August Book Club: Nymph, by Sofia Montrone

For August's book club, we'll be reading Sofia Montrone's debut novel, Nymph, with three meetups in the first week of August.

ICYMI: We’re switching up how the book club works a little bit — the book is now included with your ticket! Book your spot online, and we’ll pop a copy of the book aside for you to come in and collect when it’s convenient. Uncollected books will go back on the shelf thirty days after the bookclub meetup.

Ten-year-old Leo spends her mornings tidying the rooms of her nonna’s time-worn Italian hotel, quietly accumulating the junk and treasures left behind by guests – a pearl earring, a lock of hair. Her nights are suffused with her father’s liquor-spun tales of his childhood, mingled with stories of Greek heroes of old.

Years later, over another hot, endless Italian summer, the hotel is one of the only things in Leo’s life that has remained constant. An accident has knocked her family sideways; her brother Max is distant, and Nonna has grown frail. But then she meets Dolores, a young American woman who sets something alight in Leo that she didn’t know existed.

Heat-soaked, sensual and steeped in an exquisite longing, Nymph traverses the extraordinary pains, soaring pleasures and many metamorphoses it takes to finally grow up.

Your ticket includes small batch, natural sodas from Mischief Brew and snacks, and a $2 donation to Literacy For Life, a First Nations-run charity training local people to deliver literacy classes in their communities.

Book club tickets are non-refundable. Store gift cards cannot be used for events (yet!).

Reading and writing on the unceded land of the Turrbal and Yuggera peoples. We respect and acknowledge Elders past and present, and all First Nations storytellers. Every story on our shelves sits alongside the world’s oldest living stories, reminding us that stories are not just read, but also lived and passed on.