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The Promises, Promises Book Club

Led by Philip Burnham, retired associate professor in the English Department at George Mason University

Welcome to the Promises, Promises Book Club series, a discussion of recent fiction that grapples with the theme of people making—and sometimes breaking—a serious promise or pledge.  Participants will read about an America where fascism has become a political rallying cry; about a Scottish island where a lifelong pledge is broken by a heartless act of avarice; about a boatload of immigrants who find the American husbands they’ve been promised aren’t at all what they’d hoped for; and about a South African family that struggles with its own bigotry long after the apartheid era has come to an end. 
 
The series is led by Philip Burnham, retired associate professor in the English Department at George Mason University.  All discussions will be held in the Large Meeting Room of West End Library on the dates below, from 6:30-7:45 p.m.  Please join us early for light refreshments between 6:15 and 6:30 PM. 
 
There are still some spaces open for the series, so if interested, register at promisesbookclub@gmail.com.  About two weeks before each session, the book club will send participants some links to websites relevant to the next novel as well as a list of study questions intended to inspire reflection for readers for the upcoming discussion. 
 
The series is funded by the West End Library Friends.  Readers do not have to be a member of the Friends to join this group.  Available at West End Neighborhood Library are limited copies of all the books discussed.
 
Read below for the schedule and titles of works discussed:
 
September 17 –The Plot Against America, Philip Roth 
What would have happened if Charles Lindbergh had challenged Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency in 1940—and won?  A hypothetical--but chilling--answer to that question is Philip Roth’s venture into counterfactual history, The Plot Against America.  Based in Newark, New Jersey, where Roth spent his youth, a grim narrative unfolds that violently divides a family, a city, and a nation. A novel published over twenty years ago, Roth’s fiction feels as though it could have been written only yesterday. 
 
October 22 –Clear, Carys Davies 
From the Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution, the Enclosure movement in Great Britain devastated millions of lives.  The Ondaatje Prize winner from 2025, Carys Davies’ Clear is set on a remote Scottish island whose lone inhabitant can’t avoid the fate of this great social upheaval.  Be warned: this isn’t quite the Victorian-era British Isles of the Brontë sisters or Charles Dickens.  The novel tells a deeply personal and rural story that unfolds far from the madding crowd, and with an ending that few readers will anticipate.   
 
November 19—The Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka 
A long time before Internet dating services were all the rage, “picture brides” were how couples were matched when separated by daunting obstacles like the Pacific Ocean.  Julie Otsuka dares what few writers ever attempt, a novel told with a collective voice, a group story about the experience of immigrant Japanese women in America—all in a volume that barely numbers a hundred pages and still won the PEN-Faulkner Award for Fiction.  After reading Otsuka, you will never again think of San Francisco, much less California, in quite the same way. 
 
December 17—The Promise, Damon Galgut 
On her deathbed, Rachel Swart makes her husband take a difficult vow.  Unbeknownst to them, their young daughter is listening.  But the husband has no intention of fulfilling the promise, and it is left to their children to choose what to do with it.  The Swart family is at the center of Damon Galgut’s novel, the Booker Prize winner in 2021, about the cost of South African apartheid for black and white inhabitants alike, its legacy surviving in fundamental ways decades after it was abandoned.

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