Book Suggestions for voting on at August
Meeting (for discussion in October). All are available thru library.
1. Mountains Beyond Mountains (Nonfiction) – by Tracy Kidder
“The
central character of this marvelous book is one of the most provocative,
brilliant, funny, unsettling, endlessly energetic, irksome, and charming
characters ever to spring to life on the page.” Paul Farmer is a
44-year-old attending physician at the Brigham and Women's Hospital who finds
time to make house calls in Boston and the mountains of Haiti.
Doctor, Harvard professor, infectious-disease
specialist, anthropologist, world-class Robin Hood, he was brought up in a bus
and on a boat & in medical school found his life's calling: to diagnose and
cure infectious diseases and bring modern medicine to those who need them most.
Kidder’s magnificent account takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and
Russia.
2. The
Edge of Lost by Kristina McMorris
On
a cold night in October 1937, searchlights cut through the darkness around
Alcatraz. A prison guard's only daughter is missing. Tending the warden's greenhouse, bank robber
Tommy Capello waits anxiously. Only he knows the truth about the little girl's
whereabouts, and that both of their lives depend on the search's outcome.
Almost two decades earlier a young boy named Shanley Keagan ekes out a living
as an aspiring vaudevillian in Dublin. Talented and shrewd, he dreams of
shedding his dingy existence and finding his father in America. The chance
comes, but when tragedy strikes he must summon all his ingenuity to
forge a new life in a foreign world.
Skillfully weaving these 2 stories, McMorris delivers a compelling
novel that moves from Ireland to New York to San Francisco.
As her finely crafted characters discover the true nature
of loyalty, sacrifice, and betrayal, they are forced to confront the
lies we tell--and believe--in order to survive.
“Beautifully written with mesmerizing details,
extensively researched and the historical images are incredibly accurate.”
—VOYA Magazine
3. To
Have and Have Not – Ernest Hemmingway
Hemingway's Classic Novel
About Smuggling, Intrigue, and Love--the
dramatic story of Harry Morgan, an honest man who is forced into running
contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family
financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and
dissipated yachtsmen who throng the region, and involve him in a strange and
unlikely love affair.
Harshly realistic, yet with one of the most subtle and moving relationships in
the Hemingway novels.
4. The
Outlander by Gil Adamson (not to be confused with Outlanders series)
1903
Mary Boulton flees alone across the West, one heart-pounding step ahead of the
law. At nineteen, she has just become a widow–and her husband's killer. As
bloodhounds track her frantic race toward the mountains, she is tormented by
mad visions and by the knowledge that her two ruthless brothers-in-law are in
pursuit, determined to avenge their younger brother's death. Responding to
little more than the primitive instinct for survival at any cost, she retreats
ever deeper into the wilderness–and into the wilds of her own mind.
“THE
OUTLANDER deserves to be read twice, first for the plot and the complex
characters which make this a page-turner of the highest order, and then a
second time, slowly, to savor the marvel of Gil Adamson’s writing.” (Ann
Patchett). “This remarkable novel opens
at full gallop and never slows. Adamson has seamlessly merged a compelling
narrative with poetic language to create a work that is full of beauty and
heart and wonder.”
(Little Fires
Everywhere by Ng still has too many holds)
Lydia is
dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins this exquisite novel about a
Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite
child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will
fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found
in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee
family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving
story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is
both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the
ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives
struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.
