Due to some technical difficulties, there will be no on-line voting for the 2013 Book Club in a Box titles... please visit the library for your voting ballot!
❍ THE ABSOLUTIST by John Boyne
Tristan Sadler, a gay soldier, recalls his time spent fighting in World War I and the intensity of his friendship with Will Bancroft, a soldier who became a conscientious objector and was shot as a traitor.
❍ BEAUTIFUL RUINS by Jess Walter
Follow a young Italian innkeeper and his almost-love affair with a beautiful American starlet, which draws him into a glittering world filled with unforgettable characters.
❍ THE BOOK THIEF by Marcus Zusac
Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.
❍ THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC by Julie Otsuka
Presents the stories of six Japanese mail-order brides whose new lives in early twentieth-century San Francisco are marked by backbreaking migrant work, cultural struggles, children who reject their heritage, and the prospect of wartime internment.
❍ CALEB’S CROSSING by Geraldine Brooks
In 1665, a young man from Martha's Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. Upon this slender factual scaffold, Brooks has created a luminous tale of love and faith, magic and adventure.
❍ DANCING AT THE RASCAL FAIR by Iva n Doig
Supple tale of land seekers unfolds into a fateful contest of the heart between Anna Ramsay and Angus McCaskill, walled apart by their obligations as they and their stormy kith and kin vie to tame the brutal, beautiful Two Medicine country. This is the central volume in Doig's acclaimed Montana series.
❍ DOVEKEEPERS by Alice Hoffman
A tale inspired by the tragic first-century massacre of hundreds of Jewish people at Masada presents the stories of a hated daughter, a baker's wife, a girl disguised as a warrior, and a medicine woman who keep doves and secrets while Roman soldiers draw near.
❍ THE FINKLER QUESTION by Howard Jacobson
Julian Treslove, a radio producer, and Samuel Finkler, a Jewish philosopher, have been friends since childhood and, as they enter middle age, they reminisce over their struggles with self-identity, anti-Semitism, women, love, and the past.
❍ THE FORGOTTEN GARDEN by Kate Morton
Abandoned on a 1913 voyage to Australia, Nell is raised by a dock master and his wife who do not tell her until she is an adult that she is not their child, leading Nell to return to England and eventually hand down her quest for answers to her granddaughter.
❍ GAME OF HIDE AND SEEK Elizabeth Taylor
Harriet and Vesey meet when they are teenagers, and their love is as intense and instantaneous as it is innocent. But they are young. All life still lies ahead. Vesey heads off hopefully to pursue a career as an actor. Harriet marries and has a child, becoming a settled member of suburban society. And then Vesey returns, the worse for wear, and with him the love whose memory they have both sentimentally cherished, and even after so much has happened it cannot be denied. But things are not at all as they used to be. Love, it seems, is hardly designed to survive life.
❍ GARDEN PLOT by Kristin McKendry
Social worker Erin Kilpatrick’s annoyance from finding a dead patient in the garden turned to pity and then to alarm when she and Detective Liam Harris dig a little deeper to discover that maybe the dead man isn’t who they think he is. And now she has to deal with a missing guest and a killer on the loose.
❍ THE HIDING PLACE by Corrie Ten Boom
An old Dutch watchmaker and his two daughters become the center of a major underground operation: to hide Jewish refugees from the occupying Germans. They break all the rules to save the lives of men, women, and children being hunted by the Nazis. The cost of their bravery is betrayal, and they end up in the dreaded Ravensbruck concentration camp. Nevertheless, they continue their efforts to save those around them.
❍ HOME FRONT by Kristin Hannah
An intimate look at the inner landscape of a disintegrating marriage and a dramatic exploration of the price of war on a single American family, HOME FRONT is a provocative and timely portrait of hope, honor, loss, forgiveness, and the elusive nature of love
❍ INTO THE FREE Julie Cantrell
In Depression-era Mississippi, Millie Reynolds escapes her abusive parents by running off with a gypsy caravan, where she uncovers generations of shocking family secrets and finds the tools she needs to confront them.
❍ KAFKA ON THE SHORE by Haruki Murakami
Kafka Tamura runs away from home to escape his father's oedipal prophecy and to find his long-lost mother and sister. As Kafka flees, so too does Nakata, an elderly simpleton whose quiet life has been upset by a gruesome murder.
❍ THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
The Victorian language of flowers was used to convey romantic expressions: honeysuckle for devotion, asters for patience, and red roses for love. But for Victoria Jones, it’s been more useful in communicating grief, mistrust, and solitude. After a childhood spent in the foster-care system, she is unable to get close to anybody, and her only connection to the world is through flowers and their meanings.
❍ LAST MAN by Mary Shelley
An apocalyptic fantasy of the end of human civilization. Set in the late twenty-first century, the novel unfolds a somber and pessimistic vision of mankind confronting inevitable destruction. Interwoven with her futuristic theme, Mary Shelley incorporates idealized portraits of Shelley and Byron, yet rejects Romanticism and its faith in art and nature.
