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DISCUSSION GUIDES
- 11.The silence of the girls"From the Booker Prize-winning author of the Regeneration trilogy comes a monumental new masterpiece, set in the midst of literature's most famous war. Pat Barker turns her attention to the timeless legend of The Iliad, as experienced by the captured women living in the Greek camp in the final weeks of the Trojan War. The ancient city of Troy has withstood a decade under siege of the powerful Greek army, who continue to wage bloody war over a stolen woman--Helen. In the Greek camp, another woman watches and waits for the war's outcome: Briseis. She was queen of one of Troy's neighboring kingdoms, until Achilles, Greece's greatest warrior, sacked her city and murdered her husband and brothers. Briseis becomes Achilles's concubine, a prize of battle, and must adjust quickly in order to survive a radically different life, as one of the many conquered women who serve the Greek army. When Agamemnon, the brutal political leader of the Greek forces, demands Briseis for himself, she finds herself caught between the two most powerful of the Greeks. Achilles refuses to fight in protest, and the Greeks begin to lose ground to their Trojan opponents. Keenly observant and cooly unflinching about the daily horrors of war, Briseis finds herself in an unprecedented position to observe the two men driving the Greek forces in what will become their final confrontation, deciding the fate, not only of Briseis's people, but also of the ancient world at large. Briseis is just one among thousands of women living behind the scenes in this war--the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead--all of them erased by history. With breathtaking historical detail and luminous prose, Pat Barker brings the teeming world of the Greek camp to vivid life. She offers nuanced, complex portraits of characters and stories familiar from mythology, which, seen from Briseis's perspective, are rife with newfound revelations. Barker's latest builds on her decades-long study of war and its impact on individual lives--and it is nothing short of magnificent"-- "The Iliad, as experienced by the captured women living in the Greek camp in the final weeks of the Trojan War"--
- 12.The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & ClayWINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic, beloved novel of two boy geniuses dreaming up superheroes in New York’s Golden Age of comics, now with special bonus material by the author
“It's absolutely gosh-wow, super-colossal—smart, funny, and a continual pleasure to read.”—The Washington Post Book World
One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Decade • Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize • A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century
A “towering, swash-buckling thrill of a book” (Newsweek), hailed as Chabon’s “magnum opus” (The New York Review of Books), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a triumph of originality, imagination, and storytelling, an exuberant, irresistible novel that begins in New York City in 1939.
A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal partner in the aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink.
Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America’s finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age.
Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the New York Society Library Book Award - 13.Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The beloved memoir of self-discovery set against the spectacular Tuscan countryside that inspired the major motion picture starring Diane Lane—now in a twentieth-anniversary edition featuring a new afterword
“This beautifully written memoir about taking chances, living in Italy, loving a house and, always, the pleasures of food, would make a perfect gift for a loved one. But it’s so delicious, read it first yourself.”—USA Today
For more Frances Mayes, including a tour of her now iconic Cortona home, Bramasole, watch PBS’s Dream of Italy: Tuscan Sun Special!
More than twenty years ago, Frances Mayes—widely published poet, gourmet cook, and travel writer—introduced readers to a wondrous new world when she bought and restored an abandoned Tuscan villa called Bramasole. Under the Tuscan Sun inspired generations to embark on their own journeys—whether that be flying to a foreign country in search of themselves, savoring one of the book’s dozens of delicious seasonal recipes, or simply being transported by Mayes’s signature evocative, sensory language. Now with a new afterword from Frances Mayes, the twentieth-anniversary edition of Under the Tuscan Sun revisits the book’s most popular characters. - 14.Half His Age: A NovelNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of I’m Glad My Mom Died comes “a thorny examination of power, lust, shame and rage” (Los Angeles Times) from “a writer able to capture some of the darkest parts of human nature with unflinching honesty and devastating humor” (NPR)
“Unapologetic and undeniable . . . If there was ever any doubt whether the narrative command that Jennette McCurdy displayed in her bestselling memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died might translate to fiction, let it henceforth be put to rest.”—Elle
Waldo is ravenous. Horny. Blunt. Naive. Wise. Impulsive. Lonely. Angry. Forceful. Hurting. Perceptive. Endlessly wanting. And the thing she wants most of all: Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher with the wife and the kid and the mortgage and the bills, with the dead dreams and the atrophied looks and the growing paunch. She doesn’t know why she wants him. Is it his passion? His life experience? The fact that he knows books and films and things that she doesn’t? Or is it purer than that, rooted in their unlikely connection, their kindred spirits, the similar filter with which they each take in the world around them? Or, perhaps, it’s just enough that he sees her when no one else does.
