Host An Unforgettable Book Club Party

Sage Singer is a baker. She works through the night, preparing the day’s breads and pastries, trying to escape a reality of loneliness, bad memories, and the shadow of her mother’s death. When Josef Weber, an elderly man in Sage’s grief support group, begins stopping by the bakery, they strike up an unlikely friendship.

In 1918, after serving in WWI, Tom Sherbourne welcomes his quiet job as lighthouse keeper on Australia’s remote Janus Rock, as does his loving new wife. But three years later, a childless Isabel is bereft after suffering her third miscarriage. Tending the new grave, Isabel hears the cry of a baby; a boat has washed ashore with a dead man—and a living infant….

In 1937 Shanghai, twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Both are beautiful, modern, and carefree—until the day their father tells them that he has gambled away their wealth. To repay his debts, he must sell the girls as wives to suitors who have traveled from Los Angeles to find Chinese brides. As Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, Pearl and May set out on the journey of a lifetime, from the Chinese countryside to the shores of America.

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.

As a young child raised in a Catholic Orphanage in New York City, Cora was placed on one of the infamous adoptions trains that departed New York City for the Midwest.
Cora eventually married and settled into her role in society as wife of a successful attorney. But as Cora neared middle age, an opportunity arose for Cora to escort the very young Louise Brooks to New York City to continue her dance training with the prestigious Denishawn Dance Company. Cora, eager to get to New York City to perhaps learn more about her origins, jumped at the opportunity.

The year is 1945. Claire Randall, a former combat nurse, is back from the war and reunited with her husband — when she walks through a standing stone in one of the ancient stone circles that dot the British Isles. Suddenly she is a Sassenach — an “outlander” — in a Scotland torn by war and raiding Highland clans in the year of Our Lord … 1743.

Elizabeth Endicotte, a 21-year old missionary from “one of Boston’s most priggish families” arrives in Aleppo, Syria during World War I with her father to assist the women and children refugees of 1915 Armenian Genocide by the Turkish Ottomon Empire.

Armen Petrosian is an Armenian engineer working with the Germans in Aleppo. Armen has escaped the genocide and is desperately trying to find out the fate of his wife Karine and his infant daughter.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini tells the story of Mariam and Laila, two Afghan women whose lives were brought together by a series of unfortunate events. Set amongst the turbulent events of Afghanistan’s last thirty years, Mariam and Laila were initially just acquaintances, then adversaries and, when they realized they would need each other to survive, they formed an unbreakable bond.

Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky is set during World War II in German occupied France It is about the people of France as they fight to live, and struggle to survive under Nazi rule, at times honorable, at other times, not.

Extraordinarily, Suite Française was written as Némirovsky, a French writer of Russian-Jewish origin, was actually experiencing the German occupation of France. Némirovsky died in Auschwitz and the notebook containing her manuscript was not examined until 1998 by her daughter.

A teacher travels back in time to try to stop the assassination of JFK, and in doing so alters the futures of those he meets in ways he had not anticipated.