Book of the Month

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December - Jennifer Egan, Invisible Circus
Phoebe goes on a quest to understand her sister Faith so that she can begin her own life, free from the bonds of the unresolved family issues that Faith's life and mysterious death created. - Amazon review
January - V.S. Naipaul, Half a Life
Half a Life finds the veteran Booker and Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul on familiar territory, blending autobiography and fiction in an exploration of the "half lives" of individuals brought up in the English colonies and educated in metropolitan cities. - Amazon review
FebruaryFinding Makeba - Alexis D. Pate
Alexis Pate tells the story of how Ben Crestfield meets the woman he loves, marries her and then leaves his wife and daughter, Makeba, despite his promises to himself that he will never be that kind of man. Ben's story is entertwined with excerpts from Makeba's journal, as he and Makeba struggle to bridge the gap created by the years they have been apart.
MarchSex in the City - Clarence Bushnell
The "Sex and the City" columnist for the New York Observer documents the social scene of modern-day Manhattan. The reader gets an introduction to "Modelizers," the men who only have eyes for models, as well as a more common species, the "Toxic Bachelor."
AprilThe Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen's exhilarating novel The Corrections tells a spellbinding story with sexy comic brio, and evokes a quirky family akin to Anne Tyler's, only bitter.
MayLook At Me * - Jennifer Egan
Thirty-five-year-old Charlotte, a thoroughly unpleasant Manhattan-based model who escaped the middle-class nothingness of her upbringing in Rockford, Ill., then spent her adult life getting by on appearances, literally loses her face in a catastrophic car accident back in Rockford. As Charlotte's rebuilt face heals and she goes unrecognized at the restaurants and nightclubs that were her old haunts, she must grapple with the lives and losses she has tried to outrun a fractured childhood friendship, the fianc‚ she betrayed and "Z," a suspicious man from an unidentified Middle Eastern country.
June Cane River - Lalita Tademy
Lalita Tademy's riveting family saga chronicles four generations of women born into slavery along the Cane River in Louisiana. It is also a tale about the blurring of racial boundaries: great-grandmother Elisabeth notices an unmistakable "bleaching of the line" as first her daughter Suzette, then her granddaughter Philomene, and finally her great-granddaughter Emily choose (or are forcibly persuaded) to bear the illegitimate offspring of the area's white French planters.
JulyCatching Alice - Clare Naylor
Naylor's second novel reinvents Alice in Wonderland by plunking dumpy, brokenhearted Alice Lewis into the heart of the Los Angeles celebrity culture. When Alice flees London to escape the constant reminders of a broken relationship with an English heel, she finds L.A. a strange Wonderland indeed
AugustCaus Celeb - Helen Fielding
The narrator, Rosie Richardson, runs a relief camp in the invented country of Nambula. Henry, the most flippant member of her staff, wears a T-shirt that tersely lists the various motivations for relief workers to come to Africa: "(a) Missionary? (b) Mercenary? (c) Misfit? (d) Broken heart?" As Rosie herself admits, she is "a c/d hybrid and soft in the head to boot."
SeptemberBel Canto - Ann Patchett
In an unnamed South American country, a world-renowned soprano sings at a birthday party in honor of a visiting Japanese industrial titan. His hosts hope that Mr. Hosokawa can be persuaded to build a factory in their Third World backwater. Alas, in the opening sequence, just as the accompanist kisses the soprano, a ragtag band of 18 terrorists enters the vice-presidential mansion through the air conditioning ducts. Their quarry is the president, who has unfortunately stayed home to watch a favorite soap opera. And thus, from the beginning, things go awry.
OctoberEmpire Falls - Richard Russo
Like most of Richard Russo's earlier novels, Empire Falls is a tale of blue-collar life, which itself increasingly resembles a kind of high-wire act performed without the benefit of any middle-class safety nets. This time, though, the author has widened his scope, producing a comic and compelling ensemble piece.
NovemberThe Bone-Setter’s Daughter - Amy Tan
At the beginning of Amy Tan's fourth novel, two packets of papers written in Chinese calligraphy fall into the hands of Ruth Young. One bundle is titled Things I Know Are True and the other, Things I Must Not Forget. The author? That would be the protagonist's mother, LuLing, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In these documents the elderly matriarch, born in China in 1916, has set down a record of her birth and family history, determined to keep the facts from vanishing as her mind deteriorates.
Alternates The Last Time They Met - Anita Shreve
The Last Time They Met opens with two old lovers, both poets, running into each other at a writer's conference. Well, Linda Fallon and Thomas Janes aren't old, actually--just middle-aged, with a lifetime's worth of history between them.
Back When We Were Grownups, A Novel* - Anne Tyler
At 53, the perpetually agreeable main character is "wide and soft and dimpled, with two short wings of dry, fair hair flaring almost horizontally from a center part." Given her role as the matriarch of a large family--and the proprietress of a party-and-catering concern, the Open Arms--Rebecca is both personally and professionally inclined toward jollity. But at an engagement bash for one of her multiple stepdaughters, she finds herself questioning everything about her life: "How on earth did I get like this? How? How did I ever become this person who's not really me?"