Startlingly perceptive, mordantly funny, and keenly poignant, Half His Age is a rich character study of a yearning seventeen-year-old who disregards all obstacles—or attempts to overcome them—in her effort to be seen, to be desired, to be loved. - 15.By the Hands of Men, Book One: The Old World: A Sweeping Saga of Courage, Love, and Redemption
A soldier fights for his soul in the trenches of France. A field hospital nurse battles death every day. When duty and honor are not enough of a reason to go on in the hell of a world at war, love gives purpose to their lives.
- 16.The Great Dane
After the sudden death of his only child, Liko Greenman is looking for any way to pass, waste or kill time. He becomes obsessed with a compelling mystery within his son's favorite video game, Three Hares, and is determined to solve it. The game travels along the Old Silk Road, following the triskelion motif of the Three Hares in art and architecture. The player's journey ends abruptly at Paderborn Cathedral in Germany, but fans are certain the game isn't over.
Liko receives a condolence letter from the gaming company, with a single clue that leads him to the rural town of Birch Island, New York and a farm called Schoenfeld's. There, Liko comes face-to-face with Danelaw Strong, who has one blue eye, one brown eye, and a compelling, dual personality.
For 22 years, Dane was intimately involved with Ethan Hasen, the creator of Three Hares, and Ethan's wife, Nomi. As three deeply bonded lovers, they made a life together at Schoenfeld's that defied convention. Now only Dane is left to work the farm, a single hare grieving the loss of soulmates and simply concentrating on doing the next thing.
Recognizing they're both killing time and each has something to give the other, Liko agrees to move to Schoenfeld's for the summer and Dane will guide him in solving the video game's mystery. So begins a journey of friendship, love and belonging that will show Liko there's more to the Three Hares game and more to Danelaw Strong than he could possibly imagine.
Suanne Laqueur's newest novel is a chimerical blend of romance, drama, identity, power and hope. Combining legend and folklore with her signature depth and understanding of the human experience, The Great Dane explores how we view the most profound human connection in pairs, when three is often love's most magical number.
- 17.To Keep Her From Harm
"A realistic, gripping portrayal of family, trust, and the value of self-improvement."-Kirkus
A single mother's desperate attempt to protect her daughter from potential danger draws them into a web of secrets and hidden identities-raising the haunting question: how far is too far when a parent is fighting to keep their child safe?
When Laura first fell for Steven, she believed she'd finally found the life she'd always longed for. But after an unexpected pregnancy, the distant, simmering anger she'd once brushed aside in him becomes impossible to ignore. The birth of their daughter Amanda is a dream come true for Laura-until a violent outburst sends her fleeing to the safety of her affluent parents' home.
As Laura navigates a tense and uneasy co-parenting arrangement, subtle changes in her daughter's behavior suggest that Steven's connection to Amanda may not only be strained, but sinister. Consumed with the need to protect her child, Laura flees across the border into Canada after a court disagrees with her suspicions-leaving the FBI and a grieving father in pursuit.
A mother's love and a father's anguish have left a trail of frayed lives and fractured hearts. But the devastating consequences of a young child's attempt to take matters into her own hands reunites her parents as they struggle to make their daughter whole again.
- 18.Kin: Oprah's Book Club: A NovelA magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.
"Kin is the kind of all-encompassing reading experience I’m always hoping to find: smart and funny and deftly profound. This is Tayari Jones’s very best work.” —Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.
A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction. - 19.The Ghost Women: A NovelA mysterious art academy in the woods, a deck of ancient tarot cards, a centuries-old secret
On a hot August morning in 1972, the body of Abel Montague, a student at St. Luke’s Institute of the Arts, is found hanging from a tree in the forest. An ancient Hanged Man tarot card is found in the back pocket of his pants and his body has been positioned into the exact pose illustrated on the card.
When Detective Lola Germany arrives at St. Luke’s—a former monastery that once housed a secret order of monks who carried out witch trials and executions—she believes they are dealing with a ritualistic murder. While interviewing school administrators and Abel’s classmates, Lola discovers Abel’s live-in girlfriend, Pearl, seems shaken but also might be hiding something—along with her group of friends who call themselves witches.
When more students are found dead, each body arranged like a tarot card, Lola realizes she is trapped in a web of power and ambition that spans centuries. Soon the lines between past and present, spiritual and tangible, begin to blur, and the only way to survive is to seek answers from places she never imagined. - 20.The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: A Flavia de Luce NovelWINNER OF THE AGATHA • ARTHUR ELLIS • DILYS • DEBUT DAGGER AWARDS
“Wonderfully entertaining . . . sure to be one of the most loved mysteries of the year . . . [Flavia is] a delightful, intrepid, acid-tongued new heroine.”—Chicago Sun-Times
It is the summer of 1950–and at the once-grand mansion of Buckshaw, young Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, is intrigued by a series of inexplicable events: A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Then, hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath.
For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”
BONUS: This edition contains a The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie discussion guide and an excerpt from Alan Bradley's The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag.