Host An Unforgettable Book Club Party

The reader is ushered into an isolated gray stone mansion on the windswept Cornish coast, as the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter recalls the chilling events that transpired as she began her new life as the young bride of a husband she barely knew.

East of Eden, John Steinbeck’s passionate and exhilarating epic, re-creates the seminal stories of Genesis through the intertwined lives of two American families … in the Salinas Valley of northern California.

In a strange New York City at the turn of the nineteenth century, Peter Lake is being pursued by the murderous Pearly Soames and his Short Tails gang, when he is rescued by Athansor, a beautiful and extraordinary white horse that becomes his companion. Peter burglarizes the wealthy homes on the Upper West Side and comes upon the consumptive and dying Beverly Penn.

This is the story of Wang Lung’s life through feast and famine in his small Chinese village of Anhwei. He reaped the riches the land brought him during times of feast and he suffered devastating poverty during times of famine but he would never sell his land.

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.

Jane Eyre is the story of a young woman’s struggles to uphold her convictions despite her painful upbringing and the strictures of society and religion. Jane does not compromise, even at risk to her own happiness and health, that which she holds as truths. She is an ageless heroine for all young girls today.

Penned by Charlotte Brontë under a pseudonym in 1847, Jane Eyre, at the time, was criticized as having an anti-Christian slant. Today this semi-autobiographical novel is considered one of the top literary classics of all-time.

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.

“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.

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.

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’.