The Next Chapter Book Group invites you to join our monthly book discussion on the first Wednesday of the month at 2pm. We will be meeting at the Senior Community Center. This meeting will be held in the Boardroom. Registration is not required, and masks are optional.

This month's title is The Magician by Colm Tóibin.

“In a provincial German city at the turn of the twentieth century, a boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice. He is the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. He is expected to lead the condemnation of Hitler, whom he underestimates. His oldest daughter and son, leaders of Bohemianism and of the anti-Nazi movement, share lovers. He flees Germany for Switzerland, France and, ultimately, America, living first in Princeton and then in Los Angeles. In a stunning marriage of research and imagination, Tóibin explores the heart and mind of a writer whose gift is unparalleled and whose life is driven by a need to belong and the anguish of illicit desire.”

Books are available for request via the library catalog. Click HERE to put a copy on hold. Email info@newburyportpl.org or call 978-465-4428 x242 if you have any questions, or to have a librarian put the book on hold for you.