All are welcome to attend the Reading on the Avenue Book Club, which meets in the Community Room of Willow Glen Library. On Wednesday, March 27, we'll be discussing The Belly of Paris, written in 1873 by Emile Zola.

Florent Quenu, a wrongly accused man who escapes imprisonment on Devil's Island, returns to his native Paris and finds a city he barely recognizes, with its working classes displaced to make way for broad boulevards and bourgeois flats. Living with his brother's family in the newly rebuilt Les Halles market, Florent is soon caught up in a dangerous maelstrom of food and politics. Amidst it all, we see the dramatic difference between the rich and the poor and how the widening gulf between them strains a city to the breaking point.