Library Book Club

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American.

Senator John McCain learned about life and honor from his grandfather and father, both four-star admirals in the U.S. Navy. Told with humility, grace, and humor, it is a story of three imperfect men who faced adversity-and emerged with their honor intact.

A dark psychological tale of secrets and betrayal, dead loves and an estate called Manderley that is as much a presence as the humans who inhabit it: "when the leaves rustle, they sound very much like the stealthy movement of a woman in evening dress."

"Berry richly evokes Port William's farmlands and hamlets, and his characters are fiercely individual, yet mutually protective in everything they do. . . . His sentences are exquisitely constructed, suggesting the cyclic rhythms of his agrarian world."--New York Times Book Review.

Will there ever be a time that listeners will not want to hear the story of Scrooge, Tiny Tim and the Ghosts of Christmas?

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise he is brought face to face with his own mortality.

Deeply moving study of the tyrannical and rigid requirements of New York high society in the late 19th century and the effect of those strictures on the lives of three people. Vividly characterized drama of affection thwarted by a man’s sense of honor, family, and societal pressures.

Persuasion concerns the lives and loves of the Elliot family and their friends and relatives, in particular the thwarted romance between Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth. Finely drawn characters, gentle satire and wonderful recreation of genteel life in the English countryside.

Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal’s abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return.

Asher Lev grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. But in time his artistic gift threatens to estrange him from that world and the parents he adores. As it follows his struggle, the novel becomes a luminous portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant.

Jane is abused by her aunt and cousin and then attends a harsh charity school. Through it all she remains strong and determinedly refuses to allow a cruel world to crush her independence or her strength of will. A masterful story of a woman's quest for freedom and love.

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Azar Nafisi, a bold and inspired teacher, secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics... They were shy and uncomfortable at first... but soon they removed their veils and began to speak more freely.