JAN 10 - Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

The discussions are free and open to all. BookTalk is funded by the BSC Library and a BSC Foundation grant. This event will take place using Blackboard Collaborate.

Discussion Leader: Rachael Southam, BSC Associate Professor of English

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks

This historical novel is based on the true story of Eyam, the "Plague Village" in England’s rugged hill country, that voluntarily quarantined itself to stop the spread of bubonic plague. Told from the perspective of Anna Frith, a housemaid who emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer, we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666. After a tainted bolt of cloth from London arrived in the isolated settlement of shepherds and lead miners, Anna and her fellow villagers confront the horrors of the spread of disease, seclusion, superstition, and the disintegration of community. As Anna “struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a “year of wonders.”

• Brooks “subtly reveals how ignorance, hatred and mistrust can be as deadly as any virus … Year of Wonders is itself a wonder.” – People

• “A glimpse into the strangeness of history that simultaneously enables us to see a reflection of ourselves.” – The New York Times Book Review

• "The author has captured the various human responses to grief, fear, hopelessness, and exhaustion." -- Joanna M. Burkhardt, Library Journal

• Year of Wonders "is to conventional work in the genre as a diamond is to a rhinestone … This poignant and powerful account carries the pulsing beat of a sensitive imagination and the challenge of moral complexity." – Publishers Weekly

The event is provided free of charge by the Northern Plains Ethics Institute, the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, the YWCA Cass Clay, Humanities ND, and the NDSU Department of Anthropology and Sociology to all NDSU stakeholders and the public.