​​Upcoming Books:
January 27 @ Margi
​Oh William  - Elizabeth Strout
February 17 @Debra'
Eight Hundred Grapes - Laura Dave 
March 10 @Carol
Cloud Cuckoo Land - Anthony Doerr  
April 21 @Jeri Lynn
The Midnight Library - Matt Haig
May 19 @Anne 
Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro
June 16 @Hilary
Matrix - Lauren Groff

Author Bio: 

Larry Watson was born in 1947 in Rugby, North Dakota. He grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota, and was educated in its public schools. Larry married his high school sweetheart, Susan Gibbons, in 1967. He received his BA and MA from the University of North Dakota, his Ph.D. from the creative writing program at the University of Utah, and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Ripon College. Watson has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1987, 2004) and the Wisconsin Arts Board.
Larry Watson is the author of the novels THE LIVES OF EDIE PRITCHARD, AS GOOD AS GONE, LET HIM GO, MONTANA 1948, AMERICAN BOY, IN A DARK TIME, WHITE CROSSES, LAURA, ORCHARD, and SUNDOWN, YELLOW MOON; the fiction collection JUSTICE; the poetry collection, LATE ASSIGNMENTS, and the chapbook of poetry LEAVING DAKOTA. Watson’s fiction has been published in ten foreign editions, and has received prizes and awards from Milkweed Press, Friends of American Writers, Mountain and Plains Booksellers Association, Mountain and Plains Library Association, New York Public Library, Wisconsin Library Association, Critics’ Choice, and The High Plains Book Award. The movie rights to MONTANA 1948 and JUSTICE have been sold to Echo Lake Productions and WHITE CROSSES and ORCHARD have been optioned for film. LET HIM GO was made into a film starring Kevin Costner and Diane Lane in 2020.
He has published short stories and poems in Gettysburg Review, New England Review, North American Review, Mississippi Review, and other journals and quarterlies. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and other periodicals. His work has also been anthologized in Essays for Contemporary Culture, Imagining Home, Off the Beaten Path, Baseball and the Game of Life, The Most Wonderful Books, These United States, Writing America, Tales of Two Americas, Milwaukee Noir, and West of 98.
Watson taught writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin/Stevens Point for 25 years, then joined the faculty at Marquette University in 2003 as a Visiting Professor, until his retirement in 2018. He has also taught and participated in writers conferences in Colorado, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, Vermont, Wisconsin, St. Malo and Caen, France, and elsewhere.
He and his wife Susan live in Kenosha, Wisconsin. They have two daughters, Elly and Amy, and two grandchildren, Theodore and Abigail.
Source: Larry Watson 
is reading Montana 1948  by Larry Watson for December Book Club.​

Acclaimed author Larry Watson's novel, Montana 1948  transports the reader to another time and place with its clear, honest and sparse writing.  The year is 1948 in Bentrock,  Montana  where an event takes place which leads to decisions that change  a family's life forever. The novel begins with these powerful words from the main character, 12-year-old David Hayden. "From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them..."
David’s life is turned upside down after a local Indian girl is raped by the local town's doctor that happens to be David's father's brother. The crime turns his family members against one another. The sheriff, David’s father, must decide between justice and his brother’s life.
Ethics, morality, justice and  family loyalty are some of the issues explored in this coming of age book. This small book's story will stay with you long after you have finished it. 

Author Quotes: 
"I did not -- do not -- believe in the purity and certainty of the study of history. Not at all. I find history endlessly amusing, knowing as I do, that the record of any human community might omit stories of sexual abuse, murder, suicide...Who knows -- perhaps any region's most dramatic, most sensational stories were not played out in the public view but were confined to small, private places. A doctor's office. A white frame house on a quiet street. So no matter what the historical documents might say, I feel free to augment them with whatever lurid or comical fantasy my imagination might concoct. And know that the truth might not be far off.”
― Larry Watson, Montana 1948

Book Review:
 “A couple of months ago I asked my parents to give me some history of the town, some of the history that as a child you never learn about. I wasn’t interested in scandal for the sake of learning about a scandal. I was more interested in learning more about the community and what unspoken events shaped it and hung around its neck during my childhood. What haunted the people I knew when I was too young and careless to see it in their faces? For better or for worse, my parents have been unable to supply me with much information. Either my childish impressions of tranquility were true (and I suspect in a good number of cases it was — though certainly not all) or people were very good at keeping to themselves. All of this was much on my mind while I read the small-town tale Montana 1948."
The Mookse and the Gripes Pantheon
Montana 1948 by Larry Watson (1993) Milkweed Editions (2007) 186 pp
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