Book Club

Discussion Date: Tuesday, March 27, 2007.
Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms and clichés of the 1930s and 1940s, this novel is a richly layered and uniquely rewarding experience. It has many threads and a series of events that follow one another at a breathtaking pace. ALA Notable Book, 2001; Booklist Editors' Choice, 2000; Booker Prize; Time Magazine's All-Time Best 100 Novels.

Discussion Date: Tuesday, November 28, 2006.
As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the war, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history. From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic "Little Women," Brooks has taken the character of the absent father, March, and added adult resonance to portray the moral complexity of war and a marriage tested by the demands of extreme idealism. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2006.

Discussion Date: Tuesday, September 19, 2006.
Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation tells of growing up in San Antonio, Texas, in an in-between place and time -- shifting back and forth across the Mexican border, between present realities and ancient cultures. Interweaving family remembrance, pre-Columbian mythology, and the histories of Texas and Mexico, it blends the story of one Mexican family with the soul of an entire people. Part treasury of the elders, part elegy, part personal odyssey, part Book of the Dead, its tales are of a fragile family lineage that spans borders and rivers and decades.

Discussion Date: Tuesday, August 29, 2006.
The novel follows the fortunes and relationships of three characters whose fates are tied to the obscure inheritance case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, which is tied up in endless litigation. While many deserving and undeserving claim the inheritance, it is ironically being devoured in legal costs. Listed in Fiction Core Collection (H.W. Wilson).

Discussion Date: Tuesday, July 18, 2006.
An extraordinary first novel that tells the story of a British piano tuner sent deep into Burma in the nineteenth century. In October 1886, Edgar Drake receives a strange request from the British War Office: he must leave his wife and his quiet life in London to travel to the jungles of Burma, where a rare Erard grand piano is in need of repair. The piano belongs to an army surgeon-major whose unorthodox peacemaking methods—poetry, medicine, and now music—have brought a tentative quiet to the southern Shan States but have elicited questions from his superiors. Sensuous, lyrical, rich with passion and adventure, this is a hypnotic tale of myth, romance, and self-discovery: an unforgettable novel.