LOST by ALICE LICHTENSTEIN

On a cold January morning, Susan a professor of Biology, leaves her husband alone for a few minutes and returns to find him gone. Suffering from dementia, no longer able to take care of himself, Christopher has wandered into a frigid landscape with no sense of direction, LOST!

Susan's life intersects with those of two strangers, Jeff, her liaison with the police, a social worker and search-and-rescue expert and Corey, a twelve year old boy rendered mute by a family tragedy who has become one of Jeff's cases.

From the unexpected convergence of three lives, Corey, Jeff and Susan, emerges an arresting portrait of the shifting terrain or marriage, and the uneasy burden of love and regret.

THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

It is January 1946. London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man that she had never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb.

As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world

of this man and his friends. It is a wonderfully eccentric world. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, born as a spur of the moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island, boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers, all.

Juliet begins a remarkable correspondence with the society's members, learning about their island, their taste in books, and the impact the recent German occupation has had on their lives. Captivated by their stories, she sets sail for Guernsey, and what she finds will change her forever.

The book is written with warmth and humor as a series of letters.

HOMER AND LANGLEY BY E.L. DOCTOROW

Homer and Langley are brothers, the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness or perhaps greatness by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think that they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers, as research for Langley's proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet, the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers, wars, political movements, technological advances, and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians......and their housebound lives are fraught with peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves.

The book is brilliantly conceived, and gorgeously written, this is a wonderful rendering of the lives of the Collyer brothers.

Eat, Pray and Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

In her early thirties, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything that a modern American woman is supposed to want, husband, country home, successful career, but instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she felt consumed by panic and confusion. The book tells the story of how she left behind all those outward signs of success and what she found in its place. Following a divorce and a crushing depression , Gilbert set out to examine three different parts of her nature, set against the backdrop of three different cultures, pleasure in Italy, devotion in India and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence.

The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee

IN 1942, Will Truesdale an Englishman newly arrived in Hong Kong falls passionately in love with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But, their affair is threatened by the invasion of the Japanese as World War II overwhelms their lives.

Ten year later, Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong and is hired by the wealthy Chen family as their daughter's piano teacher. Seduced by the colony's heady social life, she soon begins an affair, only to discover that her lover is hiding a devastating past. As the threads of this spellbound novel intertwine, impossible choices emerge between love and safety, courage and survival, the present and above all, the past.

MUDBOUND by Hillary Jordan

When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place that is both foreign and frightening. As the McAllan's are tested in every way two celebrated soldiers of World War II return home to help work on the farm. Ronsel Jackson is the eldest son of a black sharecropper who live on the McAllan farm. Jamie is everything that his older brother Henry is not.

Mudbound reveals how everyone becomes a player in a tragedy on the grandest scale as they strive for love and honor.

Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross

Brilliant and talented, Joan rebels against the medieval social structures that forbid women to learn. When her brother is brutally killed, during a Viking attack, Joan takes up his cloak and his identity and enters the monastery of Fulda. As brother John, Joan distinguishes herself as a great scholar and healer. Eventually, she is drawn to Rome, where she become enmeshed in a dangerous web of love, passion and politics. She finally attains the highest office in Christendom wielding a power greater than any woman before or since. But, such power always comes at a price.

The Dark Ages come to life in all their brutal splendor. It is the story of a woman whose strength of vision led her to defy the social restrictions of the day.

BRIGHT SHINY MORNING BY JAMES FREY

This book is a sweeping chronicle of contemporary Los Angeles that is bold, exhilarating and utterly original.

Dozens of characters pass along the readers sight lines. some never to be seen again. But, James Frey lingers on a handful of LA's lost souls and captures the dramatic narrative of their lives. There is a bright, ambitious young Mexican-American who allows her future to be undone by a moment of searing humiliation. There is a supremely narcissistic movie star whose passion for the unattainable object of his passion nearly destroys him. There is a couple, both nineteen years old who flee their hometown and struggle to survive on the fringes of the great city,. There is an aging Venice Beach alcoholic whose life is turned upside down when a meth-addled teen shows up half dead outside the restroom that he calls home.

The book illuminates the joys, horrors, and unexpected fortunes of life and death in Los Angeles.

THE SHADOW OF THE WIND by CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals from its war wounds, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer's son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled, THE SHADOW OF THE WIND, by one Julian Carax. But, when he sets out to find the author's other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book that Carax has written. In fact, Daniel, may have the last of Carax's books in existence. Soon Daniel's seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona's darkest secrets.

This is an epic story of murder, madness and doomed love.

THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST BY MOHSIN HAMID

At a cafe table in LAHORE, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy, American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful encounter.

Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. At the top of his class in Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant and beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exhalted level once occupied by his own family back in Laghore.

