Stranger Than Fiction Book Discussion

Sometimes, life can be stranger than fiction. Join this monthly book club to discuss nonfiction titles. We will be meeting both in-person and online via Zoom. Register in advance to receive the Zoom meeting info to your email. Books will be available at the Circulation Desk one month prior to book club meeting.

This month, we will be reading and discussing The Wager: A tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder by David Grann.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes. But then ... six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they had a very different story to tell.