Book a Trip Abroad, no passport required! Travel the world through books. Join us on the fourth Tuesday of every month as we read books from different countries across the globe. November's selection is Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg. Read below for a brief summary:

A masterpiece of European literature that blends family memoir and fiction. An Italian family, sizable, with its routines and rituals, crazes, pet phrases, and stories, doubtful, comical, indispensable, comes to life in the pages of Family Lexicon. Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking—when he isn’t provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini’s Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives.

Copies of the book will be available for pickup at the Beech Street Center (266 Beech Street Belmont). Questions? Email Logan at lmanchester@minlib.net.