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Current Book Discussion Group Selection
One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty
Discussion Start Date: January 5th, 2006
Click on the titles for the full description.
- Small Island by Andrea Levy
Publisher: Picador (2005)
List Price: $14.00 — ISBN: 0312424671- Hotel World by Ali Smith
Publisher: Anchor (2002)
List Price $12.95 — ISBN: 0385722109- Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Picador (2004)
List Price: $14.00 — ISBN: 0312424094- The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (2005)
List Price: $14.95 — ISBN: 1582346038- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Publisher: Harper Perennial (2004)
List Price: $15.95 — ISBN: 0060586370- Get a Life by Nadine Gordimer
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2005)
List Price: $21.00 — ISBN: 0374161704
(Hardback)- Califia's Daughters by Leigh Richards (Laurie King)
Publisher: Spectra (2004)
List Price: $6.99 — ISBN: 055358667X- Exit to Reality or Proteus and Euclid, a Love Story by Edith Forbes
Publisher: Seal Press (1998)
List Price: $12.00 — ISBN: 1580050034- Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Anchor (2004)
List Price: $14.00 — ISBN: 0385721676- In America by Susan Sontag
Publisher: Picador (2001)
List Price: $14.00 — ISBN: 0312273207- When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka
Publisher: Anchor (2003)
List Price: $10.95 — ISBN: 0385721811- The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad
Publisher: Back Bay Books (2004)
List Price: $12.95 — ISBN: 0316159417- The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Penguin (1990)
List Price: $13.95 — ISBN: 0140107479- Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Publisher: Touchstone; Oprah edition (2002)
List Price: $15.00 — ISBN: 0743237188
BDG Blurbs
Small Island by Andrea Levy
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. After winning the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Levy's captivating fourth novel sweeps into a U.S. edition with much-deserved literary fanfare. Set mainly in the British Empire of 1948, this story of emigration, loss and love follows four characters—two Jamaicans and two Britons—as they struggle to find peace in postwar England. After serving in the RAF, Jamaican Gilbert Joseph finds life in his native country has become too small for him. But in order to return to England, he must marry Hortense Roberts—she's got enough money for his passage—and then set up house for them in London. The pair move in with Queenie Bligh, whose husband, Bernard, hasn't returned from his wartime post in India. But when does Bernard turn up, he is not pleased to find black immigrants living in his house. This deceptively simple plot poises the characters over a yawning abyss of colonialism, racism, war and the everyday pain that people inflict on one another. Levy allows readers to see events from each of the four character's' point of view, lightly demonstrating both the subjectivity of truth and the rationalizing lies that people tell themselves when they are doing wrong. None of the characters is perfectly sympathetic, but all are achingly human. When Gilbert realizes that his pride in the British Empire is not reciprocated, he wonders, "How come England did not know me?" His question haunts the story as it moves back and forth in time and space to show how the people of two small islands become inextricably bound together. Agent, David Grossman. (Apr.)
Hotel World by Ali Smith
This book has been nominated for the Booker Prize some years ago when it came out, just like her lastest one The Accidental. I think Ali Smith - next to Jeanette Winterson - is one of the most important English writers at the moment. Sure one of the most interesting voices. Up to now she has published three novels & three books of short stories - all of them worth reading! If you haven't read her up to now - just try something. She is a wonderful writer with a good sense of language as well as humor.
Book Description
"Ali Smith's innovative, extraordinary new novel checks us into the smooth, plush world of the Global - but is it really the kind of place you want to spend the rest of your life in?
Hotel World takes us through a night in the lives of five people. Three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. Through the course of the evening we are drawn into their different worlds. It's luxurious for some, but a long drop for others.
Playful, defiant and richly inventive, Hotel World is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration, an alchemy of opposite worlds colliding to make a modern parable of connection and indifference, and ultimately a defence of love"
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen
Housekeeping begins "My name is Ruth." It ends with Ruth remarking that she had "never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming" and realizing that her "life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined." Although Ruth and her sister Lucille spend most of their childhood in one house near a lake in Idaho - terrain described at length through poignant and radiant prose - Ruth never loses the feeling of being a homeless woman, a person who, with her sister, "had spent our lives watching and listening with the constant sharp attention of children lost in the dark. It seemed that we were bewilderingly lost in a landscape that, with any light at all, would be wholly unfamiliar." In Housekeeping, lives change drastically just when nothing seems to be happening. Marilynne Robinson's vibrant and visual language floats and flows out of Ruth's most secret self, only to remind us how impossible it is to ever really get under another person's skin.
