Graham Garner's Picks

Affiliation: Britain Yearly Meeting - but attender at Goshen Meeting nowadays, part time co manager at the bookstore.

A Girl Named Zippy

Haven Kimmel is a Quaker who grew up in a tiny town in Indiana and wrote a couple of extremely amusing books about the experience. “A Girl Named Zippy” about her early life and “She got up off the Couch” which is more about her Mothers amazing lifestyle changes when Zippy is in her teens. I have to admit we cheated, by having the audio CD's read by the author, and they really have kept me, my wife and eight year old son in hysterics in the car. Wouldn’t you know it Google has a street view of her hometown these days, and we spent some time trying to work out which was Zippys house, where her sister lived and the Road that led to the Mooreland Friends Meeting. Haven is currently working on a major piece of writing about Quakerism, and has many other novels and Childrens books in print here.

Notes from an exhibition

is a novel, that almost reads like a murder mystery, but the death is of natural causes and the “mystery” is the family trying to piece together the life of their Mother and Wife, a true and obsessed genius of an artist. Set mostly in my native Britain, mostly down in the West Country, the Quakerism of the bereaved husband and the other family members is central to the plot, and indeed the author Patrick Gale spent a year attending Quaker Meeting so as to write a true and sympathetic description of the Society. The book is not yet published in America but we are lucky enough to have a lot of imported remainders from Britain.

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Posted by QuakerBooks on September 28, 2006 5:02 PM | Permalink