2014 Book Discussions, June - October

June 28^th      Sarah's Key, Tatiana de Rosnay

Sarah's Key, first published in September 2006. Two main parallel plots are followed through the book. The first is that of ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski, a Jewish girl born in Paris, who is arrested with her parents during the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup. Before they go, she locks her four-year-old brother in a cupboard, thinking the family should be back in a few hours. The second plot follows Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris, who is asked to write an article in honour of the 60th anniversary of the roundup.

July 26^th         You, Too, Can Be 10% Happier, Dan Harris

 After 9/11, I spent many years covering wars overseas. When I  came home I got depressed and did a really stupid thing, which is that I self-medicated with recreational drugs, including cocaine and Ecstasy. While I wasn't doing it at work and I definitely wasn't doing it while I was on the air, I later learned from my doctor that (the drugs) primed me to have a panic attack on Good Morning America. It was extremely embarrassing, and that realization of what a moron I'd been kind of set me off on this strange journey.

Aug 23rd        Calling Me Home, Julie Kibler

 Eighty-nine-year-old Isabelle McAllister has a big favor to ask her hairdresser, Dorrie. She wants the black single mother to drop everything and drive her from Texas to a funeral in Ohio tomorrow. Dorrie, fleeing problems of her own and curious about Isabelle's past, agrees, not knowing it will be a journey that changes both their lives. Isabelle confesses that, as a teen in 1930s Kentucky, she fell in love with Robert Prewitt, a would-be doctor and the black son of her family's housekeeper in a town where blacks weren't allowed after dark. The tale of their forbidden relationship and its tragic consequences just might help Dorrie find her own way. 

Sept 27^th        Angela's Ashes, Frank Mc Court

 Angela's Ashes is a 1996 memoir by the Irish author Frank McCourt. The memoir consists of various anecdotes and stories of Frank McCourt's impoverished childhood and early adulthood in Brooklyn, New York, and in Limerick, Ireland. It also includes McCourt's struggles with poverty, his father's drinking, and his mother's attempts to keep the family alive. Angela's Ashes was published in 1996 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. A sequel to the book, 'Tis, was published in 1999, and was followed by Teacher Man in 2005.

Oct 25^th          The Accident, Chris Pavone

As dawn approaches in New York, literary agent Isabel Reed is turning the final pages of a mysterious, anonymous manuscript, racing through the explosive revelations about powerful people, as well as long-hidden secrets about her own past. In Copenhagen, veteran CIA operative Hayden Gray, determined that this sweeping story be buried, is suddenly staring down the barrel of an unexpected gun. And in Zurich, the author himself is hiding in a shadowy expat life, trying to atone for a lifetime’s worth of lies and betrayals with publication of The Accident, while always looking over his shoulder.

Over the course of one long, desperate, increasingly perilous day, these lives collide as the book begins its dangerous march toward publication, toward saving or ruining careers and companies, placing everything at risk—and everyone in mortal peril.  The rich cast of characters—in publishing and film, politics and espionage—are all forced to confront the consequences of their ambitions, the schisms between their ideal selves and the people they actually became