Book Club in a Bag

1984
by George Orwell

"Orwell's strict attention to detail and realistic description of a world thirty-five years ahead of his own add validity to 1984, and make its larger conclusions all the more frightening. Even today, the novel remains a bleak and shadowy forewarning of what might someday occur." (from the reader's guide at Reading Group Guides)

Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie

Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.

Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man
by Steve Harvey

From the host of the popular Steve Harvey Morning Show comes a guide for all women that takes them inside the heads of men and shows how men think about love, sex, and commitment.

The Alchemist
by Paulo Coelho

"The charming tale of Santiago, a shepherd boy, who dreams of seeing the world . . . journeys from Spain to Morocco in search of worldly success, and eventually to Egypt, where a fateful encounter with an alchemist brings him at last to self-understanding and spiritual enlightenment." (from Publisher's Weekly)

All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy

"...the story of John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of west Texas ranchers. Upon his grandfather's death and his parents' divorce, the sixteen-year-old Cole finds himself landless, penniless, and possessed of skills that mean nothing... With his friend Lacey Rawlins, John Grady sets off for Mexico. They have no idea what they will find there..." (from the reader's guide at Random House)

Anansi Boys
by Neil Gaiman

"Fat Charlie Nancy is not having a good week... Because, you see, Charlie has discovered that his dad wasn't just any dad. He was Anansi the trickster spider-god. Anansi is the spirit of rebellion, able to overturn the social order, create wealth out of thin air, and even baffle the devil. No wonder Fat Charlie's life is about to be turned upside down." (from the reading guide at Reading Circle)

Annie's Ghosts
by Steve Luxenberg

Exploring the nature of self-deception and self-preservation, a son seeks to uncover the family secret of his dead mother's sister. Part of the 2013 Great Michigan Read.

The Art of Racing in the Rain
by Garth Stein

"A heart-wrenching but deeply funny and ultimately uplifting story of family, love, loyalty and hope, The Art of Racing in the Rain is a beautifully crafted and captivating look at the wonders and absurdities of human life . . . as only a dog could tell it." (from the reading guide at HarperCollins)

Atonement
by Ian McEwan

"Briony Tallis, a precocious 13-year-old with an overactive imagination, witnesses an incident between Cecilia, her older sister, and Robbie Turner, son of the Tallis family's charwoman . . . Moving deftly between styles, this is a compelling exploration of guilt and the struggle for forgiveness. (from Library Journal)

Beekeeper's Apprentice
by Laurie King

"When Mary Russell meets famous detective Sherlock Holmes, she discovers that he is also a beekeeper. Soon she finds herself on the trail of kidnappers and discovers a plot to kill both Holmes and herself." (from Novelist)

Behind the Beautiful Forevers
by Katherine Boo

"A Mumbai slum offers rare insight into the lives and socioeconomic and political realities for some of the disadvantaged riding the coattails (or not) of India’s economic miracle in this deeply researched and brilliantly written account by New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Boo. Divided into four parts, the narrative brings vividly to the page life as it is led today in Annawadi, a squalid and overcrowded migrant settlement of some 3,000 people squatting since 1991 on a half-acre of land owned by the Sahar International Airport..."(from Publisher's Weekly)

Bel Canto
by Ann Patchett

"In the vice president's mansion in an unnamed South American country, a lavish party is taking place... An American opera singer is entertaining... dignitaries and high-ranking officials from around the world, when suddenly... terrorists invade the mansion and set in motion a series of events that irrevocably alters the life of every person involved." (from the reading guide at HarperCollins)

The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison

"Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different." (from Novelist)

Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley

"...a horrifying, but often comic, vision of a future Utopia in which humans are processed, conditioned, regimented, and drugged into total social conformity..." (from the reading guide at Reading Group Guides)
 

The Cartel
by Ashley & Jaquavis

"When Carter Diamon, the leader of The Cartel, which controls eighty percent of the cocaine industry, dies, his illegitimate son, Carter Jones, takes his place and starts sleeping with the enemy--Miamor, the leader of The Murder Mamas, who wants to take down The Cartel." (from Novelist)

Cold Sassy Tree
by Olive Ann Burns

"On July 5, 1906, Rucker Blakeslee announces that he intends to marry Miss Love Simpson, a hat-maker at his store who is years younger than he. This news shocks his family, since his wife Mattie Lou died only three weeks earlier..." (from the Sparknotes, which include study questions)

Confessions of a Pagan Nun
by Kate Horsley

(Note: This kit does not include discussion questions.)

