The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson

Chosen By Eleanor
January 2011 For Discussion February 2011

Review
Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomqvist is hired by Henrik Vanger to investigate the disappearance of Vanger’s great-niece Harriet. Henrik suspects that someone in his family, the powerful Vanger clan, murdered Harriet over forty years ago.

Starting his investigation, Mikael realizes that Harriet’s disappearance is not a single event, but rather linked to series of gruesome murders in the past. He now crosses paths with Lisbeth Salander, a young computer hacker, an asocial punk and most importantly, a young woman driven by her vindictiveness.

Together they form an unlikely couple as they dive deeper into the violent past of the secretive Vanger family.

The Glass Room - Simon Mawer

Chosen By Kelly
November 2010 For Discussion January 2011

Review
High on a Czechoslovak hill, the Landauer House shines as a marvel of steel, glass and onyx. Built specially for newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a Jew married to a gentile, it is one of the wonders of modernist architecture. But the radiant honesty and idealism of 1930 that the house seems to engender quickly tarnishes as the storm clouds of World War Two gather. Eventually, as Nazi troops enter the country, the family, accompanied by Viktor’s lover Kata and her child Marika, must flee.

Yet the family’s exile does not signify the end of this spectacular building. It slips from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet and finally back to the Czechoslovak state, the crystalline perfection of the Glass Room always exerting a gravitational pull on those who know it. It becomes a laboratory, a shelter from the storm of war, and a place where the broken and the ruined find some kind of comfort, until with the collapse of Communism, the Landauers are finally drawn back to where their story began.

Score
Carol = 8.0
Gill = 8.5
Karen = 8.0
Kelly = 9.0
Nicole = 8.5
Rachel = 9.5

Average Score: 8.6/10

Out Stealing Horses - Per Petterson

Chosen By Rachel
October 2010 For Discussion November 2010

Review
Out Stealing Horses has been embraced across the world as a classic, a novel of universal relevance and power. Panoramic and gripping, it tells the story of Trond Sander, a sixty-sevenyear-old man who has moved from the city to a remote, riverside cabin, only to have all the turbulence, grief, and overwhelming beauty of his youth come back to him one night while he’s out on a walk. From the moment Trond sees a strange figure coming out of the dark behind his home, the reader is immersed in a decades-deep story of searching and loss, and in the precise, irresistible prose of a newly crowned master of fiction.

Score
Carol = 6.0
Gill = 3.0
Kelly = 7.0
Rachel = 6.0
Nicole = 5.8
Average Score: 5.6/10

The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver

Chosen By Jill
August 2010 For Discussion September 2010

Review
The Poisonwood Bible tells the story of an American family in the Congo during a time of tremendous political and social upheaval. The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them all they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it - from garden seeds to Scripture - is calamitously transformed on African soil. This tale of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction, over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa, is set against one of history's most dramatic political parables. The Poisonwood Bible dances between the darkly comic human failings and inspiring poetic justices of our times. In a compelling exploration of religion, conscience, imperialist arrogance, and the many paths to redemption, Barbara Kingsolver has written a novel of overwhelming power and passion.

Score
Carol = 8.0
Eleanor 9.5
Kelly = 8.0
Rachel = 8.0
Nicole = 8.2
Average Score: 8.3/10

The Angel's Game - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Chosen By Gill
July 2010 For Discussion August 2010

Review
In an abandoned mansion at the heart of Barcelona, a young man - David Martin - makes his living by writing sensationalist novels under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he has taken refuge in the world of books, and spends his nights spinning baroque tales about the city's underworld. But perhaps his dark imaginings are not as strange as they seem, for in a locked room deep within the house are letters hinting at the mysterious death of the previous owner. Like a slow poison, the history of the place seeps into his bones as he struggles with an impossible love. Then David receives a letter from a reclusive French editor, Andreas Corelli, who makes him the offer of a lifetime. He is to write a book with the power to change hearts and minds. In return, he will receive a fortune, perhaps more. But as David begins the work, he realises that there is a connection between this haunting book and the shadows that surround his home. Set in the turbulent 1920s, The Angel's Game takes us back to the gothic universe of the Cemetery of the Forgotten Books, the Sempere and Son bookshop, and the winding streets of Barcelona's old quarter, in a masterful tale about the magic of books and the darkest corners of the human soul.

Score
Carol = 6.0
Gill = 7.5
Kelly = 7.5
Nicole = 6.2
Average Score: 6.8/10

Flowers For Algernon - Daniel Keyes

Chosen By Carol
June 2010 For Discussion July 2010

Review
Charlie Gordon, IQ 68, is a floor sweeper, and the gentle butt of everyone's jokes, until an experiment in the enhancement of human intelligence turns him into a genius. But then Algernon, the mouse whose triumphal experimental tranformation preceded his, fades and dies, and Charlie has to face the possibility that his salvation was only temporary.

