Book Discussion Group
The book discussion group meets once a month. Scheduled discussions are:
Fiction - 2012
January 25, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson [SPL] 2010- Forced to confront the realities of life in the twenty-first century when he falls in love with Pakistani widow, Mrs. Ali, Major Pettigrew finds the relationship challenged by local prejudices that view Mrs. Ali, a Cambridge native, as a perpetual foreigner.
February 22,
Please Look after Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin [SPL] 2011-
Follows the efforts of a family to find the mother who went missing from Seoul Station subway and their sobering realizations when they recall memories that suggest she may not have been happy.
March 28,
The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht [SPL] 2011-
Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the tiger's wife.
April 25,
The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman [SPL] 2010-
Preoccupied by personal challenges while running a struggling English language newspaper in Rome, an "imperfect" crew of reporters and editors, confront mortality, personal tragedy, betrayal, romance problems, and otherwise stumble toward an uncertain future.
May 23,
The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman [SPL] 2009-
Elv, Claire, and Meg are the Story Sisters, and each has a fate she must meet alone - One on a country road, one in the streets of Paris, and one in the corridors of her own imagination. At once a coming-of-age tale, a family saga, and a love story of erotic longing.
June 27,
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford [SPL] 2009-
When artifacts from Japanese families sent to internment camps during World War II are uncovered during renovations at a Seattle hotel, Henry Lee embarks on a quest that leads to memories of growing up Chinese in a city rife with anti-Japanese sentiment.
July 25,
The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond [SPL] 2007-
Photographer Abby Mason's life is changed forever by the disappearance of the young girl with whom she had been walking on a cold and foggy beach, and her desperate search for the truth behind the child's vanishing.
August 22,
Little Bee by Chris Cleave [SPL] 2009-
A haunting novel about the tenuous friendship that blooms between two disparate strangers -- one an illegal Nigerian refugee, the other a recent widow from suburban London.
September 26,
Noah’s Compass by Anne Tyler [SPL] 2009-
A wise, gently humorous, and deeply compassionate novel about a schoolteacher who has been forced to retire at sixty-one and coming to terms with the final phase of his life.
October 24,
The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli [SPL] 2010-
Helen Adams, an American combat photographer during the Vietnam War, captures the wrenching chaos of battle on film and finds herself torn between the love of two men, one an American war correspondent and the other his Vietnamese underling.
November 28, The Girl who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow [SPL] 2010- After a family tragedy orphans her, Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., moves into her grandmother's mostly black community in the 1980s, where she must swallow her grief and confront her identity as a biracial woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white.
- There is no fiction book discussion scheduled in December -
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All meetings are held at 2 o'clock in the Library ground floor meeting room. Anyone may attend these free discussions. Participants are urged to read the book or listen to the recorded version before the meeting.
