Host An Unforgettable Book Club Party

How would it feel if the sun and the moon where the only things you could count on in your life?

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier is Ishmael Beah’s story of what it took to survive the civil war in Sierra Leone. Under unimaginable conditions he was without his family, traveling the land with a pack of boys. He was then captured by the government army, given drugs and turned into a soldier at the age of 13.

A Room With a View is a surprisingly entertaining novel set in Italy and England in the early 20th century. This social comedy is about a high society girl trying to choose between the life that is expected of her and following her heart.

A Tale of Two Cities takes place during the French Revolution when peasants, led by the owner of a wine shop, revolt against the aristocrats. A young girl named Lucie ties the characters together and through her love she brings life to those around her, and motivates one to freely give his life away out of love for her.

“Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in tenements districts.”

Like the Tree of Heaven, Francie Nolan is a young girl growing up poor in Brooklyn in the early 1900s determined to thrive and make a better life for herself.

During WWI in the trenches of the Somme, five wounded French soldiers are reported “killed in the line of duty.” Mathilde, fiancée of Manech, one of the five, does not accept the official report, and in her attempt to reconstruct the days leading up to Manech’s reported death, she discovers things are not quite what they seem.

A Visit from the Goon Squad tells the life stories of Bennie Salazar, a record executive, and his assistant, the kleptomaniac Sasha. In chapters that take us from the present to the past and to the future, we meet the people who influenced their lives, as well as a host of other characters that have their own stories to tell.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood is the stunning fictionalized account of the real-life 1843 double murder of Thomas Kinnear and his mistress, Nancy Montgomery. Accused in the murders are two of Kinnear’s servants, James McDermott, a stable hand, and sixteen year old Grace Marks, a maid.

Angelology by Danielle Trussoni is filled with biblical intrigue and gothic mystery, fallen angels and their offspring, good vs. evil, and a race against time to find an ancient, powerful object hidden away years ago by Abby Rockefeller.

Anna Westerby’s diaries, written in Danish over seventy years ago, are published to great acclaim by her daughter Swanny after Anna’s death. But, do the diaries also contain the revelations of a double mystery within their pages: the true identity of a lost child and an unsolved gruesome murder? “Anna’s Book” by Barbara Vine is a compelling novel that will keep you guessing until its final pages.

In Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie two young boys, the narrator age 17, and his best friend, Luo, age 18, are sent to a remote village in the mountainous Szechuan region of China in the 1970′s as part of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution of China vilified intellectuals. Schools were closed and many of the educated-class were imprisioned or sent to live in the country for hard manual labor and re-education by the peasant-class. The two exiled friends meet the Little Seamstress, a young illiterate peasant girl, and, ironically, discover a secret cache of Western literature, which has a profound affect on both boys and the Little Seamstress.

This is a story of an elaborate birthday party gone wrong. The host is an unappreciated Vice President of a poor South American country. The birthday boy is a powerful businessman from Japan. The entertainment is a mesmerizing soprano that wins the heart of all who hear her sing.
When terrorists crash this party, the evening and the lives of everyone present will forever change.

Get into the Christmas spirit with Blue Christmas by Mary Kay Andrews. Weezie Foley is a funky Southern antiques dealer who owns Maisie’s Daisy, a shop in Savannah’s historic district. Weezie is determined to win this year’s Christmas decorating contest. When her blue Christmas tree pin goes missing from her truck and her shop decorations get vandalized, Weezie can’t help but think the hoity toity owners of Babalu are planning to put her out of business. But this is only the beginning of Weezie’s mystery. Are Manny and Cookie behind the mishaps or is someone else up to no good?

In Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin, Eilis Lacey lives with her mother and fashionable older sister, Rose, in a small rural Irish community in the 1950′s. Rose, with the help of an Irish priest visiting from America, arranges for Eilis to leave Ireland for Brooklyn.

Bethia Mayfield, a Puritan colonist, and Cheeshahteaumauk (later christened Caleb) of the Wampanoag tribe, meet as children and form a secret friendship. Caleb’s Crossing is inspired by the life of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College in 1665.

The Awful Grandmother, the Little Grandfather, Aunty Light-Skin, Uncle Baby, and Uncle Fat-Face are just a few of the colorful family members we meet as Lala’s story unwinds.

Lev and his cellmate Kolya are sent on a mission to find a dozen eggs for the wedding cake of a powerful colonel’s daughter in a harsh Soviet winter during WWII.

In the late 1800′s many single women flocked to New York to find respectable work in the burgeoning industries. Clara Driscoll, one such woman, managed the all-women’s Glass Cutting Department at Tiffany Studios, where she and her staff were known as the Tiffany Girls.

Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières takes place on the Greek isle of Cephalonia under German and Italian occupation during Word War II.

