Eclectic Book Club meets once a month, please check the events calendar. We read a varied mix of fiction and non-fiction and are always looking for new members.
Following a desperate night-long battle, a group of beleaguered soldiers in an isolated base in Kandahar are faced with a lone woman demanding the return of her brother’s body. Is she a spy, a black widow, a lunatic? Or is she what she claims to be: a grieving young sister intent on burying her brother according to local rites? Single-minded in her mission, she refuses to move from her spot on the field in full view of every soldier in the stark outpost. Her presence quickly proves dangerous as the camp’s tense, claustrophobic atmosphere comes to a boil when the men begin arguing about what to do next.
Told from various points of view, including those of the U.S. soldiers, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s heartbreaking and haunting novel takes a timeless tragedy and hurls it into present-day Afghanistan. Taking its cues from the Antigone myth, Roy-Bhattacharya recreates the chaos, intensity, and immediacy of battle, and conveys the inevitable repercussions felt by the soldiers, and their families, and especially one sister. The result is the most powerful expression to date of the nature and futility of war.
The first in an ambitious cycle of novels set in the Islamic world, "The Storyteller of Marrakesh" is an elegant exploration of the nature of reality and our shifting perceptions of truth.
TIME Magazine’s #1 Fiction Book of 2012!
“The Fault in Our Stars is
a love story, one of the most genuine and moving ones in recent
American fiction, but it’s also an existential tragedy of tremendous
intelligence and courage and sadness.” —Lev Grossman, TIME MagazineDespite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a
few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter
inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus
Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is
about to be completely rewritten.Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is
award-winning-author John Green’s most ambitious and heartbreaking work
yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of
being alive and in love.
Anne Panning's fiction has been described as warm and original by
"Publishers Weekly," intelligent and humorous by the "Boston Globe,"
graceful and wry by "Booklist," and infectious and enchanting by the
"New York Times." In fact, Panning's last collection of short stories,
"Super America," was a "New York Times Book Review "Editor's Choice.
Enter this exciting new novel, the best work yet from a writer whose
astute observations of American life are as honest as they are
engaging."Butter" is a coming of age tale set against the backdrop of
small-town Minnesota during the 1970s and told from the perspective of
an eleven-year-old girl, Iris, who learns from her parents that she is
adopted. The story of Iris's childhood is at first beguiling and
innocent: hers is a world filled with bell-bottoms and Barbie dolls,
Shrinky Dinks and Shaun Cassidy records, TV dinners and trips to
grandma's. But as her parents' marriage starts to unravel, Iris grows
more and more observant of disintegration all around her, and the simple
cadences of her story quickly attain an unnerving tension as she wavers
precariously between girlhood and adolescence. In the end, Iris's story
represents a profound meditation on growing up estranged in small town
America--on being an outsider in a world increasingly averse to them.
Passionate, lyrical, and disquieting, this intensely moving novel is a
rich exploration of a crucial theme in American literature that will
confirm Anne Panning's place as a major figure in the world of
contemporary fiction.
