Store Club Past Selections

Our Book Club has voted for and discussed the titles below at our monthly meetings over the past few years. If you are interested in joining our Book Club, or hosting your own at our store, please let us know!

	Shanghai Girls Lisa See    At its heart, Shanghai Girls is a story of sisters: Pearl and May are inseparable best friends who share hopes, dreams, and a deep connection, but like sisters everywhere they also harbor petty jealousies and rivalries. They love each other, but each knows exactly where to drive the knife to hurt the other the most. Along the way they face terrible sacrifices, make impossible choices, and confront a devastating, life-changing secret, but through it all the two heroines of this astounding new novel hold fast to who they are–Shanghai girls.
	Sarah's Key Tatiana De Rosnay    Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.         Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.
	The Necklace Cheryl Jarvis    Original, resonant, and beautifully told, this book is an inspiring story about a necklace that became greater than the sum of its links, and about thirteen ordinary women who understood the power of possibility, who touched the lives of a community, and who together created one extraordinary experience.
	The Piano Teacher Janice Y. K. Lee    In the sweeping tradition of The English Patient, Janice Y.K. Lee's debut novel is a tale of love and betrayal set in war-torn Hong Kong. In 1942, Englishman Will Truesdale falls headlong into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But their affair is soon threatened by the invasion of the Japanese as World War II overwhelms their part of the world. Ten years later, Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong to work as a piano teacher and also begins a fateful affair. As the threads of this spellbinding novel intertwine, impossible choices emerge-between love and safety, courage and survival, the present, and above all, the past.
	The Road Home Rose Tremain      Making his way to London through Eastern Europe in the wake of factory closings and his wife's death, Lev finds a job in a posh restaurant and a room in the home of an Irishman who has also lost his family, a situation that is colored by his affair with a younger co-worker and his phone conversations with a friend back home.
	The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Stieg Larsson    Forty years after the disappearance of Harriet Vanger from the secluded island owned and inhabited by her powerful family, her uncle, convinced that she had been murdered by someone from her own deeply dysfunctional clan, hires journalist Mikael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander, an unconventional young hacker, to investigate.
	Factory Girls Leslie T. Chang    Chronicles the everyday world of female Chinese migrant workers who have left their homes in rural towns to find jobs in China's cities, as revealed through a two-year study of the lives of two young women, and assesses the significance and influence of this movement. A New York Times Notable Book.
	Olive Kitteridge Elizabeth Strout    The world of Olive Kitteridge, a retired school teacher in a small coastal town in Maine, is revealed in stories that explore her diverse roles in many lives, including a lounge singer haunted by a past love, her stoic husband, and her own resentful son.    At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.
	The Secret Scripture Sebastian Barry        An epic story of family, love, and unavoidable tragedy from the two-time Man Booker Prize finalist. Sebastian Barry's novels have been hugely admired by readers and critics, and in 2005 his novel A Long Long Way was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In The Secret Scripture, Barry revisits County Sligo, Ireland, the setting for his previous three books, to tell the unforgettable story of Roseanne McNulty. Once one of the most beguiling women in Sligo, she is now a resident of Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital and nearing her hundredth year. Set against an Ireland besieged by conflict, The Secret Scripture is an engrossing tale of one woman's life, and a vivid reminder of the stranglehold that the Catholic church had on individuals throughout much of the twentieth century.
	The White Tiger Sebastian Barry     Introducing a major literary talent, The White Tiger offers a story of coruscating wit, blistering suspense, and questionable morality, told by the most volatile, captivating, and utterly inimitable narrator that this millennium has yet seen.       Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells us the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life -- having nothing but his own wits to help him along.
	Leap of Faith Queen Noor     In an eloquent and candid memoir, the Queen of Jordan describes her youth in a privileged Arab-American family, her Princeton education, and her marriage to King Hussein of Jordan, providing an intimate portrait of the late monarch and his quest for peace in the Middle East, their private life together, her work as a queen and activist, and the message of Islam in the wake of September 11. Reader's Guide included.         Sharing a personal perspective on the past three decades of world history, Queen Noor talks frankly of the many challenges of her life as wife and partner to the monarch, providing both an intimate portrait of the late King Hussein and a moving account of their public role.The Queen of Jordan describes her youth in a privileged Arab American family, her Princeton education, and her marriage to King Hussein of Jordan, providing a portrait of their private life together and her work as a queen and activist.
