Camden County College Library Camden County College Library Guides - Multicultural Book Club

Past Selections

Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [10/2009]
ISBN/ISSN: 1400044162
When the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria seceded in 1967 to form the independent nation of Biafra, a bloody, crippling three-year civil war followed. That period in African history is captured with haunting intimacy in this artful page-turner from Nigerian novelist Adichie (Purple Hibiscus). Adichie tells her profoundly gripping story primarily through the eyes and lives of Ugwu, a 13-year-old peasant houseboy who survives conscription into the raggedy Biafran army, and twin sisters Olanna and Kainene, who are from a wealthy and well-connected family. . . . This is a transcendent novel of many descriptive triumphs, most notably its depiction of the impact of war's brutalities on peasants and intellectuals alike. It's a searing history lesson in fictional form, intensely evocative and immensely absorbing. (Publishers Weekly Reviews, Sept. 15)
The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga [9/2009]
ISBN/ISSN: 1416562591
In what Kirkus called a “fiercely satirical first novel," the brutal,cynical and cold-bloodedly smart servant Balram realizes that he is not content to live the animal life of poverty. Though he rushes to scrub his master's feet and takes his master's ethical lapses in judgment personally, Balram rages on the inside. "The notion that you can get rich and can make a better life for yourself is bombarded at Indians daily by the newspapers, TV and roadside books," says Adiga, a Time India correspondent. "But without the foundation that the middle class enjoys − good schools, hospitals, lawyers − this idea that you can become an entrepreneur and make it big is just propaganda, a cruel hoax played on the poor. When the hoax is exposed, it can lead to anger." − Kirkus Reviews, 76(8), 4/15/2008
The Soloist - Steve Lopez [5/2009]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library
ISBN/ISSN: 0399155066
*Starred Review* On the streets of the inner city, Los Angeles Times columnist and novelist Lopez (In the Clear, 2003) stumbled upon the story that changed his life. Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless African American man, was standing on a corner coaxing memorable music from a two-stringed violin. Turns out, 30 years earlier, Ayers had been at Juilliard studying classical bass when he experienced the first in a series of schizophrenic episodes that turned his musical dreams into a nightmare. Now, worlds away from the concert halls he imagined gracing, Ayers spends his days on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, fighting off rats and drug-frenzied fellow homeless—and serenading passersby. The spot where Ayers has chosen to play is no accident; it’s near the city’s statue of Beethoven and just down the hill from Walt Disney Concert Hall. Lopez quickly becomes an integral part of Ayers’ life, bringing him new instruments and even facilitating arrangements at a homeless shelter. But as he navigates the complex world of mental illness, Lopez discovers that good intentions (and good connections) are often powerless in the face of schizophrenia, a potent, prickly, unpredictable disease. Award-winning actors Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. are set to star in a movie version of this compelling, emotionally charged tale of raw talent and renewed hope. Copyright 2008 Booklist Reviews.
Oracle Lake - Paul Adam [4/2009]
Call Number: Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0312370253
Adam delivers a routine thriller focusing on the continuing Chinese oppression of Tibet. Journalist Maggie Walsh . . . happens on the story of a lifetime when she manages to infiltrate the Himalayan inner sanctum of the Dalai Lama and learns, to her astonishment, that the beloved spiritual leader has died. Maggie tags along as the search begins for the baby in whom he has been reincarnated. When word of the quest reaches the political leadership in Beijing, the dreaded Public Security Bureau frantically launches a massive military operation to thwart it. – Publisher’s Weekly
Three Cups of Tea - Greg Mortenson [3/2009]
Call Number: Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0143038257
On a 1993 expedition to climb K2 in honor of his sister Christa, who had died of epilepsy at 23, Mortenson stumbled upon a remote mountain village in Pakistan. Out of gratitude for the villager’s assistance when he was lost and near death, he vowed to build a school for the children who were scratching lessons in the dirt. Raised by his missionary parents in Tanzania, Mortenson was used to dealing with exotic cultures and developing nations. Still, he faced daunting challenges of raising funds, death threats from enraged mullahs, separation from his family, and a kidnapping to eventually build 55 schools in Taliban territory.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows [2/2009]
ISBN/ISSN: 0385340990
“Traditional without seeming stale, and romantic without being naïve” (San Francisco Chronicle), this epistolary novel, based on Mary Ann Shaffer’s painstaking, lifelong research, is a homage to booklovers and a nostalgic portrayal of an era. As her quirky, loveable characters cite the works of Shakespeare, Austen, and the Brontës, Shaffer subtly weaves those writers’ themes into her own narrative. However, it is the tragic stories of life under Nazi occupation that animate the novel and give it its urgency; furthermore, the novel explores the darker side of human nature without becoming maudlin. The Rocky Mountain News criticized the novel’s lighthearted tone and characterizations, but most critics agreed that, with its humor and optimism, Guernsey “affirms the power of books to nourish people during hard times” (Washington Post). Copyright 2008 Bookmarks
Brick Lane - Monica Ali [1/2009]
