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2008 - 2009
The Secret Scripture
by Sebastian Barry
Dr. William Grene is evaluating his patients to determine which ones can resume life in society, because the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, where he is senior psychiatrist, is closing. His oldest patient, Roseanne Clear, is 100 years old and has been institutionalized for most of her adult life. In her sessions with Dr. Grene Roseanne is friendly but reticent about her past. Although guarded with Dr. Grene, Roseanne reveals the passions, disappointments and tragedies of her life in a journal she keeps hidden under a floorboard. Dr. Grene’s account of his interviews with the patients becomes a journal in which he confides his own secrets. The lonely widowed physician and his elderly patient make an odd pair as they try to understand each other.
Questions
Reading Guide & Interview with Sebastian Barry
Stealing Buddha's Dinner
by Bich Minh Nguyen
Bich was very young when Saigon fell and her father, who had been a soldier in the South Vietnamese army, had to flee Vietnam with his family. Growing up in a home with a Vietnamese father, sister, devoutly Buddhist grandmother and a Latina stepmother, she felt out of place in her mostly white and Christian Michigan neighborhood. Painfully aware that she was not like the “all- American” kids in her school, Bich was equally uncomfortable in the company of other Vietnamese immigrants. Her candid memoir is a funny and touching account of her childhood and the memories of the TV shows, music, clothes, fads, and especially the foods she loved.
Lost Men
by Brian Leung
Westen Chan’s mother died when he was eight and Xin, his father, took him to live with his aunt and uncle. “This is just temporary,” he promised the boy, “When I return, I will take you to China.” Twenty-five years later, Westen receives a letter from his father, estranged from him all these years. Now Xin wants to take him on a tour of China. As these two men, who are essentially strangers, travel across Xin’s native land, Westen tries to sort out his feelings about his mixed Chinese-American heritage as the two men struggle to form a relationship after years of hurt, neglect and misunderstanding.
Questions
The Welsh Girl
by Peter Ho Davies
In a village in northern Wales, the peaceful routine of life is disrupted in 1944 when English sappers arrive to build a camp for German prisoners-of-war on the outskirts of the village. Esther, the daughter of a fiercely nationalist sheep farmer, serves drinks in the pub where the young Englishmen spend their evenings. She takes care of her widowed father and Jim, a young evacuee from London. When Jim and his buddies start hanging around the camp to “gawp” at the prisoners, Esther follows them and is drawn to Karsten, an 18-year-old German who speaks to her in English.
Questions
For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
Perhaps the greatest war novel of the 20th century, Hemingway’s story of courage and sacrifice continues to make a strong impression 68 years after publication. Both 2008 presidential candidates named it as one of their favorite books. In the novel, Robert Jordan, a young American professor, has come to Spain with the International Brigades. He’s assigned to join an antifascist guerrilla unit of Spanish peasants hiding in the mountains. His job is to blow up a bridge, and he must win the trust of his Spanish comrades if they are to fight effectively.
Questions
Down the Nile
by Rosemary Mahoney
Mahoney took a cruise on the Nile in 1996 and, mesmerized by the beauty of the river, determined to repeat the trip, but this time in a rowboat. “What I wanted, really, was not just to see the Nile River but to sit in the middle of it in my own boat, alone,” she writes. Her attempts to rent a boat are frustrated by the unwillingness of boat owners to deal with a woman. Finally she meets Amr, who takes a brotherly interest in her plan. He loans her a boat, but insists on following her in his felucca. Mahoney describes the beauty of the desert, the plants, trees and birds, her fear of encountering crocodiles and her sometimes friendly, sometimes exasperating encounters with Egyptians.
Questions
Run
by Ann Patchett
Bernard Doyle didn’t get the life he wanted. His beloved wife died when their children were young, and years later his oldest son, Sullivan, was involved in a scandal that ended Doyle’s career as mayor of Boston. Now he has pinned his hopes on his adopted younger sons, Tip and Teddy, confident that with his encouragement one of them will achieve the political success that was denied him. Leaving a Jesse Jackson speech one cold night, Tip slips on an icy sidewalk and is saved from injury by a woman who throws herself between him and an oncoming car. This seemingly coincidental encounter will change all of their lives.
Questions
Trespass
by Valerie Martin
Chloe, a book illustrator, looked forward to a peaceful life in the country house she shares with her retired professor husband. Lately she feels menaced by the poacher who’s appeared several times in the woods and who seems to defy her. She’s also dismayed that her son Toby’s girlfriend, a young Bosnian woman whom Chloe finds brusque and an “ungrateful outsider”, is pregnant. As family tensions mount, she feels off-balance and increasingly threatened by these intrusions into her complacent domesticity and family life.
Questions
The Shadow Catcher
by Marianne Wiggins
Every picture tells a story, but how true to life is that story? In this novel with two plotlines, writer Marianne Wiggins is pitching her novel about photographer Edward S. Curtis to a Hollywood producer, when she’s notified that her father is unconscious in the ICU of a Las Vegas hospital. The news stuns her, because her father has been dead for 30 years. The second story tells of Curtis’s marriage to Clara, who is an orphan, and his obsession with photographing Native Americans. During his life he took more than 40,000 pictures, capturing for posterity images of what he believed was a vanishing civilization. Both of these stories are set against the vast landscape of the American West.
Questions
Web Sites
Edward S, Curtis's North American Indian Photographs
Edward S. Curtis - Shadow Catcher
The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
Offred is a handmaid in the household of the Commander and his wife. In the Republic of Gilead, where society is modeled on the precepts in the biblical book of Genesis, handmaids serve as surrogate mothers for infertile couples. Her survival depends on her ability to reproduce. Since reading and all forms of entertainment are forbidden to her, Offred spends her empty hours recalling her past life with her husband and child, before women were forbidden from holding jobs and handling money. Now that her activities are severely restricted and her every movement spied upon, Offred considers whether her life is worth living.
Questions
Titles Selected by Suzanne Fisher, Librarian
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