	American Wife Curtis Sittenfeld   A kind, bookish only child born in the 1940s, Alice Lindgren has no idea that she will one day end up in the White House, married to the president. In her small Wisconsin hometown, she learns the virtues of politeness, but a tragic accident when she is seventeen shatters her identity and changes the trajectory of her life. More than a decade later, when the charismatic son of a powerful Republican family sweeps her off her feet, she is surprised to find herself admitted into a world of privilege. And when her husband unexpectedly becomes governor and then president, she discovers that she is married to a man she both loves and fundamentally disagrees with–and that her private beliefs increasingly run against her public persona. As her husband’s presidency enters its second term, Alice must confront contradictions years in the making and face questions nearly impossible to answer.
	People of the Book Geraldine Brooks    Offered a coveted job to analyze and conserve a priceless Sarajevo Haggadah, Australian rare-book expert Hanna Heath discovers a series of tiny artifacts in the volume's ancient binding that reveal its historically significant origins. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March. Reprint. Penguin Putnam:  The moving novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks follows a rare manuscript through centuries of exile and war
	The Book Thief Marcus Zusak    Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau.
	Revolutionary Road Richard Yates    In the hopeful 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be a model couple: bright, beautiful, talented, with two young children and a starter home in the suburbs. Perhaps they married too young and started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job is dull. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is about to crumble.
	The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court   Jeffrey Toobin    In The Nine, acclaimed journalist Jeffrey Toobin takes us into the chambers of the most important—and secret—legal body in our country, the Supreme Court, revealing the complex dynamic among the nine people who decide the law of the land. An institution at a moment of transition, the Court now stands at a crucial point, with major changes in store on such issues as abortion, civil rights, and church-state relations. Based on exclusive interviews with the justices and with a keen sense of the Court’s history and the trajectory of its future, Jeffrey Toobin creates in The Nine a riveting story of one of the most important forces in American life today
	The Zookeeper's Wife Diane Ackerman    Documents the true story of Warsaw Zoo keepers and resistance activists Jan and Antonina Zabinski, who in the aftermath of Germany's invasion of Poland saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish citizens by smuggling them into empty cages and their home villa.
	The Last Chinese Chef Nicole Mones    Struggling to recover in the wake of her husband's premature death and stunned by a paternity suit against her husband's estate, food writer Maggie McElroy plans a trip to China to investigate the claim and to profile rising chef Sam Liang, who introduces her to the Chinese concept of food, while drawing her into his extended family and helping her come to terms with her life.
	Pocketful of Names Joe Coomer    Comfortable with her life as a dedicated and solitary artist living on an island off the coast of Maine, Hannah is increasingly disturbed by and forced to adjust to a series of unexpected and uninvited visitors, including an abandoned dog, a teenager running from an abusive father, a half-sister in trouble, a needy mainland family, and a trapped whale.
	Out Stealing Horses Per Petterson    After a meeting with his only neighbor, sixty-seven-year-old Trond is forced to reflect upon a long-ago incident that marks the beginning of a series of losses for Trond and his childhood friend, Jon.
	Loving Frank Nancy Horan    Fact and fiction blend in a historical novel that chronicles the relationship between seminal architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, from their meeting in Oak Park, Illinois, when they were each married to another, to the clandestine affair that shocked Chicago society.
	Free Food for Millionaires Min Jin Lee      Having become thoroughly indoctrinated in the ways of American life through her Princeton education, Casey Han struggles between the expensive lifestyle she enjoys and the traditional culture to which her Korean immigrant parents desperately cling.
	Still Alice Lisa Genova    With grace and compassion, Lisa Genova writes about the enormous white emptiness created by Alzheimer's in the mind of the still-too-young and active Alice. A kind of ominous suspense attends her gathering forgetfullness, and Genova puts us, sympathetically, right inside her plight. Somehow, too, she portrays the family's response as a loving one, and hints at the other hopeful, helpful response that science will eventually provide."