ISBN/ISSN: 0743243315
Nazneen arrived in the world in an exceptional way. The day of her birth, the bleak village midwife pronounced Nazneen stillborn. Nazneen's mother pleaded for God's mercy, and good fortune was granted her when the baby's cheeks flushed with color. Nazneen grew to be an obedient girl, unlike her sister, Hasina, who ran away from home with a love match, defying her parents' wishes for an arranged marriage. Nazneen accepts her father's marriage match, and Chanu takes her from Bangladesh to a Bangladeshi community in London. Though he is not intentionally cruel of heart, Chanu is an old man and Nazneen cannot help but feel trapped by the restrictions of her Muslim society in a land teeming with opportunity. When she ventures into the city, she is overwhelmed but animated by the hedonistic appearance of women carrying briefcases and smoking cigarettes in flimsy clothes. In an extremist male society, Nazneen must grasp at flecks of freedom, and Ali is extraordinary at capturing the female immigrant experience through her character's innocent perspective. --Elsa Gaztambide Copyright 2003 Booklist
Night - Elie Wiesel [11/2008]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
In Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life's essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel's lifelong project to bear witness for those who died. – Amazon.com Review
The Art of Happiness - Dalai Lama [10/2008]
Call Number: Available through the combined catalogs of CCC and Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 1573221112
The Dalai Lama's most salient traits are his great beaming smile and hearty laugh, spontaneous expressions of happiness that inspired Cutler, a psychiatrist, to initiate what evolved into a long and productive series of conversations about what aspects of Buddhist thought could help non-Buddhists achieve a sense of fulfillment. Their discussions ranged far and wide, revealing many differences between Eastern and Western thought. When Cutler asks the Dalai Lama if he is happy, the answer is "Yes"; when he asks if he is ever lonely, the answer is an unqualified "No." How can that be? Because, the Dalai Lama replies, he always looks at others positively and experiences a "feeling of affinity, a kind of connectedness." Over and over again, Cutler poses complicated psychological inquiries only to have the Dalai Lama offer responses that reach far beyond the parameters of the self. There really is such a thing as an art of happiness, and this is one of the best how-to books a reader will ever find. (Reviewed October 1, 1998)1573221112Donna Seaman
Out stealing horses - Per Petterson ; translated by Anne Born [6/2008]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 1555974708
Starred Review. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond Sander lives alone with his dog in a remote cabin in easternmost Norway. He hopes this isolation will help him take life one step at a time after the deaths of both his sister and his wife three years ago. This peaceful solitude is broken by the appearance of his only neighbor out looking for his dog. Meeting Lars, a boyhood friend Trond hasn't seen in 50 years, brings forth a multitude of memories. In flashback, the story centers on the summer of 1948, three years after the German occupiers left. The defining moment in those memories was when Lars, at age ten, accidentally shot his twin brother with a hunting gun. Now Trond's daily routines mask other unresolved tensions from his boyhood: his passionate feelings for Lars's mother, his father's role in the resistance in 1944 and later abandonment of the family, and his own estrangement from his daughters. Petterson (In the Wake) has established his reputation abroad, winning several international prizes including the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, but he deserves critical acclaim here as well. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.—Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO
Eat, pray, love : one woman's search for everything across Italy, India and Indonesia - Elizabeth Gilbert [4/2008]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0670034711
A celebrated writer pens an irresistible, candid, and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure, spiritual devotion, and what she really wanted out of life.
What is the what : the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng : a novel - Dave Eggers [3/2008]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 1932416641
In Atlanta, too-trusting Valentino Achak Deng opens his door to strangers and is beaten and robbed at gunpoint. Lying on the floor, tied up with telephone cord, he begins silently to tell his life story to one of his captors. Through the rest of his miserable ordeal, he continues these internal monologues: to the indifferent police officer who answers his 911 call; to the jaded functionary at the hospital emergency room; to the affluent patrons at the health club where he works. Deng is a Sudanese “Lost Boy,” and his story is one of unimaginable suffering. Forced to flee his village by the murahaleen (Muslim militias armed by the government in Khartoum), he survives marathon walks, starvation, disease, soldiers, bandits, land mines, lions, and refugee camps before winning the right to immigrate to the U.S.--a move he sees as nothing short of salvation. Deng is a real person, and this story, told in his voice, is mostly true. Readers may weigh Eggers' right to tell the story or wonder what parts have been changed, but here a novel is the best solution to the problems of memoir. Reworking this powerful tale with both deep feeling and subtlety, Eggers finds humanity and even humor, creating something much greater than a litany of woes or a script for political outrage. What Is the What does what a novel does best, which is to make us understand the deeper truths of another human being's experience.
KeirGraff.
