The Current Book Club Choice

Back Roads, by Tawni O'Dell

Harley Altmyer is marooned in the Pennsylvania backwoods caring for his three beloved but unruly younger sisters. He has, at best, a shaky hold on the vicissitudes of day care, mac and cheese dinners, and visits to a once-devoted mother who seems not only resigned, but glad to hand over the reins of motherhood to her son. Frustrated, overwhelmed, and utterly endearing, he's a guy in an impossible situation: an orphan with the responsibilities of an adult and the fiery, aggressive libido of a teenager.


The Recent Book Club Choices

Isabel Allende   Robert Morgan   Jane Hamilton   Bernhard Schlink   Breena Clarke   Maeve Binchy  

Daughter of Fortune, by Isabel Allende

Spirited Eliza leaves her home in Chile in search of her lover, who has set out for the California Gold Rush. What she finds instead is adversity and adventure and, through her own resourcefulness, an even more momentous journey to independence and freedom.


Gap Creek, by Robert Morgan

Oprah's latest pick is here! The author of "The Truest Pleasure" returns his readers to the world of the Appalachian high country as a couple struggles to survive amid fires and floods, flesh-and-blood grifters, drunks, and busybodies who insinuate themselves into their lives in the late 1800s.


A Map of the World, by Jane Hamilton

With more than 65,000 hardcover copies in print, rave reviews from coast to coast, and appearances on several national bestseller lists, the publication of Hamilton's "extraordinary story of a family's disintegration" (People) in paperback should be among the literary highlights of the summer.


The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink

When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover. She enthralls him with her passion but puzzles him with her odd silences. Then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and Hanna is on trial for a hideous crime. But as he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder. Masterfully evoking eroticism while addressing the moral dilemmas that continue to haunt postwar Germany, "The Reader" is an intimate coming-of-age story as well as a frank and sensitive exploration of the dark areas of a nation's uneasy and embattled conscience.


River Cross My Heart, by Breena Clarke

Five-year-old Clara Bynum is dead, drowned in the Potomac River in the shadow of a seemingly haunted rock outcropping known locally as the Three Sisters. This debut novel by a wonderfully gifted storyteller tells what effect Clara's absence has on the people she has left behind.


Tara Road, by Maeve Binchy

Ria, who lives on Tara Road in Dublin, thinks her marriage is fine right up until her husband leaves with his young, pregnant girlfriend. By a chance phone call, Ria meets Marilyn, a woman from New England unable to come to terms with her only son's death and now estranged from her husband. The two women exchange houses for the summer with extraordinary consequences, each learning that the other has a deep secret that can never be revealed.


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