First Fiction Book Club

November 2010 Selection: Set against the backdrop of a devastating forest fire that Henry David Thoreau accidentally set in 1844, John Pipkin's novel brilliantly illuminates the mind of the young philosopher at a formative moment in his life and in the life of the young nation.

September 2010 Selection: A haunting, masterfully-wrought debut novel about a young woman adrift in Berlin, where a string of fateful encounters leads to romance, violence, and revelation.

July 2010 Selection: Teasing, provocative, and funny, Hanif's debut novel imagines a connection between the still mysterious 1988 plane crash that ended the life of the Pakistani dictator General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq and the events of 9/11.

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.

March 2010 Selection: In the sweeping tradition of The English Patient comes this gripping tale set in war-torn Hong Kong. Rich with intrigue, romance, and betrayal, this wonderfully written, utterly captivating novel dazzles.

January 2010 Selection: For the farming Pye family of northern Ontario, life is a Greek tragedy where the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, and terrible events occur offstage. In this universal drama of family love and misunderstandings, Lawson ratchets up the tension with heartbreaking humor and consummate control.

August 2009 Selection: A mesmerizing, allegorical, and beautifully wrought first novel about one boy's fascination with the sea during the summer that will change his life. One moonlit night, thirteen-year-old Miles O'Malley slips out of his house, packs up his kayak and goes exploring on the flats of Puget Sound. But what begins as an ordinary hunt for starfish, snails, and clams is soon transformed by an astonishing sight: a beached giant squid. As the first person to ever see a giant squid alive, the speed-reading Rachel Carson-obsessed insomniac instantly becomes a local curiosity. When he later finds a rare deepwater fish in the tidal waters by his home, and saves a dog from drowning, he is hailed as a prophet. The media hovers and everyone wants to hear what Miles has to say. But Miles is really just a teenager on the verge of growing up, infatuated with the girl next door, worried that his bickering parents will divorce, and fearful that everything, even the bay he loves, is shifting away from him. While the sea continues to offer up discoveries from its mysterious depths, Miles struggles to deal with the difficulties that attend the equally mysterious process of growing up. In this mesmerizing, beautifully wrought first novel, we witness the dramatic sea change for both Miles and the coastline that he adores over the course of a summer--one that will culminate with the highest tide in fifty years.

June 2009 Selection: Christmas Eve 1967: the night the lives of the McDonald children, Deborah, Robert, James, and Meredith, changed forever. Their mother, Rosemarie, told them she was running out to buy more lights for the tree. Instead, she boarded a plane bound for London, leaving the children with their father and the gnawing question: Why did their mother abandon them? Over the years the siblings have become practiced in concealing their pain, remaining close into adulthood and forming their own families. But long-closed wounds are reopened and secrets that each sibling has locked away come to light, as their father progresses into dementia and James encounters Rosemarie after nearly forty years of her absence. Veitch's family portrait reveals the joys and sorrows, the complexity and ambiguity of family life, and poignantly probes what it means to love and what it means to leave.

February 2009 Selection: A tender and sharply observant debut novel about a missing young girl. Kate Meaney, with her "Top Secret" notebook and toy monkey in tow, is hard at work as a junior detective. Busy trailing "suspects" and carefully observing everything around her at the newly opened Green Oaks shopping mall, she forms an unlikely friendship with Adrian, the son of a local shopkeeper. But when this curious, independent-spirited young girl disappears, Adrian falls under suspicion and is hounded out of his home by the press.

November 2008 Selection: In 2002, a Cambridge historian is found dead, floating down the river Cam, a glass prism in her hand, after researching a book about a series of suspicious circumstances surrounding Newton's appointment as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1667. That year, two Fellows died by falling down staircases, apparently drunk; another died in a field, apparently drunk; and a fourth was expelled, having gone mad-leaving vacancies for new appointments and paving the way for Newton's extraordinary scientific discoveries. When Lydia Brooke, at the request of her ex-lover, the historian's son, steps in to finish the book, strange shows of light begin to play on the walls, and papers disappear only to reappear elsewhere. And when events escalate to murder, and Lydia's rekindled romance appears increasingly implicated in the danger, the present becomes entangled with the seventeenth century, with Isaac Newton at the center of the mystery. Filled with evocative descriptions of Cambridge, past and present, of seventeenth-century glassmaking, alchemy, the Great Plague, and Newton's scientific innovations, "Ghostwalk" centers on a real historical mystery that Rebecca Stott has uncovered, involving Newton's alchemy. A riveting literary thriller, "Ghostwalk "is a rare debut that will change the way most of us think about scientific innovation, our perception of time, and the force of history.