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This week, the Genre Reading Group met for one our biannual
Salon Discussions. Each year, GRG
selects ten topics to explore, leaving two months free for open discussion of
pretty much anything. We had a fabulous
chat!
Annotations pulled from Amazon and and Rotten Tomatoes,
unless otherwise noted.
How do you start over after the end of the world? Six years after a global pandemic wiped out
most of the planet’s population, the survivors are rebuilding the country,
split between self-governing cities, hippie communes and wasteland gangs. In
postapocalyptic San Francisco, former pop star Moira has created a new identity
to finally escape her past―until her domineering father launches a sweeping
public search to track her down. Desperate for a fresh start herself, jaded
event planner Krista navigates the world on behalf of those too traumatized to
go outside, determined to help everyone move on―even if they don’t want to.
Rob survived the catastrophe with his daughter, Sunny, but
lost his wife. When strict government rules threaten to separate parent and
child, Rob needs to prove himself worthy in the city’s eyes by connecting with
people again. Krista, Moira, Rob and Sunny are brought together by
circumstance, and their lives begin to twine together. But when reports of
another outbreak throw the fragile society into panic, the friends are forced
to finally face everything that came before―and everything they still stand to
lose. Because sometimes having one person is enough to keep the world going.
The worst thing possible has happened. Richard and Juliette
Willoughby's son, Ewan, has died suddenly at the age of five. Starve Acre,
their house by the moors, was to be full of life, but is now a haunted place. Juliette,
convinced Ewan still lives there in some form, seeks the help of the Beacons, a
seemingly benevolent group of occultists. Richard, to try and keep the boy out
of his mind, has turned his attention to the field opposite the house, where he
patiently digs the barren dirt in search of a legendary oak tree.
Starve Acre is a devastating new novel by the
author of the prize-winning bestseller
The
Loney. It is a novel about the way in which grief splits the world in two
and how, in searching for hope, we can so easily unearth horror.
The uproarious, bestselling true story of the
world's most sought-after con man,
immortalized
by Leonardo DiCaprio in DreamWorks' feature film of the same name,
from the author of
Scam
Me If You Can.
Frank W. Abagnale, alias Frank Williams, Robert Conrad, Frank Adams, and Robert
Monjo, was one of the most daring con men, forgers, imposters, and escape
artists in history. In his brief but notorious criminal career, Abagnale donned
a pilot's uniform and copiloted a Pan Am jet, masqueraded as the supervising
resident of a hospital, practiced law without a license, passed himself off as
a college sociology professor, and cashed over $2.5 million in forged checks,
all before he was twenty-one.
Known by the police of twenty-six foreign countries and all fifty states as
"The Skywayman," Abagnale lived a sumptuous life on the lam—until the
law caught up with him. Now recognized as the nation's leading authority on
financial foul play, Abagnale is a charming rogue whose hilarious,
stranger-than-fiction international escapades, and ingenious escapes-including
one from an airplane-make Catch Me If You Can an irresistible tale of
deceit.
Fresh out of Cambridge University, the young Mycroft Holmes
is already making a name for himself in government, working for the Secretary
of State for War. Yet this most British of civil servants has strong ties to
the faraway island of Trinidad, the birthplace of his best friend, Cyrus
Douglas, a man of African descent, and where his fiancée Georgiana Sutton was
raised.
Mycroft’s comfortable existence is overturned when Douglas receives troubling
reports from home. There are rumors of mysterious disappearances, strange
footprints in the sand, and spirits enticing children to their deaths, their
bodies found drained of blood. Upon hearing the news, Georgiana abruptly
departs for Trinidad. Near panic, Mycroft convinces Douglas that they should
follow her, drawing the two men into a web of dark secrets that grows more
treacherous with each step they take...
Written by NBA superstar Kareem Abdul- Jabbar and screenwriter Anna Waterhouse,
Mycroft Holmes reveals the untold story of Sherlock’s older brother. This
harrowing adventure changed his life and set the stage for the man Mycroft
would become: founder of the famous Diogenes Club and the hidden power behind
the British government.