The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald
From Publishers Weekly
A little girl's body, lying in a field, is the first image in this absorbing, psychologically rich second novel by the Canadian author of the bestselling Fall on Your Knees. Then the focus shifts to the appealing McCarthy family. It's 1962, and Jack, a career officer in the RCAF, has just been assigned to the Centralia air force base in Ontario. Jack's wife, Mimi, is a domestic goddess; their children, Mike, 12, and Madeleine, 8, are sweet, loving kids. This is an idyllically happy family, but its fate will be threatened by a secret mission Jack undertakes to watch over a defector from Soviet Russia, who will eventually be smuggled into the U. S. to work on the space program. Jack is an intensely moral, decent guy, so it takes him a while to realize that the man is a former Nazi who commanded slave labor in Peenemande, where the German rockets were built in an underground cave. Meanwhile, Madeleine is one of several fourth graders who are being molested by their teacher, and one of them winds up dead in that field. McDonald is an expert storyteller who can sustain interest even when the pace is slow, as it is initially, providing an intricate recreation of life on a military base in the 1960s. As the narrative darkens, however, it becomes a chronicle of innocence betrayed. The exquisite irony is that both Madeleine and her father, unbeknownst to each other, are keeping secrets involving the day of the murder. The subtheme is the cynical decision by the guardians of the U.S. space program to shelter Nazi war criminals in order to win the race with the Russians. The finale comes as a thunderclap, rearranging the reader's vision of everything that has gone before. It's a powerful story, delicately layered with complex secrets, told with a masterful command of narrative and a strong moral message. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
From Publisher's Weekly's starred review:
The drawing room social comedies of early 19th-century Britain are infused with the powerful forces of English folklore and fantasy in this extraordinary novel of two magicians who attempt to restore English magic in the age of Napoleon. In Clarke's world, gentlemen scholars pore over the magical history of England, which is dominated by the Raven King, a human who mastered magic from the lands of faerie. The study is purely theoretical until Mr. Norrell, a reclusive, mistrustful bookworm, reveals that he is capable of producing magic and becomes the toast of London society, while an impetuous young aristocrat named Jonathan Strange tumbles into the practice, too, and finds himself quickly mastering it. Though irritated by the reticent Norrell, Strange becomes the magician's first pupil, and the British government is soon using their skills. Mr. Strange serves under Wellington in the Napoleonic Wars (in a series of wonderful historical scenes), but afterward the younger magician finds himself unable to accept Norrell's restrictive views of magic's proper place and sets out to create a new age of magic by himself. Clarke manages to portray magic as both a believably complex and tedious labor, and an eerie world of signs and wonders where every object may have secret meaning. London politics and talking stones are portrayed with equal realism and seem indisputably part of the same England, as signs indicate that the Raven King may return. The chock-full, old-fashioned narrative (supplemented with deft footnotes to fill in the ignorant reader on incidents in magical history) may seem a bit stiff and mannered at first, but immersion in the mesmerizing story reveals its intimacy, humor and insight, and will enchant readers of fantasy and literary fiction alike. Agent, Jonny Geller. (Oct.) Forecast: A massive push by Bloomsbury has made this one of the most anticipated novels of the season. It's convenient to pigeonhole it as Harry Potter for grownups-and grown-up readers of J.K. Rowling will enjoy it-but its deep grounding in history gives it gravitas as well as readability.