"Cloistered in a stone cell at the monastery of Saint Brigit, a sixth-century Irish nun secretly records the memories of her Pagan youth, interrupting her assigned task of transcribing Augustine and Patrick... But disturbing events at the cloister keep intervening..." (from the publisher's comments)

Cry, the Beloved Country
by Alan Paton

"The most famous and important novel in South Africa's history, and an immediate worldwide bestseller when it was published in 1948, Alan Paton's impassioned novel about a black man's country under white man's law is a work of searing beauty... the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son, Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. Remarkable for its lyricism, unforgettable for character and incident..." (from the reading guide at Simon and Schuster)

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon

"Christopher John Francis Boone... is autistic... Routine, order, and predictability shelter him from the messy wider world. Then, at fifteen, Christopher's carefully constructed world falls apart when he finds his neighbor's dog, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork..." (from the reader's guide at Vintage)

Daughter of Fortune
by Isabel Allende

"...Eliza is a stranger in California. Cloaking her identity - and her sex - she must carve out a new life for herself by whatever means possible. Like thousands of other newcomers... she is thrust into a melting pot of unfamiliar languages and customs. But Eliza and Tao Chi'en quickly learn the value of assimilation, gradually discarding their own suspicions and prejudices..." (from the reader's guide at HarperCollins)

The Deep End of the Ocean
by Jacquelyn Mitchard

"The Deep End of the Ocean is a story about every parent's worst nightmare: the loss of a child. It is a story that is all too familiar to many of us, made frighteningly routine by the young faces emblazoned on milk cartons or steeped in pathos by Hollywood scriptwriters. In Jacquelyn Mitchard's deft hands, however, the story of the Cappadora family is neither routine nor cliched. It is chillingly and beautifully real." (from the reading guide at Penguin Group USA.)

Defending Jacob
by William Landay

“… When Ben Rifkin, Jacob’s classmate, is found stabbed to death in the woods, Internet accusations and incontrovertible evidence point to big, handsome Jacob. Andy’s prosecutorial gut insists a child molester is the real killer, but as Jacob’s trial proceeds and Andy’s marriage crumbles under the forced revelation of old secrets, horror builds on horror toward a breathtakingly brutal outcome. “ (from the Publisher’s Weekly)

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
by Cory Doctorow

"Jules, a relative youngster at more than a century old, is a contented citizen of the Bitchun Society that has filled Earth and near-space since shortage and death were overcome. People are free to do whatever they wish, since the only wealth is respect and since constant internal interface lets all monitor exactly how successful they are at being liked. What Jules wants to do is move to Disney World, join the ad-hoc crew that runs the park and fine-tune the Haunted Mansion ride to make it even more wonderful." (from Publisher's Weekly)

Eat Pray Love
by Elizabeth Gilbert

"At the age of thirty-one, Gilbert moved with her husband to the suburbs of New York and began trying to get pregnant, only to realize that she wanted neither a child nor a husband. Three years later, after a protracted divorce, she embarked on a yearlong trip of recovery, with three main stops: Rome, for pleasure (mostly gustatory, with a special emphasis on gelato); an ashram outside of Mumbai, for spiritual searching; and Bali, for 'balancing.'" (from The New Yorker)

A Game of Thrones (Song of Ice & Fire, Bk.1)
by George R.R. Martin

“As Warden of the north, Lord Eddard Stark counts it a curse when King Robert bestows on him the office of the Hand. His honor weighs him down at court where a true man does what he will, not what he must … and a dead enemy is a thing of beauty. The old gods have no power in the south, Stark’s family is split and there is treachery at court. Worse, the vengeance-mad heir of the deposed Dragon King has grown to maturity in exile in the Free Cities. He claims the Iron Throne.” (Goodreads.com)

Glass Castle
by Jeannette Walls

"Walls remembers the poverty, hunger, jokes, and bullying she and her siblings endured, and she looks back at her parents: her flighty, self-indulgent mother, a Pollyanna unwilling to assume the responsibilities of parenting, and her father, troubled, brilliant Rex, whose ability to turn his family's downward-spiraling circumstances into adventures allowed his children to excuse his imperfections until they grew old enough to understand what he had done to them--and to himself." (from Booklist)

The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt

“It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.” (Goodreads.com)