In Furiously Happy, a humor memoir tinged with
just enough tragedy and pathos to make it worthwhile, Jenny Lawson examines her
own experience with severe depression and a host of other conditions, and
explains how it has led her to live life to the fullest:
"I've often thought that people with severe depression
have developed such a well for experiencing extreme emotion that they might be
able to experience extreme joy in a way that ‘normal people' also might never
understand. And that's what Furiously Happy is all about."
Jenny’s readings are standing room only, with fans lining up
to have Jenny sign their bottles of Xanax or Prozac as often as they are to
have her sign their books. Furiously Happy appeals to Jenny's core
fan base but also transcends it. There are so many people out there
struggling with depression and mental illness, either themselves or someone in
their family―and in Furiously Happy they will find a member of their
tribe offering up an uplifting message (via a taxidermied roadkill
raccoon). Let's Pretend This Never Happened ostensibly was
about embracing your own weirdness, but deep down it was about family. Furiously
Happy is about depression and mental illness, but deep down it's about
joy―and who doesn't want a bit more of that?
When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit
in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a
morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for
Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we
are all the better for it.
In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s
long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising
discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend
never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today.
For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the
things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical
look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives.
Albert Camus' The Stranger is one of the most
widely read novels in the world, with millions of copies sold. It stands as
perhaps the greatest existentialist tale ever conceived, and is certainly one
of the most important and influential books ever produced. Now, for the first
time, this revered masterpiece is available as an
unabridged
audio production.
When a young Algerian named Meursault kills a man, his
subsequent imprisonment and trial are puzzling and absurd. The apparently
amoral Meursault, who puts little stock in ideas like love and God, seems to be
on trial less for his murderous actions, and more for what the authorities
believe is his deficient character.
This remarkable translation by Matthew Ward has been
considered the definitive English version since its original publication. It
unlocks the prose as no other English version has, allowing the listener to
soak up the richness of Camus' ideas.
As fascism spreads, German refugee Georg (Franz Rogowski)
flees to Marseille and assumes the identity of the dead writer whose transit
papers he is carrying. Living among refugees from around the world, Georg falls
for Marie (Paula Beer), a mysterious woman searching for her husband--the man
whose identity he has stolen. Adapted from Anna Segher's 1942 novel, TRANSIT
transposes the original story to the present, blurring periods to create a
timeless exploration of the plight of displaced people.
With
The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel
brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with her peerless, Booker
Prize-winning novels,
Wolf
Hall and
Bring
Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from
nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of
predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between
royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through
conflict, passion and courage.
Within the glittering Hapsburg court in Prague lurks a
darkness of which no one dares speak…
In 1606, the city of Prague shines as a golden mecca of art
and culture carefully cultivated by Emperor Rudolf II. But the emperor hides an
ugly secret: His bastard son, Don Julius, is afflicted with a madness that
pushes the young prince to unspeakable depravity. Desperate to stem his son’s
growing number of scandals, the emperor exiles Don Julius to a remote corner of
Bohemia where the young man is placed in the care of a bloodletter named
Pichler. The bloodletter’s task: cure Don Julius of his madness by purging the
vicious humors coursing through his veins.
When Pichler brings his daughter Marketa to assist him, she
becomes the object of Don Julius’s frenzied—and dangerous—obsession. To him,
she is the embodiment of the women pictured in the Coded Book of Wonder, a
priceless manuscript from the imperial library that was the mad prince’s only
link to sanity. As the prince descends further into the darkness of his mind,
his acts become ever more desperate, as Marketa, both frightened and
fascinated, can’t stay away.
Inspired by a real-life murder that threatened to topple the
powerful Hapsburg dynasty, The Bloodletter’s Daughter is a dark and
richly detailed saga of passion and revenge.