Get a Life by Nadine Gordimer
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review:
The phrase "late work" is usually reserved for masters, and it is appropriate to this 14th novel from Gordimer, whose cruel meditations on mortality and commitment are enacted within two marriages a generation apart. Paul Bannerman, a 35-year-old activist ecologist who works to prevent development of the South African bush, is diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Following radiation treatment, he stays with his parents, Adrian and Lyndsay; his ad exec wife, Berenice (Benni), and toddler son, Nicholas, visit him, but must avoid contact with Paul while he's radioactive. During Paul's stay, Gordimer sounds the depths of Paul and Benni's connection (shallow but sometimes tender) and replays Adrian and Lyndsay's turbulent (but on the surface, placid) past together. Paul and Benni's professional lives are at odds (she does ads for developers); Adrian chucked a potential career as an archeologist to advance Lyndsay's as a lawyer. When Paul returns home, change comes very rapidly—and dramatically—for everyone. Gordimer's narrator is chilly, remote and omniscient, toying with the characters and taking shots at them at almost every opening, particularly the two career-women: "How girlishly exciting it must have been," says the narrator of Lyndsay's past affair, begun at a conference. Paul's vulnerable, mortal body and everyone's life choices are relentlessly, tauntingly picked over in a manner that is spare and quick to the point of offhandedness. The result is a lacerating novel, one in which conflicted professional and domestic lives are played for all their contradictory possibility. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
For more than 50 years, the groundbreaking fiction of Nobel Prize-winning Gordimer has told the human story of a changing South Africa, from the apartheid era to today. Her latest novel is rooted in her native Johannesburg, and it is that inside view of people across race and class that is most exciting here, even as the story reaches out to universal issues of conservation. Paul Bannerman is an ecologist, passionate about his work with his multiracial wilderness team, but when he develops thyroid cancer, the radiation treatment makes him a radioactive threat. Suddenly, at 35, the white conservationist is the "leper," and he must move into an isolated wing of his parents' home. He recovers, but the metaphor of the untouchable is always there, including the quiet parallel of the family's adoption of a black foundling with AIDS "born not in a manger but in a public toilet." Paul loves his wife, but he realizes that her advertising projects with both foreign and government clients in the "leisure industry" are a looming disaster. The conservation message is strong—tourism's lure of quick jobs for the poor and desperate; the danger of dams, toll roads, nuclear reactors to the wilderness and all living things. Above all, there is the intimate story of the "untouchable" in your home and in yourself. Hazel Rochman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Califia's Daughters by Leigh Richards (Laurie King)
From Booklist
In the not-so-distant future Richards envisions, women warriors guard their peaceful, self-sustaining California enclave, hunting, planting, harvesting, and keeping watch over the men and boys essential to survival after most males perished along with electric power and fossil-fuel-driven engines. When Dian and her pregnant sister, Judith, discover two strange wagons headed their way, they are suspicious and, when they recall a single, armed wagon's devastation on a settlement called the Smithy village only a year ago, frightened. With men, children, and elders safely hidden in a cave, however, the visitors are carefully welcomed in a well-guarded, open area. They hail from southern Oregon, 300 miles away, and bring valuable gifts: Isaac, a grown man, and his small son. They wish to join forces with the Californians to escape the waterborne, irradiated contaminants let loose by an aggressive group led by one Queen Bess. This sets in motion an engaging adventure in which Dian must make a hazardous journey to investigate the northern dangers. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
Set in the near future and inspired by the captivating myth of the warrior queen Califia, this brilliantly inventive novel tells the story of a small, peaceful community of women tucked away in a world gone mad.
Only the elders of the Valley remember life the way it used to be, when people traveled in automobiles and bought food others had grown. When the ratio of male to female was nearly the same. Before the bombs fell, and a deadly virus claimed the world's men.
Now, civilization's few surviving males are guarded by women warriors like Dian, the Valley's chief protector, as fierce and loyal as the guard dogs she trains. When an unexpected convoy of strangers rides into her village, it is Dian who meets them, ready to do battle.
To her surprise, the visitors come in peace and bear a priceless gift, whose arrival is greeted with as much suspicion as delight. And indeed, the strangers want something in return, a request that could change the future of the Valley into one of hope—or utter desolation.
It is up to Dian to discover their motive, in a journey that will cost her far more than she ever imagined, a journey from which she may never return.
