IMPORTANT: We will be meeting virtually via Zoom @ 6PM EST. Please sign up for our book club newsletter on our website OR email info@twentystoriesla.com for the Zoom meeting link prior to the meeting day.

This month (MARCH 2021) we'll be discussing THE SCAPEGOAT by Sara Davis. We'll talk about the novel's structure, our favorite passages, and what the author is trying to accomplish, among other things! Come meet new book friends!

SPECIAL GUEST:

Author Sara Davis will be joining us for the last 25 minutes (all the way from Shanghai) to answer your burning questions!

ALL ARE WELCOME TO JOIN THE DISCUSSION. FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

* OUR FICTION BOOK CLUB MEETS THE LAST SUNDAY OF EVERY MONTH *

BUY THE BOOK online at twentystoriesla.com/fictionbooks

**ABOUT THE SCAPEGOAT**

AT A GLANCE:

"Unnervingly good . . . An eerie and surprising reconstruction by an unreliable narrator."

— Kirkus (starred review)

"The Scapegoat is a novel of disquiet and disturbance, with an atmosphere of perfect dread...Sara Davis had me shivering. This is the debut novel of a marvelous new talent."

— Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling

SYNOPSIS:

A mesmerizing postmodern debut novel, The Scapegoat is a propulsive and destabilizing literary mystery that follows a man at a university in the San Francisco Bay area as he investigates his father’s death

N is employed at a prestigious California university, where he has distinguished himself as an aloof and somewhat eccentric presence. His meticulous, ordered life is violently disrupted by the death of his estranged father—unanticipated and, as it increasingly seems to N, surrounded by murky circumstances. His investigation leads him to a hotel built over a former Spanish mission, a site with a dark power and secrets all its own. On campus, a chance meeting with a young doctor provokes uncomfortable feelings on the direction of his life, and N begins to have vivid, almost hallucinatory daydreams about the year he spent in Ottawa, and a shameful episode from his past.

Meanwhile, a shadowy group of fringe academics surfaces in relation to his father’s death. Their preoccupation with a grim chapter in California’s history runs like a surreal parallel to the staid world of academic life, where N’s relations with his colleagues grow more and more hostile. As he comes closer to the heart of the mystery, his ability to distinguish between delusion and reality begins to erode, and he is forced to confront disturbing truths about himself: his irrational antagonism toward a young female graduate student, certain libidinal impulses, and a capacity for violence. Is he the author of his own investigation? Or is he the unwitting puppet of a larger conspiracy?

With this inventive, devilish debut, saturated with unexpected wit and romanticism, Sara Davis probes the borders between reality and delusion, intimacy and solitude, revenge and justice. The Scapegoat exposes the surreal lingering behind the mundane, the forgotten history underfoot, and the insanity just around the corner.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Sara Davis, the daughter of two Stanford immunologists, grew up in Palo Alto, California and received her BA and MFA at Columbia University. She has taught creative writing in New York City and Detroit. She has been awarded residencies from Ucross, Vermont Studio Center, and Ragdale. She lives in Shanghai, China. The Scapegoat is her first book.

SEE YOU THERE! Questions? Email: info@twentystoriesla.com