Dear Great Book Guru, While attending the Sea Cliff Civic Association’s first event of 2020 - Dinner & THE DEAD - last weekend at the Metropolitan Bistro, friends at our table mentioned a recent novel they had all read. It was set in the future but had strange medieval overtones. Any thoughts?                  Reader at the Feast

Dear Reader at the Feast, I was at Dinner & THE DEAD too and it was a magnificent evening. Kudos to Fred Stroppel and Dan DiPietro, the fine cast of actors and singers, Billy and Anita Long of the Metropolitan Bistro and Sleepy Jean’s delectable desserts.  Robert Harris’s THE SECOND SLEEP is a strange tale of life in England set eight hundred years in the future, but in its very first pages we are led to believe we are in the Middle Ages. The church rules every aspect of life… and life is very harsh. There is no electricity, food is scarce, and the life span is short with people typically dying in their fifties.  We soon realize an apocalyptic event or series of events has ended civilization as we know it. In the story, young priest Christopher Fairfax travels to a remote rural village in Britain to preside over the burial of the local pastor. He soon unearths a collection of artifacts the man had hidden - lots of plastic, an iPhone, smashed TVs, human bones.  He is baffled by this assortment and sets out to unravel the mystery of humankind’s past and present. A terrifying take on how fragile the veneers of civilization are - recommended!