Exit to Reality or Proteus and Euclid, a Love Story by Edith Forbes
From Library Journal
In her first foray into science fiction, novelist Forbes (Nowle's Passing, LJ 4/15/96) creates a utopian world in 3000 A.D. in which the population has stabilized, almost everybody is employed, crime has been eradicated, everyone is good-looking, and individuals go through a regular regeneration process that erases their childhood memories. Lydian, an information analyst, encounters unemployed Merle online and agrees to meet him in Paris. When she discovers that he can change his appearance instantly, Lydian suspects that Merle is not human but a virtual-reality construct. Then Merle teaches her the secrets of shape-shifting, and the inquisitive Lydian begins to question their very existence. Forbes explores issues of morality, mortality, sexuality, loneliness, ecology, and bioengineering in this thought-provoking, chilling look at a potential future. Highly recommended for sf collections. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
From Publishers Weekly
Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was "Crake," the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmy's mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net; she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryx's story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake's affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex "pixie" in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. He's procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself "the Snowman," after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. Chesterton once wrote of the "thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species." Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
In America by Susan Sontag
From Publishers Weekly
As she did in The Volcano Lover, Sontag crafts a novel of ideas in which real figures from the past enact their lives against an assiduously researched, almost cinematically vivid background. Here again her signal achievement is to offer fresh and insightful commentary on the social and cultural currents of an age, with a distinctive understanding of how historical events forged character and destiny. If the story of renowned Polish actress Maryna Zalewska cannot compare in drama to that of Admiral Nelson and the Hamiltons (as a protagonist, Maryna remains somewhat shadowy and elusive), Sontag succeeds in conveying how the political and intellectual atmosphere of Poland and the U.S. in the late 19th century affected her heroine's life. Beautiful, famous and restless at 35, Maryna decides to leave her native land, suffering under Russian occupation. She convinces her husband, Count Bogdan Demboski, her would-be lover, journalist Ryszard Kierul, and various other members of the Warsaw intelligentsia to emigrate to America, where, influenced by Fourier's social philosophy, they will establish an experimental farm commune in southern California. Predictably, the community fails to prosper and falls into debt; idealism gives way to disillusionment; Maryna decides to resume her career, achieving immediate acclaim; and the romantic triangle moves to a new stage. Meanwhile, Sontag makes meaningful associations between a woman's need for freedom and independence, a nation's suffering under a conqueror's heel and the common human quest for "newness, emptiness, pastlessness... this dream of turning life into pure future" that colored many immigrants' views of America. She leads readers into the book via a long, breathless, one-paragraph prologue, narrated as if in a fever dream; indeed, it is not until many pages into the novel that the date and the geographical setting are established. Exemplary at imagining an actor's needs, impulses and sources of inspiration, Sontag also conveys the theatrical world of the time (East Lynne was the most popular play; Sarah Bernhardt reigned in Paris) almost palpably. There are few dramatic peaks and valleys in Maryna's story, but the historical backdrop—with pithy and evocative descriptions of American cities at the turn of the last century, cameo portraits of salty frontier types, and snippets of Western lore—supplies the vigor that the main plot often fails to engender. While this book does not exert the passionate energy of The Volcano Lover, it is a provocative study of a woman's life and the historical setting in which she moves. Author tour; U.K. rights to Jonathan Cape. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka
From Publishers Weekly
This heartbreaking, bracingly unsentimental debut describes in poetic detail the travails of a Japanese family living in an internment camp during World War II, raising the specter of wartime injustice in bone-chilling fashion. After a woman whose husband was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy sees notices posted around her neighborhood in Berkeley instructing Japanese residents to evacuate, she moves with her son and daughter to an internment camp, abruptly severing her ties with her community. The next three years are spent in filthy, cramped and impersonal lodgings as the family is shuttled from one camp to another. They return to Berkeley after the war to a home that has been ravaged by vandals; it takes time for them to adjust to life outside the camps and to come to terms with the hostility they face. When the children's father re-enters the book, he is more of a symbol than a character, reduced to a husk by interrogation and abuse. The novel never strays into melodrama-Otsuka describes the family's everyday life in Berkeley and the pitiful objects that define their world in the camp with admirable restraint and modesty. Events are viewed from numerous characters' points of view, and the different perspectives are defined by distinctive, lyrically simple observations. The novel's honesty and matter-of-fact tone in the face of inconceivable injustice are the source of its power. Anger only comes to the fore during the last segment, when the father is allowed to tell his story-but even here, Otsuka keeps rage neatly bound up, luminous beneath the dazzling surface of her novel.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad
