Events › Book Clubs of EPL: Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel

Love reading? Love to talk about books you've read? Come join us for lively discussions on all types of fiction and non-fiction. We'll feature different titles and authors each month. Come and share your impressions, thoughts and interpretations of a book we have all read.

This week we will be reading Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel by Maria Semple

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect; and to 15-year-old Bee, she is her best friend and, simply, Mom.

Then Bernadette vanishes. It all began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle -- and people in general -- has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.

To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, and secret correspondence -- creating a compulsively readable and surprisingly touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.