Author Lecture Series with Lynn Freed |
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Thursday, April 30 2009, 7:30pm - 8:30pm |
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Lynn Freed, author of The Servant’s Quarters, will speak about her book at the Sonoma Community Center on Thursday, April 30, at 7:30pm. The community center works in partnership with local book store Reader’s Books to host author lectures that cover various genres of writing. Previous speakers have included T. Coraghessan Boyle and Tilar Mazzeo.
This complex and sophisticated love story evokes a vanishing world of privilege with a Pygmalion twist. Haunted by phantoms of the Second World War and the Holocaust, young Cressida lives in terror of George Harding, who, severely disfigured, has returned from the front to recover in his family’s stately African home. When he plucks young Cressida’s beautiful mother and her family from financial ruin, establishing them in the old servants’ quarter of his estate, Cressida is swept into a future inexorably bound to his.
In the new setting, she finds that she is, after all, indentured. She is conscripted to enliven George Harding’s nephew, the hopelessly timid Edgar, to make him “wild and daring.” And she takes on this task with resentful fury, leading the boy astray, and, in the process, learning to manipulate differences in power, class, background and ambition. Only slowly does she come to understand that George Harding himself is watching her.
Tickets for Lynn Freed’s talk are $5 ($4 for SCC members,) and can be purchased in advance or at the door the night of the event. To contact the Sonoma Community Center for more information, or to purchase advance tickets, call the front desk at (707) 938-4626 ext. 1 or visit our website at www.sonomacommunitycenter.org. Advanced tickets may also be purchased at Reader’s Books in Sonoma.
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Location: Sonoma Community Center, 276 E Napa St, Sonoma 95476
Contact: (707) 938-4626 ext. 1 |
