First Fiction Book Club

November 2011 Pick: Punctuated with great wit, beauty, and playfulness, Mason's brilliant and beguiling debut novel re-imagines Homer's classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy, opening up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations.

September 2011 Selection: Born in a landlocked town in the center of Kansas, Pip is tall, flat, smart, funny, and supernaturally buoyant. On land, she has her share of troubles: an agoraphobic mother, a lost father, and a school full of nuns who just want her to sit still. But in the water, Pip is unstoppable. Swimming her way from a small Midwestern team to the Barcelona Olympics, Pip's journey is the story of a young girl with an unsinkable spirit, struggling to stay afloat in the only way she can.

July 2011 Selection: Libya, 1979. Nine-year-old Suleiman's days are circumscribed by the narrow rituals of childhood: outings to the ruins surrounding Tripoli, games with friends played under the burning sun, exotic gifts from his father's constant business trips abroad. But his nights have come to revolve around his mother's increasingly disturbing bedside stories full of old family bitterness. And then one day Suleiman sees his father across the square of a busy marketplace, his face wrapped in a pair of dark sunglasses. Wasn't he supposed to be away on business yet again? Why is he going into that strange building with the green shutters? Why did he lie? Suleiman is soon caught up in a world he cannot hope to understand--where the sound of the telephone ringing becomes a portent of grave danger; where his mother frantically burns his father's cherished books; where a stranger full of sinister questions sits outside in a parked car all day; where his best friend's father can disappear overnight, next to be seen publicly interrogated on state television. In the Country of Men is a stunning depiction of a child confronted with the private fallout of a public nightmare. But above all, it is a debut of rare insight and literary grace.

May 2011 Selection: Part love story, part literary mystery, Melanie Benjamin's spellbinding historical novel leads readers on an unforgettable journey down the rabbit hole, to tell the story of a woman whose own life became the stuff of legend. Her name is Alice Liddell Hargreaves, but to the world she'll always be known simply as "Alice," the girl who followed the White Rabbit into a wonderland of Mad Hatters, Queens of Hearts, and Cheshire Cats. Now, nearing her eighty-first birthday, she looks back on a life of intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. First as a young woman, then as a wife, mother, and widow, she'll experience adventures the likes of which not even her fictional counterpart could have imagined. Yet from glittering balls and royal romances to a world plunged into war, she'll always be the same determined, undaunted Alice who, at ten years old, urged a shy, stuttering Oxford professor to write down one of his fanciful stories, thus changing her life forever.

March 2011 Selections::Set against the gorgeous backdrop of Rome, Rachman's wry, vibrant debut follows the topsy-turvy private lives of the reporters, editors, and executives of an international English-language newspaper as they struggle to keep it--and themselves--afloat.

January 2011 Selections: In the small village of Edgecombe St. Mary in the English countryside lives Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson's wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing, the Major leads a quiet life valuing the proper things that Englishmen have lived by for generations: honor, duty, decorum, and a properly brewed cup of tea. But then his brother's death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. But village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and regarding her as the permanent foreigner. Can their relationship survive the risks one takes when pursuing happiness in the face of culture and tradition?

October 2010 Selection: Set in a beautiful but economically-devastated Pennsylvania steel town, American Rust is a novel of the lost American Dream and the desperation that arises from its loss.

August 2010 Selection: An astonishing first novel of memory, consciousness, and man's place in the natural world.

May 2010 Selection: The astonishing first novel from the author of the award-winning story collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers weaves together the delicate moments between mothers and sons, husbands and wives, illuminating the reality of oppression and pain.