❍ THE LITTLE STRANGER by Sarah Waters
After being summoned to treat a patient at dilapidated Hundreds Hall, Dr. Faraday finds himself becoming entangled in the lives of the owners, the Ayres family, and the supernatural presences in the house.
❍ MISSION TO PARIS Alan Furst
Arriving in Paris on the eve of the Munich Appeasement in 1938, Hollywood star Frederic Stahl is unwittingly entangled in the region's shifting political currents when he discovers that his latest film is linked to the destinies of fascists, German Nazis and Hollywood publicists.
❍ THE NIGHT STRANGERS by Chris Bohjalian
After he crashes his plane into Lake Champlain, killing most of the passengers, Chip Linton moves into a new home with his wife and twin daughters and soon finds himself being haunted by the dead passengers, all while his wife wonders why the strange herbalist denizens of the town have taken such an interest in her daughters.
❍ NIGHTWOODS by Charles Frazier
Named the guardian of her murdered sister's troubled twins, Luce struggles to build a family with the children before being targeted by the twins' father--her sister's killer--who believes that the children are in possession of a stolen cache of money.
❍ THE ODDS by Stewart O’Nan
Valentine's weekend, Art and Marion Fowler flee their Cleveland suburb for Niagara Falls, desperate to recoup their losses. Jobless, with their home approaching foreclosure and their marriage on the brink of collapse, Art and Marion liquidate their savings and book a bridal suite at the Falls' ritziest casino. While they sightsee like tourists during the day, at night they risk it all at the roulette wheel to fix their finances--and save their marriage.
❍ THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL by Philippa Gregory
The daughters of a ruthlessly ambitious family, Mary and Anne Boleyn are sent to the court of Henry VIII to attract the attention of the king, who first takes Mary as his mistress, in which role she bears him an illegitimate son, and then Anne as his wife.
❍ PERFUME: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
An odorless baby orphaned in a Paris gutter in 1738 grows to become a monster obsessed with his perfect sense of smell, and a desire to capture, by any means, the ultimate scent which will make him human.
❍ ROOTS by Alex Haley
Captured in Africa, Kunta Kinte, a tribal prince, becomes a slave, and eventually generations of his family survive to become free again.
❍ RULES OF CIVILITY Amor Towles
An encounter with a handsome banker in a jazz bar on New Year's Eve 1938 catapults Wall Street secretary into the upper echelons of New York society, where she befriends a shy multi-millionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, and a single-minded widow.
❍ THE SOLDIER’S WIFE Joanna Trollope
Returning to his wife and daughters after a tour of duty in Afghanistan, British major Dan Riley struggles to adjust back to civilian life while his family evaluates the difficult sacrifices they must make to support him.
❍ SOMETHING I’VE BEEN MEANING TO TELL YOU by Alice Munro
A new edition of the author's second, long out-of-print collection of stories captures the lives of characters ranging in from childhood and adolescence to old age, including those of two sisters bound together by unrequited loves past and present, a young girl's passion for a barnstorming pilot, and a woman dealing with her first husband's writing career.
❍ THE TIGER’S WIFE by Tea Oberht
Struggling to understand why her beloved grandfather left his family to die alone in a field hospital far from home, a young doctor in a war-torn Balkan country takes over her grandfather's search for a mythical ageless vagabond while referring to a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book".
❍ THESE IS MY WORDS by Nancy Turner
In 1881, Sarah Agnes Prine, 17, goes from New Mexico to Texas and back, protecting her family with her rifle, and then becoming ranch manager while her second husband serves as a Texas Ranger.
❍ THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY by Rachel Joyce Meet Harold Fry, recently retired. He lives in a small English village with his wife, Maureen, who seems irritated by almost everything he does, even down to how he butters his toast. Little differentiates one day from the next. Then one morning the mail arrives, and within the stack of quotidian minutiae is a letter addressed to Harold in a shaky scrawl from a woman he hasn’t seen or heard from in twenty years. Queenie Hennessy is in hospice and is writing to say goodbye.
❍ THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX by Maggie O’Farrell Moving between the 1930s and the present, Maggie O'Farrell's new novel is an unforgettable portrait of a woman edited out of her family's history. The heartbreaking tale of two sisters in colonial India and Edinburgh bound together by loneliness and driven apart by rivalries that lead to a cruel betrayal, it is also the gripping story of how, 60 years later, their shocking secret comes to light. An impassioned, intense, haunting family drama, this novel is a stunning imagining of a life stolen, and reclaimed.
❍ VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD by Jennifer Egan
Working side-by-side for a record label, former punk rocker Bennie Salazar and the passionate Sasha hide illicit secrets from one another while interacting with a motley assortment of equally troubled people from 1970s San Francisco to the post-war future.
❍ WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN by Lionel Shriver
Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.
❍ THE WOMAN WHO HEARD COLOR by Kelly Jones
Art detective Lauren O'Farrell investigates a priceless piece of art that survived World War II and discovers the truth about Isabella Fletcher, a woman whose mother was rumored to have partnered with the Nazis in art thefts.