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

"The letters comprising this small charming novel begin in 1946, when single, 30-something author Juliet Ashton writes to her publisher to say she is tired of covering the sunny side of war and its aftermath. When Guernsey farmer Dawsey Adams finds Juliet's name in a used book and invites articulate—and not-so-articulate—neighbors to write Juliet with their stories, the book's epistolary circle widens, putting Juliet back in the path of war stories." (from Publisher's Weekly)

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers

"At the novel's center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who is left alone after his friend and roommate, Antonapoulos, is sent away to an asylum. Singer moves into a boarding house and begins taking his meals at the local diner, and in this new setting he becomes the confidant of several social outcasts and misfits..." (from the reading guide at Houghton Mifflin)

The Help
by Kathryn Stockett

"Eugenia Skeeter Phelan is just home from college in 1962, and, anxious to become a writer, is advised to hone her chops by writing about what disturbs you. The budding social activist begins to collect the stories of the black women on whom the country club sets relies and mistrusts enlisting the help of Aibileen, a maid who's raised 17 children, and Aibileen's best friend Minny, who's found herself unemployed more than a few times after mouthing off to her white employers." (from Publisher's Weekly)

The Hound of the Baskervilles
by Arthur Conan Doyle

“[Sherlock] Holmes and Watson are faced with their most terrifying case yet. The legend of the devil-beast that haunts the moors around the Baskerville families home warns the descendants of that ancient clan never to venture out in those dark hours when the power of evil is exalted. Now, the most recent Baskerville, Sir Charles, is dead and the footprints of a giant hound have been found near his body. Will the new heir meet the same fate?” (Goodreads.com)

House Girl
by Tara Conklin

“Weaving together the story of an escaped slave in the pre–Civil War South and a determined junior lawyer, The House Girl follows Lina Sparrow as she looks for an appropriate lead plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking compensation for families of slaves. In her research, she learns about Lu Anne Bell, a renowned prewar artist whose famous works might have actually been painted by her slave, Josephine.” (Amazon.com)

Hunger Games
by Suzanne Collins

"When her beloved younger sister Prim is chosen as one of the “tributes,” Katniss volunteers to go in her sister’s place. Her fellow tribute from District 12 is Peeta, a boy with whom she soon develops a complicated relationship. After traveling to the Capital and undergoing elaborate training and preparation, Katniss and Peeta are launched into the game. In the terrifying events that follow, Katniss must marshal all her skills to stay alive and all her emotions to remain a caring human being in the face of the stark brutality of the Games." (from the reader's guide at Reading Group Guides)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot

"Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old black mother of five in Baltimore when she died of cervical cancer in 1951. Without her knowledge, doctors treating her at Johns Hopkins took tissue samples from her cervix for research. They spawned the first viable, indeed miraculously productive, cell line—known as HeLa. These cells have aided in medical discoveries from the polio vaccine to AIDS treatments. What Skloot so poignantly portrays is the devastating impact Henrietta’s death and the eventual importance of her cells had on her husband and children… " (from Publishers Weekly)

In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
by Truman Capote

"Herbert Clutter inspects his ranch on the morning of November 14, 1959. That same morning, on the other side of Kansas, Perry Smith meets up with Dick Hickock. While the Clutters go about their daily business, running errands and baking cherry pies, Hickock and Smith are tuning their car. After a long drive, they pull up to the Clutter home with a shotgun and knife in hand..." (from the Sparknotes, which include study questions)

Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai

"This stunning is set in mid-1980s India, on the cusp of the Nepalese movement for an independent state. Jemubhai Popatlal, a retired Cambridge-educated judge, lives in Kalimpong, at the foot of the Himalayas, with his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and his cook. The makeshift family's neighbors include a coterie of Anglophiles who might be savvy readers of V.S. Naipaul but who are, perhaps, less aware of how fragile their own social standing is—at least until a surge of unrest disturbs the region." (from Publisher's Weekly)

Into the Wild by John Krakauer

"After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive . . . (from Publisher's Weekly)

The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini

"...Amir... places the fate of his relationship with his father on the outcome of a kite running tournament... Yet just as he begins to feel that all will be right in the world, a tragedy... marks a turning point in Amir's life - one whose memory he seeks to bury by moving to America." (from the reading guide at Penguin Books)

