Dear Great Book Guru, What a wonderful weekend we just had….the Antigone Rising concert was a spectacular event with the most amazing music.  The verve, the crowds , the delicious food and drink all added to a great night and guess what….we will all have one more time to celebrate before Sea Cliff Beach’s Summer 2014 comes to an end. Saturday, September 20 at 6pm the Sea Cliff Civic Association will present Silly Shakespeare Company’s Mac…Nooo…or “the Scottish Play” as the superstitious among us call it. How I would love to spend one more afternoon down at the beach reading a good book and waiting for the fun to begin!  Any suggestions?   Fan of the Bard

Dear Fan of the Bard, You are so right…..  Sea Cliff’s own Kristen Henderson and Nini Camps and the rest of the band gave an unforgettable performance at Sea Cliff Beach and I do have a great book for you to read while waiting for Silly Shakespeare to begin:  THE LIAR’S WIFE by Mary Gordon.    This- her latest work- is a collection of four novellas each about seventy pages long, all connected by a search for truth. In “The Liar’s Wife” an older, affluent woman meets her ex-husband after fifty years and learns about the person she has become; in “Simone Weil in New York” a young mother meets her teacher, the legendary mystic, and questions her earlier devotion to the woman. In “Thomas Mann in Gary, Indiana” a ninety year-old man looks back on the finest day of his life- the day in 1939 he was chosen to introduce the famed writer Mann to his high school class- the day in which he began to question the truths his family and community lived by.   In the final piece “Fine Arts” a young woman travels to Europe to study the artist Civatali’s sculpture and discovers the depth of her passion for truth. Beautifully written, each of these novellas leaves the reader with many unanswered questions about one’s own need for truth.  Highly recommended!