From Publishers Weekly
After living for three months with the Kabul bookseller Sultan Khan in the spring of 2002, Norwegian journalist Seierstad penned this astounding portrait of a nation recovering from war, undergoing political flux and mired in misogyny and poverty. As a Westerner, she has the privilege of traveling between the worlds of men and women, and though the book is ostensibly a portrait of Khan, its real strength is the intimacy and brutal honesty with which it portrays the lives of Afghani living under fundamentalist Islam. Seierstad also expertly outlines Sultan's fight to preserve whatever he can of the literary life of the capital during its numerous decades of warfare (he stashed some 10,000 books in attics around town). Seierstad, though only 31, is a veteran war reporter and a skilled observer; as she hides behind her burqa, the men in the Sultan's family become so comfortable with her presence that she accompanies one of Sultan's sons on a religious pilgrimage and witnesses another buy sex from a beggar girl-then offer her to his brother. This is only one of many equally shocking stories Seierstad uncovers. In another, an adulteress is suffocated by her three brothers as ordered by their mother. Seierstad's visceral account is equally seductive and repulsive and resembles the work of Martha Gellhorn. An international bestseller, it will likely stand as one of the best books of reportage of Afghan life after the fall of the Taliban.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–A female journalist from Norway moved in with the Khan family in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. Disguised as she was behind the bulky, shapeless burka and escorted always by a man and even in Western dress, she was somehow anonymous and accepted readily into the bookseller's large extended family. Her account is of the tragedy, contradictions, rivalries, and daily frustrations of a middle-class Afghan family. She accompanied the women as they shopped and dressed for a wedding and was privy to the negotiations for the marriage. She tells of the death by suffocation of a young woman who met her lover in secret, the bored meanderings of a 12-year-old boy forced to work 12-hour days selling candy in a hotel lobby, and of going on a religious pilgrimage with a restless, frustrated teen. All this is recounted with journalistic objectivity in spite of her close ties to the Khans. Events that the author doesn't actually witness or participate in, she recounts from conversations with members of the family, primarily Sultan Khan's sister. There is much irony here–Sultan, who has risked his life to protect and disseminate books with diverse points of view, denies his sons the right to pursue an education and subjects his female relatives to drudgery and humiliation.–Jackie Gropman, Chantilly Regional Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
From Publishers Weekly
National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Hazzard here tells of two sisters, Grace and Caroline Bell. Born in Australia and orphaned at an early age, the two make their way to England. There Grace opts for marriage and its securities; Caroline reaches for more and loves not always wisely but well. "A strong, deep, poetic, vibrant novel," lauded PW.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
The Transit of Venus is considered Shirley Hazzard's most brilliant novel. It tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in post-war England. What happens to these young women--seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal--becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves. Gorgeously written and intricately constructed, Hazzard's novel is a story of place: Sydney, London, New York, Stockholm; of time: from the fifties to the eighties; and above all, of women and men in their passage through the displacements and absurdities of modern life.
"Engrossing, masterly. . . . Combines the satisfaction of a family saga . . . with a highly structured plot reminiscent of Greek tragedy."-- Gail Godwin, The New York Times Book Review
"A wonderfully mysterious book. . . . Both plot and characters are many layered. Unforgettably rich."-- Anne Tyler, The New Republic
"Luminous. . . . Almost without flaw. Aphoristic and iridescent, her language turns paragraphs into events."-- Webster Schott, The Washington Post Book World
"Fall On Your Knees" by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Amazon.com Reviews
A sprawling saga about five generations of a family from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Fall on Your Knees is the impressive first fiction from Canadian playwright and actor Ann-Marie MacDonald. This epic tale of family history, family secrets, and music centers on four sisters and their relationships with each other and with their father. Set in the coal-mining communities of Nova Scotia in the early part of this century, the story also shifts to the battlefields of World War I and the jazz scene of New York City in the 1920s.
The New York Times Book Review, John Motyka
The Canadian actress and playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald writes of several generations of a Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, family in this resonant first novel... Ms. MacDonald skillfully shifts the story backward and forward in time, giving it a mythic quality that allows dark, half-buried secrets to be gracefully and chillingly revealed.