The public is invited to join the UNH Manchester Library and Manchester Historic Association for the spring book group series, “Books in the Mill: A Year of Booker Reads.” The selected titles are all international Man-Booker award winning novels.  

For more information, call the UNH Manchester library at 603-641-4173. Programs are held on Thursdays in the library mezzanine from 6:30-8 p.m. Visit http://manchester.unh.edu/campuslife/events for more information about this series or other events on campus. 

“The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro

Thursday, Feb. 21, 6:30-8:30 p.m.

A tragic, spiritual portrait of a perfect English butler and his reaction to his fading insular world in post-war England. At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving “a great gentleman.” But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s “greatness” and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served.  

“The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes

Thursday, March 21, 6:30-8:30 p.m.

This intense novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about, until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance. Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for himself. Then he is presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

“The Sea” by John Banville

Thursday, April 18, 6:30-8:30 p.m.

Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman, has gone back to the seaside town of his childhood to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this novel.