But, in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned and his relationship with Erica shifting. And Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power and maybe even, love.

NETHERLAND BY JOSEPH O'NEILL

Unexpectedly finding himself marooned among the strange occupants of New York's Chelsea Hotel, feeling lost in the country that he has come to regard as home, Hans van den Brock begins an unlikely friendship with Chuck Ramkissoon, a charming Trinidadian who introduces Hans to an "other" America populated by immigrants,and strivers of every race and nationality. What holds them all together is their love of cricket and this allows Hans to re-connect with his adopted home, after his wife and son return to England after the horrible events of September 11.

A HOLE IN THE EARTH BY ROBERT BAUSCH

Henry Porter's summer begins when his daughter Nicole, who he hasn't seen since his wife divorced him five years ago shows up on his doorstep. Nicole is a surprise. She just graduated high school and is almost an adult. The gap between the little girl that Henry once knew and the woman she has become leaves him fumbling for words. The very evening of Nicole's arrival, Henry's girlfriend, Elizabeth, reveals that she is pregnant, leaving Henry speechless once more. He deals best with situations like these by heading to the racetrack in time for the daily double and to place a few bets.

At the heart of this compelling and thought-provoking look at family, relationships and why men act the way that they do is the profound and affecting story of a family piecing itself back together.

SOUTH OF BROAD BY PAT CONROY

Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Bend gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. Leopold Bloom King, the narrator is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school Principal and a respected Joyce scholar. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of ten, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death and Leo, lonely and isolated, searches for something to sustain him. Eventually, he finds his answer when he becomes part of a tightly knit group of high school seniors that include Sheba and Trevor Poe, glamorous twins with an alcoholic mother and a prison-escapee father; hard scramble mountain runaways Niles and Starla Whitehead, socialite Molly Huger and her boyfriend, Chadworth Rutledge. The ties among them last for years. The final test of friendship brings them to San Francisco and is something that no one is prepared for.

Julie and Julia by Julie Powell

Nearly thirty and trapped in a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell resolves to reclaim her life by cooking, in the span of a single year, every one of 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her unexpected reward: not just a newfound respect for calves liver and aspic, but a new life.....lived with gusto.

This was the worst book that I ever read. I finished it because the library is doing it for a book discussion and since Martin has CHF we will never attend GREAT BOOKS again. I wanted to discuss a book and this is it. It isn't worth the paper that it was written on.

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

This is the story of two women. Their lives collide on faithful day and one of them has to make a terrible choice, the kind of choice that we hope that you never have to face. Two years later, they meet again......the story starts there.

The Forger's Spell

As riveting as a World War II thriller, this book is the true story of three men and an extraordinary deception: the revered artist Johannes Vermeer, the small time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him years later and the con man's mark, Hermann Goering, the fanatical art collector and one of Nazi Germany's most reviled leaders.

The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz

This book is beautifully written. It is a deeply felt discourse on Mexico's quest for identity. It gives us an unequaled look at the country hidden behind the mask.

The Piano Lesson by August Wilson

At the heart of this Pulitzer Prize winning play stands the ornately carved upright piano that has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles's Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, her exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that their family had worked on as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the cash he needs to stake his future. Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This book tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad and alive with unforgettable men and women, brimming with truth, compassion and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul.

Still Alice by Lisa Genova

Alice Howland is proud of the life that she worked so hard to build. At fifty years old, she's a cognitive professor at Harvard and a world renowned expert in linguistics with a successful husband and three grown children. When she becomes increasingly disoriented and forgetful, a tragic diagnosis changes her life and her relationship with her family and the word forever.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Hanna Heath, an Australian rare book expert, has been offered the job of a lifetime; analysis and conservation of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, rescued from the Serb shelling during the Bosnian War. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illustrated with images. When Hanna discovers a series of tiny artifacts, in its ancient binding, an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair, she begins to unlock the book's mysteries ushering in its exquisite and atmospheric past, from its salvation to its creation through centuries of exile and war.

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

In the year 1954, U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, came to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate an unexplained disappearance. Multiple murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this barren island despite having been kept under constance surveilance in a locked, guarded cell. As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on the island, hints of radical experimentation, and covert government machinations add darker, more sinister shades to an already bizarre case. Because nothing in Asheville Hospital is remotely what it seems.

Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay

PARIS, July 1942- Sarah, a ten year old girl, is taken with her parents by the French police as they go door to door arresting Jewish families in the middle of the night. Desperate to protect her younger brother, Sarah locks him in a bedroom cupboard, their secret hiding place, and promises to come back for him as soon as they are released.

SIXTY YEARS LATER- Sarah's story intertwines with that of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist investigating the roundup. In her research, Julia stumbles onto a trail of secrets that link her to Sarah, and to questions about her own romantic future.