Ann S.' Book Suggestions for October selection

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.”

5.  Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng   

     (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.

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