The Last Juror
by John Grisham

"The killer belongs to an infamous clan... who live on impregnable Padgitt Island. Willie splashes the murder all over the Times, making him both an instant success and a marked man... Willie finds, to his consternation, that in Mississippi life doesn't necessarily mean life, so in nine years Danny is back out - and jurors begin to die..." (from Publishers Weekly)

The Last of the Mohicans
by James Fenimore Cooper

"During this war, the French often allied themselves with Native American tribes in order to gain an advantage over the English, with unpredictable and often tragic results..." (from the introduction at SparkNotes)

A Lesson Before Dying
by Ernest J. Gaines

"In a story so simple that it might be a lost parable from the Gospels, Gaines has compressed the entire bitter history of black people in the South -- and, by extension, in America as a whole... Gaines's novel transcends its minutely evoked circumstances to address the basic predicament of what it is to be a human being..." (from the reader's guide at Vintage)

Life of Pi
by Yann Martel

"God, survival, and tiger behavior. It's hard to imagine a more invigorating combination of discussion topics. We hope that the following questions will enrich your reading of Pi's fantastic journey. After all, Pi didn't have to make his voyage alone; neither should you..." (from the reader's guide at Harcourt)

Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's
by John Elder Robison

"Robison's thoughtful and thoroughly memorable account of living with Asperger's syndrome is fully detailed in this moving memoir, beginning with his painful childhood, his abusive alcoholic father and his mentally disturbed mother. Robison describes how from nursery school on he could not communicate effectively with others, something his brain is not wired to do, since kids with Asperger's don't recognize common social cues and body language or facial expressions." (from Publisher's Weekly)

Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"While delivering a message to her father, Florentino Ariza spots the barely pubescent Fermina Daza and immediately falls in love. What follows is the story of a passion that extends over 50 years, as Fermina is courted solely by letter, decisively rejects her suitor when he first speaks, and then joins the urbane Dr. Juvenal Urbino, much above her station, in a marriage initially loveless but ultimately remarkable in its strength. Florentino remains faithful in his fashion; paralleling the tale of the marriage is that of his numerous liaisons, all ultimately without the depth of love he again declares at Urbino's death." (from Library Journal)

Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold

"On her way home from school on a snowy December day in 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon ("like the fish") is lured into a makeshift underground den in a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer--the man she knew as her neighbor, Mr. Harvey. Susie struggles to accept her death while still clinging to the lost world of the living, following her family's dramas over the years." (from Amazon.com)

Loving Frank
by 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, when they were each married to another, to the clandestine affair that shocked Chicago society." (from Novelist)

Mama Black Widow
by Iceberg Slim

"Otis Tilson's family moves from the rural South to the urban promised land of Chicago only to find more racism, abysmal slums and demeaning, low-paying jobs. Unable to provide for his family, Otis's father declines into alcoholism while the family founders, with Otis's doomed sisters and brother drifting into prostitution and petty crime. " (from Publisher's Weekly)

The Memory Keeper's Daughter
by Kim Edwards

"In a tale spanning twenty-five years, a doctor delivers his newborn twins during a snowstorm and, rashly deciding to protect his wife from their baby daughter's affliction with Down Syndrome, turns her over to a nurse, who secretly raises the child. His deception becomes the defining moment of the main characters' lives, and their daughter's absence corrodes her birth family's core over the course of the next 25 years. (from Novelist)

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
by John Berendt

"the book's extremely graceful prose depictions of some of Savannah, Georgia's most colorful eccentrics--remarkable characters who could have once prospered in a William Faulkner novel or Eudora Welty short story--were certainly a critical factor in its tremendous success." (from Amazon.com)

The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri

"From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri's critically acclaimed first novel is a finely wrought, deeply moving family drama that illuminates her signature themes: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the tangled ties between generations." (from the reader's guide at Houghton Mifflin)

The Nick Adams Stories
by Ernest Hemingway

"The famous "Nick Adams" stories show a memorable character growing from child to adolescent soldier, veteran, writer and parent--a sequence closely paralleling the events of Hemingway's life." (from the product description)

Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting by in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich

"Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages, and one day Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 to $7 an hour?..." (from the reading guide at Henry Holt)

Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout

"Thirteen linked tales present a heart-wrenching, penetrating portrait of ordinary coastal Mainers living lives of quiet grief intermingled with flashes of human connection. The opening Pharmacy focuses on terse, dry junior high-school teacher Olive Kitteridge and her gregarious pharmacist husband, Henry, both of whom have survived the loss of a psychologically damaged parent, and both of whom suffer painful attractions to co-workers. Their son, Christopher, takes center stage in A Little Burst, which describes his wedding in humorous, somewhat disturbing detail, and in Security, where Olive, in her 70s, visits Christopher and his family in New York." (from Publisher's Weekly)

