The Current Book Club Choice

While I Was Gone, by Sue Miller

Jo has everything she's ever wanted: a veterinary practice she loves, a devoted husband, three grown daughters, and a beautiful Massachusetts farmhouse. But when an old housemate settles in her small town, the fabric of Jo's life begins to unravel: seduced again by the enticing possibility of another self and another life, she begins a dangerous flirtation that returns her to the darkest moment of her past and imperils all she loves.


The Recent Book Club Choices

Toni Morrison   Tawni O'Dell   Isabel Allende   Robert Morgan   Jane Hamilton   Bernhard Schlink  

The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom, Pecola's life does change -- in painful, devastating ways. With its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment, The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrison's most powerful, unforgettable novels -- and a significant work of American Fiction.


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.


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.


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