The jovial Italian Captain Antonio Corelli is quartered with Dr. Iannis and his daughter Pelagia. Despite the fact that Captain Corelli is Italian and considered the enemy, his love of life, his kind joyful spirit, and his gifted ability on the mandolin, all work to win Pelagia’s heart.

In rural Mississippi, Larry lives a solitary existence, never able to rise above the whispers of suspicion when his date went missing over 20 years ago. Silas, who was once a friend of Larry’s, is the town constable. He and Larry have no reason to cross paths until another girl disappears and Larry is blamed again. And now the two men who once called each other friend are forced to confront the past they’ve buried and ignored for decades.

Cutting for Stone is an engaging and witty novel about the traumatic origins of twin brothers who grew up in the shadows of a hospital in Ethiopia. Losing their mother and being abandoned by their father, they were raised by two physicians who instilled in them a love of medicine. Despite their bond, the twins could not be more different. However, it is their genetic similarities that gives life to one of them, but in the process destroys the other.

A mesmerizing young Irish seanchaí (storyteller) on a red 1950 Vincent Comet motorcycle pulls into town and into the lives of young school teacher, Fiona Walsh, her twin sisters, Aiofe and Róisín, and Aunt Moira. With riveting tales of long ago kingdoms, mighty battles, princes, princesses and wolves, Jim charms and seduces his listeners. But let the games begin when a jealousy-driven Fiona follows Jim and discovers a very dark secret.

“Doc” by Mary Doria Russell is the story of twenty-six year old Georgia gentleman John Henry Holliday who arrives in Dodge City, Kansas in 1878 with his lady friend, Kate Harony. John Henry sets up a dental practice and earns some fast money gambling. But Doc Holliday is dying of consumption, the same disease that slowly killed his mother when he was fifteen.

Books and the beach just go together. Driftwood Summer by Patti Callahan Henry takes place in the seaside town of Palmetto Beach, where Riley and her mother own the Driftwood Cottage Bookstore. It is a place of gathering, and hosting get togethers for book clubs, such as the Cookbook Club and the Blonde Book Club. But the bookstore is in financial trouble. Riley calls on her two sisters to come back to Palmetto Beach to help save the family bookstore. During this “Driftwood Summer” the sisters must face their past of sibling rivalry and kept secrets.

Elizabeth Gilbert was in her 30s when she realized the life she had made for herself was not the life she wanted. Dealing with divorce, depression and an unhealthy love affair, she plans a year long voyage to find those things that were missing in her life. She heads to Rome to experience the pleasures in life, India to learn about meditation and devotion and Bali to experience balance.

Can you imagine a society in which there were no books? Fahrenheit 451 gives us a glimpse of what it would be like if censorship were the norm.

Frank Mackey grew up in a tenement house and loved a girl named Rosie. Frank and Rosie were going to run away and start a new life in London, but on their scheduled night of departure, Rosie did not show up. Frank, heartbroken, left Faithful Place, supposedly for good, and became a detective in Dublin. Twenty two years later, he gets a call that the suitcase belonging to Rosie, who had never been seen again after that night, had been found in an abandoned house. Frank returns to Faithful Place and the family he felt did their best to ruin his life to solve the mystery of what happened to Rosie.

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett is the first book in The Century Trilogy. The series begins with an introduction to five families of different classes and origins – America, England, Germany, Russia and Wales during the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

In Francesca’s Kitchen, Francesca Campanile is a widow with adult children preoccupied with their own lives. Not being able to shake this my-kids-don’t-need-me-anymore feeling, Francesca decides to apply for a nanny position to get herself get out of the house and start living her life instead of just passing the time. Through her food, Francesca wins the hearts of her newfound friends, a struggling single mom named Loretta and two young children, Penny and Will.

Girl With a Pearl Earring is a historical fiction novel about the girl in Johannes Vermeer’s famous painting by the same name.

A terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes; a summons to meet the bitter, decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella; the sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor—these form a series of events that changes the orphaned Pip’s life forever, and he eagerly abandons his humble origins to begin a new life as a gentleman. Dickens’s haunting late novel depicts Pip’s education and development through adversity as he discovers the true nature of his ‘great expectations’.

Jin, whose Korean family named her Regret, leaves behind her family in 1914 to become a picture bride to a Korean man in Hawaii.

The Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown, is the hotel at the corner of bitter and sweet. In 1986, Henry Lee hears that the belongings of 37 Japanese families interned during WWII are found in the basement of the Panama Hotel. This event sends Henry, a Chinese-American, on a journey back to the 1940s when his best friends were a Japanese-American named Keiko Okabe and a local Jazz musician named Sheldon. Henry was 12 years old and was struggling with his relationship with his father, his feelings for Keiko and the events taking place in wartime Seattle.

Enjoy some dim sum appetizers, sticky rice and mango pudding as you discuss the friendships and loves of Henry Lee in Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.