From Publishers Weekly
If you've ever wondered what your dog is thinking, Stein's third novel offers
an answer. Enzo is a lab terrier mix plucked from a farm outside Seattle to
ride shotgun with race car driver Denny Swift as he pursues success on the
track and off. Denny meets and marries Eve, has a daughter, Zoë, and risks his
savings and his life to make it on the professional racing circuit. Enzo,
frustrated by his inability to speak and his lack of opposable thumbs, watches
Denny's old racing videos, coins koanlike aphorisms that apply to both driving
and life, and hopes for the day when his life as a dog will be over and he can
be reborn a man. When Denny hits an extended rough patch, Enzo remains his most
steadfast if silent supporter. Enzo is a reliable companion and a likable
enough narrator, though the string of Denny's bad luck stories strains
believability. Much like Denny, however, Stein is able to salvage some dignity
from the over-the-top drama. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information,
a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Evicted meets Nickel and Dimed in
Stephanie Land's memoir about working as a maid, a beautiful and gritty
exploration of poverty in America. Includes a foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich.
At 28, Stephanie Land's plans of breaking free from the
roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams of attending
a university and becoming a writer, were cut short when a summer fling turned
into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, and
with a tenacious grip on her dream to provide her daughter the very best life
possible, Stephanie worked days and took classes online to earn a college
degree, and began to write relentlessly.
Art restorer and sometime spy Gabriel Allon is sent to
Vienna to discover the truth behind a bombing that killed an old friend, but
while there he encounters something that turns his world upside down. It is a
face—a face that feels hauntingly familiar, a face that chills him to the
bone.
While desperately searching for answers, Allon will uncover a portrait of evil
stretching across sixty years and thousands of lives—and into his own personal
nightmares…
When his mother became President, Alex Claremont-Diaz was
promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome,
charismatic, genius―his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White
House. There's only one problem: Alex has a beef with the actual prince, Henry,
across the pond. And when the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an
Alex-Henry altercation, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse.
Mark Helprin’s legions of devoted readers cherish his
timeless novels and short stories, which are uplifting in their conviction of
the goodness and resilience of the human spirit. Freddy and Fredericka—a
brilliantly refashioned fairy tale and a magnificently funny farce—only seems
like a radical departure of form, for behind the laughter, Helprin speaks of
leaps of faith and second chances, courage and the primacy of love. Helprin’s
latest work, an extraordinarily funny allegory about a most peculiar British
royal family, is immensely mocking of contemporary monarchy and yet deeply sympathetic
to the individuals caught in its lonely absurdities.
The novel follows the parallel adventures and intertwining
fates of its protagonists Ned Rise, a luckless petty criminal, and the famous
explorer Mungo Park - the first a purely fictional character, the
latter based on a historical person. The book takes place in various locales in Scotland, England and Western Africa.
It revolves around
two Imperial British expeditions into the interior of Western Africa
in an effort to find and explore the Niger River. The novel is loosely
based on historical sources, including
Mungo Park's 1799
book,
Travels
in the Interior Districts of Africa. However, as Boyle admits in his
foreword to
Water Music, he does not claim historical accuracy or
even faithfulness to the contemporary accounts, whose reliability is doubtful
anyway.
A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn
private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grafter named Joel
Cairo, a fat man name Gutman, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a beautiful and
treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the
ingredients of Dashiell Hammett's iconic, influential, and beloved The
Maltese Falcon.
A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe
Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long
shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the
Golden Age of comic books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is
looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal partner in the
aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that
takes them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned
American ambition.
From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage
boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and
the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night.
Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building,
Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink. Spanning
continents and eras, this superb book by one of America’s finest writers
remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age.
GENERAL DISCUSSION:
A haunting tale of human resilience and hope in the face of
unrelieved horror, Albert Camus' iconic novel about an epidemic ravaging the
people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century
literature.
The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its
victims to a swift and horrifying death. Fear, isolation and claustrophobia
follow as they are forced into quarantine. Each person responds in their own
way to the lethal disease: some resign themselves to fate, some seek blame, and
a few, like Dr. Rieux, resist the terror.
