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Community Corner

Fairfield Author Deborah Henry to Speak at Annual Meeting of the Friends of the Fairfield Public Library

The Friends of the Fairfield Public Library are pleased to welcome Fairfielder Deborah Henry, author of The Whipping Club, as the guest speaker at the Annual Meeting of the general membership on Thursday, September 12, 2013.  The meeting will take place at 7:00 pm in the Memorial Room at the Main Library, 1080 Old Post Road. This will be a festive event with a “champagne reception” for members and prospective members.

The Friends of the Fairfield Public Library are celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the organizations’ formation in June of 2003.  Ms. Henry’s presentation will follow a brief business meeting and the election of the proposed slate of Board of Directors for 2013-14.

Set in 1960s Dublin, The Whipping Club follows the travails of Marian McKeever, a feisty, young Catholic school teacher, and Ben Ellis, the Jewish journalist with whom she falls in love. Against all odds they plan to marry – until a stunned Marian discovers she is pregnant. Confused, and believing that she is protecting her future with Ben, Marian decides to hide her pregnancy from him and delivers a baby boy in secret. Assured that a better life with an American family awaits her infant, Marian relinquishes him to the nuns of a Mother Baby Home. A decade later, Ben and Marian, now wed, raise their ten-year-old daughter, Johanna. Out of the past walks the nurse who delivered her first child. She confesses to Marian that her young son has not been living in America, but has been institutionalized in a notorious Catholic orphanage.
 
The Whipping Club was named to Kirkus Reviews Best of 2012, and Oprah Magazine’s Summer Reading List for July, 2012. Curious about the duality of her own Jewish/Irish heritage, Henry was inspired to examine the territory of interfaith marriage and in so doing was led to the subject of the Irish Industrial School system. She traveled to Ireland for extensive research and interviews, including interviews with survivors of the Magdalene Laundries, Mother Baby homes, orphanages and the Industrial Schools.
 
The Whipping Club is Deborah's first novel. She lives in Fairfield with her husband and three children and is currently at work on her next book. For more information about Deborah and The Whipping Club, please visit http://www.deborahhenryauthor.com.

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To make reservations for the Friends Annual Meeting, please email Danielle Sharp at dsharp@fplct.org or call 203-912-5963.  For more information about the Friends of the Fairfield Public Library, please visit http://fairfieldpubliclibrary.org/our-community/friends-of-fairfield-public-library/.

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