Oshkosh Public Library

The Lonely Hearts Cinema Club, David M. Barnett

eng

no index present

fiction

The Lonely Hearts Cinema Club

975033604

David M. Barnett

An uplifting, heart-warming comedy in the vein of Calling Major Tom. It's about the aches of being young and the pains of being old, about loneliness and belonging, about how what separates us can sometimes bring us together. Sunset Promenade, a quirky and eclectic private nursing home on a lonely spit of land on the north Lancashire coastline, is in trouble. Managed by eccentric twins Barry and Garry Grange, the care home has taken advantage of a number of esoteric European funding schemes to allow their business to continue. But in the face of Brexit, funding is drying up. Their problem is, they're just too nice ... or at least, Barry is. He wants to charge low fees to the residents, not wanting to take advantage of them, while Garry is more forward-thinking, and is keen to take up an offer to sell the premises to a big care home chain that is keen to take them over. That would spell the end of Sunset Promenade as it exists now, with corporate greed forcing most of the residents to either find more money for the massive fees ... or leave. Barry's latest wheeze is something he read about in the papers, where a Scandinavian care home is taking in students in their empty rooms. The same thing happens at Sunset Promenade; students from the University of North Lancashire get to live there cheaply, and the residents get some interaction with younger people. Plus there's a grant available for this. So in come the first wave, including Jenny Ebert, a film studies student just starting her third and final year, who has never fit into the hurly-burly of student life and just wants somewhere quiet and out of the way to work on her dissertation, which is a study of the little-known crime dramas made in the 1940s and 1950s by her own great-grandfather, the largely-forgotten director James Jonathan Ebert. That, and the fact that she's been recently orphaned when her parents died in a car crash, means she really just wants to be left alone