❍ Y; THE LAST MAN VOLUME 1: UNMANNED by Brian K Vaughn
The only human survivor of a planet-wide plague that instantly kills every mammal possessing a Y chromosome. Accompanied by a mysterious government agent, a brilliant young geneticist and his pet monkey, Ampersand, Yorick travels the world in search of his lost love and the answer to why he's the last man on earth.
NON FICTION TITLES
❍ 1493 by Charles Mann
From the author of 1491--the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas--a deeply engaging new history that explores the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's voyages brought them back together--and marked the beginning of an extraordinary exchange of flora and fauna between Eurasia and the Americas. As Charles Mann shows, this global ecological tumult--the "Columbian Exchange"--underlies much of subsequent human history. Presenting the latest generation of research by scientists, Mann shows how the creation of this worldwide network of exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Manila and Mexico City-- where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted--the center of the world.
❍ APRON ANXIETY by Alyssa Shelasky
The hilarious and heartfelt memoir of quintessential city girl Alyssa Shelasky and her crazy, complicated love affair with the kitchen, as detailed on her blog Apron Anxiety. This is a memoir (with recipes) about learning to cook, the ups and downs of love, and entering the world of food.
❍ CITIZENS OF LONDON: The Americans who stood with Britain in its darkest, finest hour by Lynne Olson
The behind-the-scenes story of how the United States forged its wartime alliance with Britain, told from the perspective of three key American players in London: Edward R. Murrow, Averell Harriman, and John Gilbert Winant.
❍ CITY OF SCOUNDRELS: The twelve days of disaster that gave birth to modern Chicago by Gary Krist
Documents the harrowing twelve-day period in Chicago in 1919 during which a blimp crash, a race riot, a crippling transit strike, and a sensational child murder case challenged the city's modernization efforts.
❍ GOD’S HOTEL: A doctor, a hospital, and a pilgrimage to the heart of medicine by Victoria Sweet
"San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hotel-Dieu (God's Hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves--"anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care-ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for twenty years. Laguna Honda, lower tech but human paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished. Gradually, the place transformed the way she understood her work. Alongside the modern view of the body as a machine to be fixed, her extraordinary patients evoked an older idea, of the body as a garden to be tended. God's Hotel tells their story and the story of the hospital itself, which, as efficiency experts, politicians, and architects descended, determined to turn it into a modern "health care facility," revealed its own surprising truths about the essence, cost, and value of caring for body and soul"
❍ HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION: The untold story of Ireland’s heroic role from the fall of Rome to the ride of medieval Europe by Thomas Cahill
During the Dark Ages, learning, scholarship, and culture disappeared from the European continent. The great heritage of Western civilization would have been utterly lost were it not for the holy men and women of the unconquered Ireland. This delightful and illuminating book takes readers to the "island of saints and scholars" and shows how the Irish put their unique stamp on Western culture.
❍ IN THE GARDEN OF THE BEASTS: Love, terror and an American family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larsen
Documents the efforts of the first American ambassador to Hitler's Germany, William E. Dodd, to acclimate to a residence in an increasingly violent city where he is forced to associate with the Nazis while his daughter pursues a relationship with Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels.
❍ IN THE SANCTUARY OF OUTCASTS by Neil White
White tells his emotional, incredible true story of crime and redemption, vanity and spirituality, as he discovers happiness and fulfillment in an unlikely place--imprisonment in The Long Center, the last leper colony in the U.S.
❍ LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder by Richard Louv
Louv talks with parents, children, teachers, scientists, religious leaders, child-development researchers, and environmentalists to find ways for children to experience the natural world more deeply.
❍ MANHUNT by James L. Swanson
A fascinating and vivid account of the escape of John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln's assassin, takes readers along on the intensive search from the streets of Washington, D.C., through the swamps of Maryland, into the forests of Virginia, and into the lives of the men who pursued him.
❍ MY OWN COUNTRY by Abraham Verghese
A young doctor of eastern Tennessee describes the town's first introduction to the AIDS virus, which preceded a disturbing epidemic and introduced the doctor to many unique people.
❍ RIVER OF DOUBT: Roosevelt’s darkest journey by Candice Millard
Chronicles the 1914 expedition of Theodore Roosevelt into the unexplored heart of the Amazon basin to explore and map the region surrounding a tributary called the River of Doubt, detailing the perilous conditions they faced.
❍ THE BLACK SWAN: The impact of the highly improbably by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Examines the role of the unexpected, discussing why improbable events are not anticipated or understood properly, and how humans rationalize the black swan phenomenon to make it appear less random
❍ TIPPING POINT: How little things can make a big difference by Malcolm Gladwell
Explains why major changes in society often happen suddenly and unexpectedly. Also describes the personality types who are natural originators of new ideas and trends.
❍ WHITE LIKE ME by Tim J. Wise
A memoir of white privilege explores the various ways in which white skin constitutes an advantage in American society in education, employment, housing, criminal justice, and health care.
I appreciate your vote!
The collection will be announced in November and the boxes will be ready for circulation in January 2013
(feel free to print this list out, mark your choices and return it to the library)
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