Nemesis by Philip Roth

In the stifling heat of Newark, a terrifying epidemic is raging threatening the children of the New Jersey City with maiming, paralysis, lifelong disability and even death. This is the story of a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect that it has on a closely knit family oriented Newark community and its children.

At the center of the book, is a vigorous twenty-three year old playground director named Bucky Cantor. Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground and on the everyday realities that he faces, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion that polio brought to a community. Roth depicts a decent energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic. Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantor's passage into personal disaster.

Questions are posed such as, what kind of choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand the onslaught of circumstance?

The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman

Josef Kohn is a successful New York obstetrician who still dreams of his first wife, Lenka, an art student he left behind in Czechoslovakia while fleeing the Nazis.

Lenka, who he believes died during the war, continues to haunt his dreams, while his second wife, Amalia, remains more of a ghost to him than is Lenka. As we follow Lenka's journey to the ghetto of Terezin, where she is forced to draft technical drawings for the Germans and is a witness to the secret paintings of an underground group of artists involved in their own form of resistance against their captors, we see not only the endurance of the human spirit, but also of the artist, whose desire to create and document, cannot be extinguished.

From the glamourous of pre-war Prague, to the ensuing horrors of the Nazi Europe, we experience both the dawning of Lenka's and Josef's love affair to its tragic unraveling. Each character must forge their own path for survival and each must struggle to adapt to post-war America, while their secrets, their past and the ghost of their first marriage are only known to them.

The First Wife is a story that explores the depth......the power of first love, the resilience of the human spirit, and our capacity to remember.