An immediate triumph when it was published in 1947, The Plague is
in part an allegory of France's suffering under the Nazi occupation, and a
timeless story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human
existence.
Tony Award-winning actor Mark Rylance and Emmy Award-winning
Damian Lewis star as Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII in this adaptation of
Hilary Mantel’s novels. A historical drama for a modern audience, Wolf Hall
charts Cromwell’s meteoric rise in the Tudor court – from blacksmith’s son to
Henry VIII’s closest advisor, trapped between his desire to do what is right
and his instinct to survive.
Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for
poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was
inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised
that a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But how does
anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left
her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs
she was offered.
Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a
waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart
sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very
quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even
the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She
also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to
live indoors.
Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety,
and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand
desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of
Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity"
looks from the bottom. You will never see anything -- from a motel bathroom to
a restaurant meal -- in quite the same way again.
In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur
“Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each
struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory”
(The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms
our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh
ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating
problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality
of home, without which nothing else is possible.
The year is 2008 and Samantha Kofer’s career at a huge Wall
Street law firm is on the fast track—until the recession hits and she is
downsized, furloughed, and escorted out of the building. Samantha, though, is
offered an opportunity to work at a legal aid clinic for one year without pay,
all for a slim chance of getting rehired.
In a matter of days Samantha moves from Manhattan to Brady, Virginia,
population 2,200, in the heart of Appalachia, a part of the world she has only
read about. Samantha’s new job takes her into the murky and dangerous world of
coal mining, where laws are often broken, communities are divided, and the land
itself is under attack. But some of the locals aren’t so thrilled to have a
big-city lawyer in town, and within weeks Samantha is engulfed in litigation
that turns deadly. Because like most small towns, Brady harbors big secrets
that some will kill to conceal.
Wallander series
Wallander is a British television series adapted from
the Swedish novelist Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels
and starring Kenneth Branagh as the eponymous police inspector. It
was the first time the Wallander novels have been adapted into an
English-language production.
Millennium series
THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING SENSATION. In these
page-turning thrillers, a crusading journalist and a cyberpunk hacker team up
to drag Sweden’s darkest secrets into the light: family scandals, political
corruption, sex crimes, and murder. Experience Stieg Larsson’s Millennium
Series, which introduced the world to one of the most original, unforgettable
characters in crime fiction: Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo
and a quest for revenge.
ABC News' all-new series, "The Genetic
Detective," follows investigative genetic genealogist CeCe
Moore as she uses her unique research skills to transform the face of crime
solving. By working with police departments and crime scene DNA, Moore is able
to trace the path of a violent criminal's family tree to reveal their identity
and help bring them to justice. Airs Tuesday nights at 9pm.
Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life
scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption
organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the
country—Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale
reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the
heart never forgets where we belong.
The compelling, poignant true stories of victims of a
notorious adoption scandal—some of whom learned the truth from Lisa Wingate’s
bestselling novel Before We Were Yours and were reunited with birth
family members as a result of its wide reach.
THE BASIS FOR THE MAJOR 6-PART HBO® DOCUMENTARY SERIES
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR:
Washington Post | Maureen Corrigan, NPR | Paste | Seattle
Times | Entertainment Weekly | Esquire | Slate |
Buzzfeed | Jezebel | Philadelphia Inquirer | Publishers
Weekly | Kirkus Reviews | Library Journal | Bustle
Winner of the Goodreads Choice Awards for Nonfiction |
Anthony Award Winner | SCIBA Book Award Winner | Finalist for the Edgar Award
for Best Fact Crime | Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence
The haunting true story of the elusive serial rapist
turned murderer who terrorized California during the 70s and 80s, and
of the gifted journalist who died tragically while investigating the
case—which was solved in April 2018. Introduction by Gillian
Flynn • Afterword by Patton Oswalt
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