Dear Great Book Guru, Last week at the Sea Cliff Mini Mart, I met up with so many friends from long ago and one of them mentioned an intriguing book about family dynamics set on  a London stage. Does it sound familiar?  Fan of Family Tales

Dear Fan of Family Tales, THE HYPOCRITE by Jo Hamya is set in Sicily and London and takes place in 2010 and 2020.  Sophia is a twenty-seven-year-old successful playwright whose latest work is about a month she had spent in Sicily ten years before with her novelist father.  Her father is in the audience for a matinee performance of her play, having no idea the play is about him - he has carefully avoided reading reviews. Sophia and her mother are having lunch above in the terrace restaurant of the playhouse. The storyline shifts from the father and his reaction to seeing his past come to life on the stage - the kitchen in Sicily, his favorite purple shirt, and most importantly the many women he entertained while his daughter slept nearby…. to the mother-daughter conversation about the play.   Her memories of the conversations she overheard, the lies and exaggerations, half truths are all acted out on stage and her father - to his horror - is portrayed as a mediocre writer and latent misogynist.  Meanwhile as Sophia and her mother lunch, a variety of characters appear to discuss the play going on in the theater below.  As her mother becomes more and more drunk and belligerent, Sophia continues to deny the play is about her family, leaving the reader to question who indeed is the hypocrite? Recommended!