	Miss Alcott's E-mail Kit Bakke    Shouldn't life be more than simply showing up? Is it enough to be part of a family, make another family, earn your living, and then exit stage left? Or should you engage and be engaged in a bit of purposeful shaking and shoving along the way? These are questions that Kit Bakke urgently needs answered. Tired of self-proclaimed gurus and self-help books, she turns to her childhood role model -- Louisa May Alcott -- for direction. She sends an e-mail to Louisa, and is amazed when she receives a reply. Their correspondence becomes a dance of ideas and tales bridging the mid-1800s and the twenty-first century. But why Louisa? "Her abolitionist zeal, her women's rights advocacy, her hospital work, her crazy commune days, her heartfelt desire to leave the world a better place, her humor and her energy all materialized in front of me," writes Bakke. "Louisa was serious when she signed her letters, 'Yours for reforms of all kinds.' She made her life, she didn't just live it."
	Nineteen Minutes Jodi Picoult    Jodi Picoult, bestselling author of "My Sister's Keeper" and "The Tenth Circle," pens her most riveting book yet, with a startling and poignant story about the devastating aftermath of a small-town tragedy.    Sterling is an ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens--until the day its complacency is shattered by an act of violence. Josie Cormier, the daughter of the judge sitting on the case, should be the state's best witness, but she can't remember what happened before her very own eyes--or can she? As the trial progresses, fault lines between the high school and the adult community begin to show--destroying the closest of friendships and families. "Nineteen Minutes" asks what it means to be different in our society, who has the right to judge someone else, and whether anyone is ever really who they seem to be.
	The Space Between Us Thrity Umrigar    A new novel by the author of Bombay Time vividly captures the delicate balance of class and gender in contemporary India as witnessed through the lives of two compelling women--Sera Dubash, an upper middle-class parsi housewife, and Bhima, an illiterate domestic hardened by a life of loss and despair.
	What is the What Dave Eggers    What Is the What is the epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children--the so-called Lost Boys--was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. When he finally is resettled in the United States, he finds a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges. Moving, suspenseful, and unexpectedly funny, What Is the What is an astonishing novel that illuminates the lives of millions through one extraordinary man.
	The In-Between World of Vikram Lall M.S. Vissanji    Vikram Lall comes of age in 1950s Kenya, at the same time that the colony is struggling towards independence. Against the unsettling backdrop of Mau Mau violence, Vic and his sister Deepa, the grandchildren of an Indian railroad worker, search for their place in a world sharply divided between Kenyans and the British. We follow Vic from a changing Africa in the fifties, to the hope of the sixties, and through the corruption and fear of the seventies and eighties. Hauntingly told in the voice of the now exiled Vic, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is an acute and bittersweet novel of identity and family, of lost love and abiding friendship, and of the insidious legacy of the British Empire.
	Suite Francaise Irene Nemirovsky    Beginning in Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation in 1940. Suite Française tells the remarkable story of men and women thrown together in circumstances beyond their control. As Parisians flee the city, human folly surfaces in every imaginable way: a wealthy mother searches for sweets in a town without food; a couple is terrified at the thought of losing their jobs, even as their world begins to fall apart. Moving on to a provincial village now occupied by German soldiers, the locals must learn to coexist with the enemy—in their town, their homes, even in their hearts.
	Water for Elephants Sara Gruen    As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It was there that he met Marlena, the beautiful equestrian star married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. And he met Rosie, an untrainable elephant who was the great gray hope for this third-rate traveling show. The bond that grew among this unlikely trio was one of love and trust, and, ultimately, it was their only hope for survival.
	Angle of Repose Wallace Stegner    The classic Pulizer Prize-winning novel traces the lives and fortunes of four generations of one family as they attempt to build a life for themselves in the American West.
	The Omnivore's Dilemma Michael Pollan    An ecological and anthropological study of eating offers insight into food consumption in the twenty-first century, explaining how an abundance of unlimited food varieties reveals the responsibilities of everyday consumers to protect their health and the environment. By the author of The Botany of Desire.
	Middlesex Jeffrey Eugenides    Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparents' desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s.
	The Lost Painting Jonathan Harr    The author of A Civil Action offers a compelling account of the search for a long-lost masterpiece by Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Caravaggio, one his era's most colorful and turbulent figures, following a young graduate student across hundreds of years and four countries to uncover the mystery of "The Taking of Christ."
