A little known fact: There are over 80 book clubs throughout the city of Baltimore (and beyond) that are registered with The Ivy Bookshop. Baltimore Fishbowl features weekly a current read from a local book club registered with the Ivy. Lucky for us, the clubs’ picks are noted online at Club Ivy.
This week’s pick from the MMAE Women’s Book Club:
An Officer And A Spy: A Novel (Hardcover)
Robert Harris returns to the thrilling historical fiction he has so brilliantly made his own. This is the story of the infamous Dreyfus affair told as a chillingly dark, hard-edged novel of conspiracy and espionage.
Paris in 1895. Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish officer, has just been convicted of treason, sentenced to life imprisonment at Devil’s Island, and stripped of his rank in front of a baying crowd of twenty-thousand. Among the witnesses to his humiliation is Georges Picquart, the ambitious, intellectual, recently promoted head of the counterespionage agency that “proved” Dreyfus had passed secrets to the Germans. At first, Picquart firmly believes in Dreyfus’s guilt. But it is not long after Dreyfus is delivered to his desolate prison that Picquart stumbles on information that leads him to suspect that there is still a spy at large in the French military. As evidence of the most malignant deceit mounts and spirals inexorably toward the uppermost levels of government, Picquart is compelled to question not only the case against Dreyfus but also his most deeply held beliefs about his country, and about himself.
Bringing to life the scandal that mesmerized the world at the turn of the twentieth century, Robert Harris tells a tale of uncanny timeliness––a witch hunt, secret tribunals, out-of-control intelligence agencies, the fate of a whistle-blower–richly dramatized with the singular storytelling mastery that has marked all of his internationally best-selling novels.
The Ivy Bookshop is Baltimore’s literary bookstore.We actively support book clubs and their members throughout the city.
As a registered Club Ivy member, you are entitled to a number of benefits:
1 Club Ivy participants will receive a 10% discount on all book club purchases.
2 Upon request, The Ivy will host catered book club meetings for its registered clubs.
3 Registered Club Ivy members will be invited to participate in publisher-sponsored receptions and other book events, some of them invitation-only.
6080 Falls Road
Baltimore, MD 21209