Orphan Train
by Christina Baker Kline

“Seventeen-year-old Penobscot Indian Molly Ayer has spent most of her life in foster care. When she’s caught stealing a copy of Jane Eyre from the library, in an effort to keep the peace with her stressed foster parents, she ends up cleaning out elderly Vivian Daly’s attic. Molly learns that Vivian was herself an orphan, an Irish immigrant in New York who was put on the Orphan Train in the late 1920s and tossed from home to home in Minnesota.” (from Publisher's Weekly)

The Other Boleyn Girl
by Philippa Gregory

"When Mary Boleyn comes to court... she catches the eye of Henry VIII... However, she soon realizes just how much she is a pawn... as the king's interest begins to wane and she is forced to step aside for her best friend and rival: her sister, Anne. Then Mary knows that she must defy her family and her king..." (from the reading guide at Reading Group Guides)

The Paris Wife
by Paula McLain

"A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley..." (from the reading guide at Reading Group Guides)

A Patchwork Planet
by Anne Tyler

"Barnaby Gaitlin is a loser - just short of thirty he's the black sheep of a philanthropic Baltimore family... He has an almost pathological curiosity about other people's lives, which has got him into serious trouble in the past, and a hopeless charm which attracts the kind of angelic woman who wants to save him from himself." (from the reading guide at Random House UK | also check out the slightly longer reader's circle guide.)

The Pilot's Wife
by Anita Shreve

"Fighting the impulse to protect herself and her daughter from the details of the crash and the mystery surrounding it, Kathryn sets out to learn who her husband really was - whatever that knowledge may cost. The search will lead her to shocking revelations, testing both the truth of her marriage and the limits of her ability to face it." (from the reading guide at Hatchette Books.)

The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth

"In a novel of alternative history, aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, negotiating an accord with Adolf Hitler and accepting his conquest of Europe and anti-Semitic policies." (Novelist)

The Purpose Driven Life
by Rick Warren

"The most basic question everyone faces in life is Why am I here? What is my purpose? Self-help books suggest that people should look within, at their own desires and dreams, but Rick Warren says the starting place must be with God and his eternal purposes for each life." (from the book description at purposedrivenlife.com; also look at the reader's guide.)

Push
by Sapphire

"Push recounts a young black street-girl's horrendous and redemptive journey through a Harlem inferno. For Precious Jones, 16 and pregnant with her father's child, miraculous hope appears and the world begins to open up for her when a courageous, determined teacher bullies, cajoles, and inspires her to learn to read, to define her own feelings and set them down in a diary." (from Product Description)

Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
by Azar Nafisi

"Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher... secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran... the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils..." (from the reading guide at Random House.)

The Red Badge of Courage
by Stephen Crane

"The Red Badge of Courage is the story of Henry Fleming, a teenager who enlists with the Union Army in the hopes of fulfilling his dreams of glory. Shortly after enlisting, the reality of his decision sets in... Henry’s transformation from a fearful, lost, doubting youth, to a courageous, confident, duty-bound soldier is the essence of the novel." (from the synopsis at CliffsNotes)

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy

"In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity." (from Novelist)

Robopocalypse
by Daniel H. Wilson

"Not far into our future, the dazzling technology that runs our world turns against us. Controlled by a childlike—yet massively powerful—artificial intelligence known as Archos, the global network of machines on which our world has grown dependent suddenly becomes an implacable, deadly foe. At Zero Hour—the moment the robots attack—the human race is almost annihilated, but as its scattered remnants regroup, humanity for the first time unites in a determined effort to fight back." (from Amazon.com)

Room
by Emma Donoghue

“Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough...not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.” (Goodreads.com)

The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne

"A stark and allegorical tale of adultery, guilt, and social repression in Puritan New England, The Scarlet Letter is a foundational work of American literature... As Kathryn Harrison points out in her Introduction, Hester is 'the herald of the modern American heroine, a mother of such strength and stature that she towers over her progeny much as she does the citizens of Salem.'" (from the reading guide at Random House.)