Score
Carol = 7.5
Eleanor = 8.5
Gill = 9
Jill = 8.3
Karen = 8
Average Score: 8.3/10

The Kerracher Man - Eric MacLeod

Chosen By Kelly
April 2010 For Discussion June 2010

Review
Eric Macleod looks across the loch at the forlorn wreck of his family s croft. How would you like to live there? he asks his wife Ruth, half joking. After all, they have to think of something to do with the place. But he doesn t expect her instant reply I would love to. A few short months later, fired by the challenge of an adventure like no other they ve known, Eric has given up a promising career in London as an accountant with an international company, and moved to the remote shores of Loch Cairnbawn in the West Highlands. With Ruth and their two little girls, he plans to renovate the croft and make a living from the land, but it s a long leap from management accountant to house builder and crofter as they soon find out. In their seventeen years at Kerracher, they experience the beauty and terror of living in the last wilderness in Scotland. They can reach the croft only by boat, across the loch, or by walking a mile and a half over the hill from the road.

Score
Carol = 7
Eleanor = 6.4
Gill = 7.5
Jill = 6.8
Karen = 6.5
Kelly = 7.5
Rachel = 6.5
Average Score: 6.9/10

Of Bees And Mist - Erick Setiawan

Chosen By Nicole
March 2010 For Discussion April 2010

Review
Up in the house that sits on the hill, a strange spell is brewing...

To Meridia, growing up with her father Gabriel, who vanishes daily in clouds of mist, and her bewitching mother Ravenna, the outside world is a refuge. So when as a young woman her true love Daniel offers her marriage, it seems an escape to a more straightforward existence.

Yet behind the welcoming façade of her new home lies a life of drudgery and a story even stranger than that she left behind. Aged retainers lurk in the background; swarms of bees appear at will, and of course, there’s her indomitable mother-in-law, Eva, hiding secrets that it will take Meridia years to unravel. Surrounded by seemingly unfathomable mysteries, can Meridia unlock the intrigues of the past, and thus protect her own family’s future?

An epic tale of two families told by an unforgettable voice. A modern fable, a gothic page-turner, but most of all, a passionate story about the power of love to conquer all that comes its way.

Score
Carol = 5
Kelly = 5
Nicole = 8
Rachel = 7.5
Average Score: 6.4/10

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Chosen By Eleanor
February 2010 For Discussion March 2010

Review
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 she’s 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 --- and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is. 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.

Written with warmth and humor as a series of letters, this novel is a celebration of the written word in all its guises, and of finding connection in the most surprising ways.

Score
Carol = 8
Eleanor = 8.3
Jill = 7
Nicole = 9.5
Average Score: 8.2/10

The Diving Bell And The Butterfly - Jean-Dominique Bauby

Chosen By Karen
January 2010 For Discussion February 2010

Jean-Dominique Bauby Wikipedia

Review
On December 8, 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby's life was forever altered when a part of his body he'd never heard of--his brain stem--was rendered inactive. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, his exquisitely painful memoir, is neither a triumphant account of recovery nor a journey into the abyss of self-pity. Instead, it is a tender testament to the power of language and love. At 43, Bauby was defined by success, wit and charisma. But in the course of a few bewildering minutes, the editor-in-chief of French Elle became a victim of the rare locked-in syndrome. The only way he could express his frustration, however, was by blinking his left eye. The rest of his body could no longer respond. Bauby was determined to escape the paralysis of his diving bell and free the butterflies of his imagination. And with the help of ESA, "a hit parade in which each letter is placed according to the frequency of its use in the French language," Bauby did so. Visitors, and eventually his editor, would read each letter aloud and he would blink at the right one. Slowly--painstakingly-- words, sentences, paragraphs and even this graceful book emerged.

Bauby relays the horrors and small graces of his struggle, which range from awaking one day to discover his right eye being sewn shut to realising the significance of Father's Day, a holiday previously absent from his family's "emotional calendar": "Today we spent the whole of the symbolic day together, affirming that even a rough sketch, a shadow, a tiny fragment of a dad is still a dad." The author makes it clear that being locked in doesn't kick open the doors of perception, but The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is nonetheless a celebration of life. Jean Dominique-Bauby died of a heart attack on March 9, 1997, two days after his book was published in France.

Score
Carol = 8.2
Eleanor = 8
Gill = 8
Jill = 7.7
Karen = 8.5
Nicole = 7
Average Score: 7.9/10