

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