London’s annual book club has returned for another year.
On Wednesday morning, the London Public Library revealed the latest title for One Book One London, a donor-funded initiative that aims to give Londoners a shared reading experience.
This year’s title is The Saturday Night Ghost Club, a 1980s coming-of-age story that follows a group of misfit kids as they investigate local ghost stories and urban legends in Niagara Falls, Ont.
The book’s setting is just a hop, skip and a jump from author Craig Davidson’s hometown of St. Catharines.
“If I set it in my home city, I feel like I know that place, I know the people and its rhythms, and so that kind of gets you over some of the humps that naturally come up when you’re writing a book,” Davidson said.
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“There is a mystery at the heart of the book,” Davidson said, adding that one of its central themes is the universality of memory.
“We delude ourselves sometimes… Memory has kind of a safeguard for tragic things that have happened in our past that we want to either forget altogether or remember in a way that gives us comfort and some sort of satisfaction.”
The safeguarding of memory was an idea that Davidson said was partly inspired by bees.
“Bees leave something called a footprint pheromone, so if they’re out away from the hive they leave a little trace to go back to a pollen source that they find particularly interesting,” Davidson said.
“What if our brain did the same thing, except instead of a nice pollen source it was a bad memory and somehow or another the brain is trying to find its way back to that memory?”
Every year, a novel is chosen by the One Book One London committee from a selection of five titles read by each committee member.
Committee co-chair Sarah Andrews told Global News that the goal of the annual initiative is to foster a city-wide book club.
“We want people to read the book, we want them to have conversations with their neighbours, people on the bus, people in the park,” Andrews said.
“It’s a touchpoint between people to say, ‘Have you read the London title?'”
The Saturday Night Ghost Club is now available to borrow in all branches of the London Public Library.
You can find more information online at the library’s website. Accessible formats for those with print disabilities are available from the Centre for Equitable Library Access.
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