Join us over the course of 5 weeks to red Shola von Reinhold’s exquisite debut novel LOTE.

Each week we’ll read chapters in advance and then come together to discuss and explore the novel further. The weekly sessions will also include contextual materials including music, art, film and additional texts.

About LOTE:

Solitary Mathilda has long been enamoured with the ‘Bright Young Things’ of the 20s, and throughout her life, her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagence and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things that she adores, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists’ residency in Dun, a small European town in Hermia was  known to have lived in during the 30s. The artists’ residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination, but will she be able to break the thrall of her Transfixions? From champagne theft and Black Modernisms, to art sabotage, alchemy and lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cults, Mathilda’s journey through modes of aesthetic expressions guides her to truth and the convoluted ways it is made and obscured.

This reading group is open to all; it’s a place to come together, to reflect, to think and to learn, not only from what we’ll be reading but from each other. It’s a space of multiple perspectives, constructive disagreements, mutual respect and care for one another. The reading group will be hosted by Sim Panaser, Visual Art Curator at Chapter.