	The Book of Dead Birds Gayle Brandeis    Having accidentally killed her mother's birds throughout her childhood, Ava Sing Lo volunteers to help rescue poisoned birds, while Helen, Ava's mother, remembers the time she was forced into prostitution on a segregated American army base.
	The Worst Hard Time Timothy Egan    The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist brings together an oral history of the American Dust Bowl that devastated the Great Plains during the Great Depression, following several families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region and their desperate struggle to persevere despite the devastation.
	Team of Rivals Doris Kearns Goodwin    An analysis of Abraham Lincoln's political talents identifies the character strengths and abilities that enabled his successful election above three accomplished candidates, in an account that also describes how he used the same abilities to rally former opponents in forming his cabinet and winning the Civil War. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of No Ordinary Time.
	Snow Flower and the Secret Fan Lisa See    An evocative story of friendship set against the backdrop of a nineteenth-century China in which women suffered from foot binding, isolation, and illiteracy follows an elderly woman and her companion as they communicate their hopes, dreams, joys, and tragedies through a unique secret language.
	On Beauty Zadie Smith    Struggling with a stale marriage and the misguided passions of his three adult children, long-suffering art professor Howard Belsey finds his family life thrown into turmoil by his son's engagement to the socially prominent daughter of a right-wing icon. By the author of White Teeth.
	Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro    A reunion with two childhood friends--Ruth and Tommy--draws Kath and her companions on a nostalgic odyssey into the supposedly idyllic years of their lives at Hailsham, an isolated private school in the serene English countryside, and a dramatic confrontation with the truth about their childhoods and about their lives in the present. Reader's Guide available.
	Sister Carrie Theodore Dreiser    Young Caroline Meeber leaves home for the first time and experiences work, love, and the pleasures and responsibilities of independence in late nineteenth-century Chicago and New York, where she becomes the mistress of a married man in return for material wealth.
	March Geraldine Brooks    In a story inspired by the father character in Little Women and drawn from the journals and letters of Louisa May Alcott's father Bronson, a man leaves behind his family to serve in the Civil War and finds his marriage and beliefs profoundly challenged by his experiences.
	The Orientalist Tom Reiss    Describes the complex and fascinating life of Jewish writer Lev Nussimbaum, detailing his birth into a wealthy Jewish family, his flight from the Russian Revolution, his transformation into a Muslim prince, his rise to success as a best-selling author in Nazi German, and his premature death.
	Anil's Ghost Michael Ondaatje    Anil’s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past–a story propelled by a riveting mystery. Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka’s landscape and ancient civilization, Anil’s Ghost is a literary spellbinder–Michael Ondaatje’s most powerful novel yet.
	The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo Paula Huntley    The author recounts her experiences as an English teacher for Kosovo Albanians and how her students formed a book club that brought them together and helped them work through their painful war experiences. A moving testimony to the power of literature to bring people together in even the most difficult of circumstances.
	The Glass Castle Jeannette Walls    Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an "excitement addict." Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.
	Prodigal Summer Barbara Kingsolver    Barbara Kingsolver's fifth novel is a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself. It weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives amid the mountains and farms of southern Appalachia. Over the course of one humid summer, this novel's intriguing protagonists face disparate predicaments but find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place.
	Under the Banner of Heaven Jon Krakauer    Jon Krakauer’s literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. He now shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders, taking readers inside isolated American communities where some 40,000 Mormon Fundamentalists still practice polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer only to God.
	Snow Orhan Pamuk    Dread, yearning, identity, intrigue, the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism-these are the elements that Orhan Pamuk anneals in this masterful, disquieting novel. An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head-scarves. But Ka is also drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now recently divorced.
	Broken for You Stephanie Kallos    Margaret Hughes, a septuagenarian living in Seattle, takes in a series of boarders who help her cope with her illness, and whose lives become unexpectedly connected to each other.    Two very different women, each with her own dark secrets--wealthy, reclusive septuagenarian Margaret Hughes, living alone with her vast collection of priceless antiques, and Wanda Schultz, a brokenhearted young woman in search of her wayward boyfriend--find new meaning and redemption in their growing friendship with each other. A first novel. Reader's Guide included.