Seabiscuit: An American Legend
by Laura Hillenbrand

"Hillenbrand combines a horse's biography with a social history of 1930s and 1940s America and incisive portraits of the team around Seabiscuit, the thoroughbred champion. Charlie Howard, a car dealer, bought the crooked-legged, scruffy little horse; Tom Smith, a man who rarely spoke to people but who communicated perfectly with horses, became its trainer; and Red Pollard, a half-blind jockey, rode Seabiscuit to fame." (from Library Journal)

The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kidd

"Set in the American South in 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act and intensifying racial unrest, Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees is a powerful story of coming-of-age, of the ability of love to transform our lives, and the often unacknowledged longing for the universal feminine divine. Addressing the wounds of loss, betrayal, and the scarcity of love, Kidd demonstrates the power of women coming together to heal those wounds, to mother each other and themselves, and to create a sanctuary of true family and home." (from the reader's guide at Penguin Group USA)

The Shack
by William P. Young

"Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare." (from the Product Description)

The Song of the Lark
by Willa Cather

"...traces the development of a female artist supported by a series of male characters willing to serve her career. Inspired by Willa Cather's own development as a novelist and by the career of an opera diva, The Song of the Lark examines the themes of the artist's relationship with family and society, themes that would dominate all of Cather's best fiction." (from the reading guide at Penguin Books.)

Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel

“An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.” (Goodreads.com) Part of the 2015 Great Michigan Read.

Suite Francaise
by Irene Nemirovsky

"Celebrated in pre-WWII France for her bestselling fiction, the Jewish Russian-born Némirovsky was shipped to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, months after this long-lost masterwork was composed. Némirovsky, a convert to Catholicism, began a planned five-novel cycle as Nazi forces overran northern France in 1940. This gripping "suite," collecting the first two unpolished but wondrously literary sections of a work cut short, have surfaced more than six decades after her death." (from Publisher's Weekly)

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos
by H. P. Lovecraft

"Most of H. P. Lovecraft's work is unified by a common theme--the Cthulhu (kuh-tool-ew) Mythos--in which gods furtively control the fate of mortals, and a mere glimpse of the universe, by nature hostile, is enough to drive a man insane. A number of Lovecraft's peers borrowed the Mythos for use in their own stories, launching a tradition that continues in our day. This generous volume . . . features 22 Mythos stories by Lovecraft and 15 other writers. (from Publisher's Weekly)

Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston

"The main character, an African American woman in her early forties named Janie Crawford, tells the story of her life and journey via an extended flashback to her best friend, Pheoby, so that Pheoby can tell Janie's story to the nosy community on her behalf . Her life has three major periods corresponding to her marriages to three very different men." (from the article at Wikipedia)

The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger

"...the story of Clare, a beautiful art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was 6 and Henry was 36, and were married when Clare was 23 and Henry 31. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder..." (from the reading guide at Reading Group Guides)

Tuesdays with Morrie
by Mitch Albom

"Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher, or a colleague. Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, helped you see the world as a more profound place, gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it. For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly twenty years ago..." (from the reader's guide at the book's website)

Unbroken
by Laura Hillenbrand

"Readers of this soul-stirring narrative will never forget Louis Zamperini, who after a career as a runner served in WWII only to be captured and held prisoner by the Japanese; a more horrific internment would be difficult to imagine. Zamperini's physical and spiritual sufferings both during and after WWII and his coming out the other side become the story of a true American hero from that greatest generation.” (from Publishers Weekly best books of 2010)

Water for Elephants
by Sara Gruen

The novel, told in flashback by nonagenarian Jacob Jankowski, recounts the wild and wonderful period he spent with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, a traveling circus he joined during the Great Depression. When 23-year-old Jankowski learns that his parents have been killed in a car crash, leaving him penniless, he drops out of Cornell veterinary school and parlays his expertise with animals into a job with the circus, where he cares for a menagerie of exotic creatures. (from Publisher's Weekly)

Wild
by Cheryl Strayed

" In the summer of 1995, at age 26 and feeling at the end of her rope emotionally, Strayed resolved to hike solo the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,663-mile wilderness route stretching from the Mexican border to the Canadian and traversing nine mountain ranges and three states. In this detailed, in-the-moment re-enactment, she delineates the travails and triumphs of those three grueling months. “(from Publisher’s Weekly)

The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion

"Joan Didion chronicles the year following the death of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, from a massive heart attack on December 30, 2003, while the couple's only daughter, Quintana, lay unconscious in a nearby hospital suffering from pneumonia and septic shock." (from Publisher's Weekly)