Described as a cross between a traditional book club and a university course without exams, this popular program is back in-person for the 2023-24 season!
This is a special registration option for the Thursday in-person subscription option. Enjoy the final four lectures of the series for a discounted price.
Subscription to the Thursday in-person Series will include access to the online lectures of same series when it is launched a week later, so if you miss a week in-person and want to catch the lecture or if you want to watch it again, you can. The links to all the online lectures will be accessible one week after the filming date until August 31, 2024. Other subscription options are available here: https://www.heliconianclub.org/lls2324.html
The Thursday Series includes:
FEBRUARY 15 - ANN SHIN: THE LAST EXILES
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An unforgettable saga inspired by true events, The Last Exiles is a searing portrait of a young couple in North Korea and their fight for love and freedom.
Jin and Suja met and fell in love while studying at university in Pyongyang. She was a young journalist from a prominent family, while he was from a small village of little means. Outside the school, North Korea has fallen under great political upheaval, plunged into chaos and famine. When Jin returns home to find his family starving, their food rations all but gone, he makes a rash decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, miles away, Suja has begun to feel the tenuousness of her privilege when she learns that Jin has disappeared. Risking everything, and defying her family, Suja sets out to find him, embarking on a dangerous journey that leads her into a dark criminal underbelly and will test their love and will to survive.
MARCH 14 - C.S. RICHARDSON: ALL THE COLOUR IN THE WORLD
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The story of the restorative power of art in one man ’s life, set against the sweep of the twentieth century—from Toronto in the ’ 20s and ’ 30s, through the killing fields of World War II, to 1960s Sicily.
Henry, born 1916, thin-as-sticks, nearsighted, is an obsessive doodler—copying illustrations from his Boy ’s Own magazines. Left in the care of a nurturing, Shakespeare-quoting grandmother, eight-year-old Henry receives as a gift his first set of colouring pencils (and a pocket knife for the sharpening). As he commits these colours to memory—cadmium yellow; burnt ochre; deep scarlet red—a passion for art, colour, and the stories of the great artists takes hold, and becomes Henry ’s unique way of seeing the world. It is a passion that will both haunt and sustain him on his journey through the century: from boyhood dreams on a summer beach to the hothouse of art academia and a love cut short by tragedy; from the psychological wounds of war to the redemption of unexpected love.
Projected against a backdrop of iconic masterpieces—from the rich hues of the European masters to the technicolour magic of Hollywood—All the Colour in the World is Henry ’s story: part miscellany, part memory palace, exquisitely precise with the emotional sweep of a great modern romance.
APRIL 11 - CHARLOTTE GRAY: PASSIONATE MOTHERS, POWERFUL SONS
A captivating dual biography of two famous women whose sons would change the course of the 20th century—by award-winning historian Charlotte Gray.
Born into upper-class America in the same year, 1854, Sara Delano (later to become the mother of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Jennie Jerome (later to become the mother of Winston Churchill) refused to settle into predictable, sheltered lives as little-known wives to prominent men. Instead, both women concentrated their energies on enabling their sons to reach the epicenter of political power on two continents.
In the mid-19th century, the British Empire was at its height, France’s Second Empire flourished, and the industrial vigor of the United States of America was catapulting the republic towards the Gilded Age. Sara and Jennie, raised with privilege but subject to the constraints of women’s roles at the time, learned how to take control of their destinies—Sara in the prosperous Hudson Valley, and Jennie in the glittering world of Imperial London.
Yet their personalities and choices were dramatically different. A vivacious extrovert, Jennie married Lord Randolph Churchill, a rising politician and scion of a noble British family. Her deft social and political maneuverings helped not only her mercurial husband but, once she was widowed, her ambitious son, Winston. By contrast, deeply conventional Sara Delano married a man as old as her father. But once widowed, she made Franklin, her only child, the focus of her existence. Thanks in large part to her financial support and to her guidance, Franklin acquired the skills he needed to become a successful politician.
Set against one hundred years of history, Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons is a study in loyalty and resilience. Gray argues that Jennie and Sara are too often presented as lesser figures in the backdrop of history rather than as two remarkable individuals who were key in shaping the characters of the sons who adored them and in preparing them for leadership on the world stage.
Impeccably researched and filled with intriguing social insights, Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons breathes new life into Sara and Jennie, offering a fascinating and fulsome portrait of how leaders are not just born but made.
MAY 9 – SUANNE KELMAN WILL LECTURE ON Small Things Like These by CLAIRE KEEGAN
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It's a cold, wet December in small-town Ireland, during a time of economic hardship and the authority of the Catholic Church. Making his delivery to the local convent, a coalman finds a shivering, ragged girl locked in the shed. He knows he should look away and not ask questions. But he can't help himself.
That's the premise of Claire Keegan's gem of a novella, Small Things Like These — a moving tale of complicity and human decency. Keegan is the author of prize-winning short fiction, including two story collections, Antarctica and Walk the Blue Fields. Subtle and truthful, her work has been widely praised for its emotional honesty. As one critic put it, she has "an eerily acute ear for dialogue, but her real gift is for what goes unsaid."
