Moon Tiger

March 2009 DeeAnn's pick

From Library Journal:Lively recently won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for this deeply moving, elegantly structured novel. The heroine is Claudia Hampton, an unconventional historian and former war correspondent who lies in a hospital bed dying of cancer. Forced inward, Claudia moves randomly across time and place to reconstruct the strata of her life. But "most lives have their core, their kernel, the vital centre"; Claudia's is the brief, tragic encounter she had in Egypt during the war with Tom Southern, a British tank officer on leave from battle. Tom's voice, along with those of her brother and daughter, joins Claudia's to shape a narrative that is a complex, intricately composed fugue. This haunting evocation of loss is Lively's finest achievement yet. Read more...

A Buffalo in the House

February 2009 - Michelle's pick

A sprawling suburban house in Santa Fe is not the kind of home where a buffalo normally roams, but then Veryl Goodnight and Roger Brooks are not your ordinary pet owners. Over a hundred years after Veryl’s ancestors, Charles and Mary Ann Goodnight, hand-raised two baby buffalo to help save the species from extinction, the sculptor and her husband adopt an orphaned buffalo calf of their own. Against a backdrop of the old American West, A Buffalo in the House tells the story of a household that redefines familyl in a really big way. Charlie has no idea he’s a buffalo and Roger has no idea just how strong the bond between man and buffalo can be. In the shadow of the near-extermination of a majestic and misunderstood animal, Roger sets out to save just one buffalo. Writing in the tradition of great human-animal relationship stores like Born Free, Seabiscuit, and Marley & Me, R. D. Rosen relates the story of a single animal’s ability to touch human lives and reconnect people of all ages to the vanished past. Read more here....

Moonstone

January 2009 - Karen's Choice

Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

"The first and greatest of English detective novels."

T. S. Eliot

An enormous diamond is bequeathed to Miss Rachel Verinder by her uncle Colonel John Herncastle who has recently expired out in the colonies. In anticipation of Miss Verinders eighteenth birthday , the Moonstone is spirited out of India and brought back to England whereupon it goes missing. Stolen in the first place from a Hindu shrine, the ownership and indeed the whereabouts of the sacred diamond is the question around which the plot revolves. Credited with being the first example of detective fiction the tale is told as a series of eyewitness accounts which was partly necessitated by it being published by instalment in All Year Round in 1868. (Kirkus UK)

Funny in Farsi

October 2008 - Katie's Choice

Funny in Farsi, by Firoozeh Dumas

From Random House: Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and later lost his job during the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (nor cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an army of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot. Above all, this is an unforgettable story of identity, discovery, and the power of family love. It is a book that will leave us all laughing—without an accent.

Read more about Firoozeh here. Or listen to a commentary here.

The Thirteenth Tale

September 2008, Kari's Choice

This month's book is The Thirteen Tale, by Diane Setterfield

From Reading Group Guides: Margaret Lea works in her father’s antiquarian bookshop where her fascination for the biographies of the long-dead has led her to write them herself. She gets a letter from one of the most famous authors of the day, the mysterious Vida Winter, whose popularity as a writer has been in no way diminished by her reclusiveness. Until now, Vida has toyed with journalists who interview her, creating outlandish life histories for herself --- all of them invention. Now she is old and ailing, and at last she wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. Her letter to Margaret is a summons.Somewhat anxiously, the equally reclusive Margaret travels to Yorkshire to meet her subject. Vida’s strange, gothic tale features the Angelfield family; dark-hearted Charlie and his unbrotherly obsession with his sister, the fascinating, devious, and willful Isabelle, and Isabelle’s daughters, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline. Margaret is captivated by the power of Vida’s storytelling, but she doesn’t entirely trust Vida’s account. She goes to check up on the family, visiting their old home and piecing together their story in her own way. What she discovers on her journey to the truth is for Margaret a chilling and transforming experience.