Welcome back from the summer and welcome to the new members, Tracy, Jamie and Rebecca! Julie started the round of book club on an excellent note. Thanks for the delicious food and new recipes.
We selected 3 new books for the next several months. They were, The Fates will Find Their Way, Cutting for Stone and Paris Wife.
The Fates will Find Their Way by Hannah Pritchard
Hannah Pritchard also wrote the book the Virgin Suicides, which you may recall was made into a movie starring Kristin Dunst. Has anyone seen it?
As for her current novel, The Fates will Find Their Way it is a similar story to the Virgin Suicides in that it is centred around a tragedy within a town. If you are interested in what someone else thought about the book, there was a review in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/books/review/Gilmore-t.html It’s not glowing, but it will be interesting to compare the reviewer thoughts with our own at the next book club.
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Book Description:
Sixteen-year-old Nora Lindell is missing. And the neighborhood boys she's left behind are caught forever in the heady current of her absence.
As the days and years pile up, the mystery of her disappearance grows kaleidoscopically. A collection of rumors, divergent suspicions, and tantalizing what-ifs, Nora Lindell's story is a shadowy projection of teenage lust, friendship, reverence, and regret, captured magically in the disembodied plural voice of the boys who still long for her.
Told in haunting, percussive prose, Hannah Pittard's beautifully crafted novel tracks the emotional progress of the sister Nora left behind, the other families in their leafy suburban enclave, and the individual fates of the boys in her thrall. Far more eager to imagine Nora's fate than to scrutinize their own, the boys sleepwalk into an adulthood of jobs, marriages, families, homes, and daughters of their own, all the while pining for a girl–and a life–that no longer exists, except in the imagination.
A masterful literary debut that shines a light into the dream-filled space between childhood and all that follows, The Fates Will Find Their Way is a story about the stories we tell ourselves–of who we once were and may someday become.
Cutting for Stone by Ambraham Verghese
When I was searching for information on Cutting for Stone I came across this interesting website called Good Reads. Here you can search for a book and read other peoples reviews and see what others have rated the book. Cutting for Stone got 4.24 out of 5 from 34,000 reviewers. So it looks like a LOT of other people liked the book!
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Book Description:
Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics—their passion for the same woman—that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him—nearly destroying him—Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him
The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
Book Description
No twentieth-century American writer has captured the popular imagination as much as Ernest Hemingway. This novel tells his story from a unique point of view — that of his first wife, Hadley. Through her eyes and voice, we experience Paris of the Lost Generation and meet fascinating characters such as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Gerald and Sara Murphy. The city and its inhabitants provide a vivid backdrop to this engrossing and wrenching story of love and betrayal that is made all the more poignant knowing that, in the end, Hemingway would write of his first wife, "I wish I had died before I loved anyone but her."
