Thursday, July 7, 7:00 pm Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold A powerful first novel, narrated by Susie Salmon, in heaven. Brutally raped and murdered by a deceptively mild-mannered neighbor, Susie begins with a compelling description of her death. During the next ten years, she watches over her family and…
Tuesday, June 21, 7:00 pm If Washington, D.C. housewife Eliza Benedict sometimes seems preoccupied, it’s easy to imagine why: As a teenager a quarter century ago, she was kidnapped by a serial rapist and murderer. That maniac is now sitting on death row and he is making one last macabre…
Thursday, June 2, 7:00 pm Close Range and Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx A raw, powerful story of two young men, a Wyoming ranch hand and a rodeo cowboy, who meet in the summer of 1963 sheepherding in the harsh, high grasslands of contemporary Wyoming and form an unorthodox yet…
Tuesday, May 17, 7:00 pm In this stunning first novel, Mary Sutter is a brilliant, headstrong midwife from Albany, New York, who dreams of becoming a surgeon. Determined to overcome the prejudices against women in medicine-and eager to run away from her recent heartbreak- Mary leaves home and travels to…
Thursday, May 5, 7:00 pm Dear John by Nicholas Sparks An angry rebel, John dropped out of school and enlisted in the Army, not knowing what else to do with his life—until he meets the girl of his dreams, Savannah. Their mutual attraction quickly grows into the kind of love…
Tuesday, April 19, 7:00 pm In the years preceding the United States’ entrance into World War II, radio journalist Frankie Bard broadcasts from London during the air raids. Among her listeners are several residents of a small Cape Cod town. Writing in starkly descriptive prose, novelist Blake offers a revealing…
Thursday, April 7, 7:00 pm My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult This is the story of Anna Fitzgerald who was conceived so that she could be a genetically compatible donor for her older sister, Kate, who suffers from leukemia. When Kate is 16 and Anna is 13, Kate needs a…
Tuesday, March 22, 7:00 pm Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking is about grieving for her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne. The couple had been married since 1964 when Dunne died of a heart attack at the end of 2003. His death came suddenly, just as the…
Thursday, March 3, 7:00 pm Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier Cold Mountain is a 1997 historical fiction novel by Charles Frazier. It tells the story of W.P. Inman, a wounded deserter from the Confederate army near the end of the American Civil War who walks for months to return to…
Tuesday, February 22, 7:00 pm Olive Kitteridge, the 2008 “novel in stories” by Elizabeth Strout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The title character appears in all thirteen stories in the book in a variety of ways following the flow of her life from middle age into old age.…