Suite Francaise - Irène Némirovsky; translated by Sandra Smith [2/2008]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library
ISBN/ISSN: 1400096278
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Celebrated in pre-WWII France for her bestselling fiction, the Jewish Russian-born Némirovsky was shipped to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, months after this long-lost masterwork was composed. Némirovsky, a convert to Catholicism, began a planned five-novel cycle as Nazi forces overran northern France in 1940. This gripping "suite," collecting the first two unpolished but wondrously literary sections of a work cut short, have surfaced more than six decades after her death. The first, "Storm in June," chronicles the connecting lives of a disparate clutch of Parisians, among them a snobbish author, a venal banker, a noble priest shepherding churlish orphans, a foppish aesthete and a loving lower-class couple, all fleeing city comforts for the chaotic countryside, mere hours ahead of the advancing Germans. The second, "Dolce," set in 1941 in a farming village under German occupation, tells how peasant farmers, their pretty daughters and petit bourgeois collaborationists coexisted with their Nazi rulers. In a workbook entry penned just weeks before her arrest, Némirovsky noted that her goal was to describe "daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides." This heroic work does just that, by focusing—with compassion and clarity—on individual human dramas. (Apr. 18)
The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao - Junot Díaz [1/2008]
Call Number: PS3554.I259 B75 2007
ISBN/ISSN: 1594483299
Ten years after his acclaimed short story collection Drowned, Junot Diaz returns with a lollapalooza of a debut novel centered on a grotesquely overweight Dominican-American teenager named Oscar. Lonely, loveless, and living almost completely inside his own head, Oscar is a "ghetto nerd" whose multiple obsessions include comic books, fantasy fiction, and supremely unobtainable women. In a story that moves back and forth between the Dominican Republic and Paterson, New Jersey, Diaz illuminates the tragic arc of Dominican history (especially under the brutal Trujillo regime) in the lives of Oscar's sister, mother, grandmother, and aunt. Shot through with witty cultural footnotes, scabrous slang, and touches of magic realism, this heartbreaking family saga is a work of brave originality. From Barnes & Noble
Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee [11/2007]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0670887315
At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless, shunned by his friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife. He retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding, where a brief visit becomes an extended stay as he tries to find meaning from this one remaining relationship. David's attempts to relate to Lucy and to a society with new racial complexities are disrupted by an afternoon of violence that shakes all his beliefs and threatens to destroy his daughter. In this wry, visceral, yet strangely tender novel, Coetzee once again tells "truths Athat? cut to the bone (The New York Times Book Review).
River town : two years on the Yangtze - Peter Hessler [10/2007]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0060195444
In the heart of China's Sichuan province, tucked away amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this vast and ever-evolving country, Fuling is shifting gears and heading down a new path, one of change and vitality, tension and reform, disruption and growth. Its position at the crossroads came into sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. Hessler taught English and American literature at the local college, but it was his students who taught him about the ways of Fuling -- and about the complex process of understanding that takes place when one is immersed in a radically different society. Poignant, thoughtful, funny, and enormously compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that, much like China itself, is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.
Exile : a novel - Richard North Patterson [9/2007]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0805079475
"David Wolfe's life is approaching an exhilarating peak: he's a successful San Francisco lawyer, he's about to get married, and he's being primed for a run for Congress. But when the phone rings and he hears the voice of Hana Arif - the Palestinian woman with whom he had a secret affair in law school - he begins a completely unexpected journey. The next day, the prime minister of Israel is assassinated by a suicide bomber while visiting San Francisco; soon, Hana herself is accused of being the mastermind behind the murder. Now David faces an agonizing choice: will he, a Jew, represent Hana - who may well be guilty - or will he turn away the one woman he can never forget?" "The most challenging case of David's career requires that he delve deep into the lives of Hana Arif and her militant Palestinian husband, both of whom have always lived in exile. Ultimately, David's quest takes him to Israel and the West Bank, where, in a series of harrowing encounters, he learns that appearances are not at all what they seem."-Book Jacket.
Bel canto : a novel - Ann Patchett [4/2007]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0060188731
From the bestselling author of "The Magician's Assistant" comes a marvelous novel of love, opera, and terrorism set in South America. Two couples, complete opposites, fall in love; sexual identities become confused; and a horrific imprisonment is transformed into an unexpected heaven on earth.
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy - Carlos Eire [3/2007]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 1416544720
From The New Yorker
At the start of the nineteen-sixties, an operation called Pedro Pan flew more than fourteen thousand Cuban children out of the country, without their parents, and deposited them in Miami. Eire, now a professor of history and religion at Yale, was one of them. His deeply moving memoir describes his life before Castro, among the aristocracy of old Cuba—his father, a judge, believed himself to be the reincarnation of Louis XVI—and, later, in America, where he turned from a child of privilege into a Lost Boy. Eire's tone is so urgent and so vividly personal (he is even nostalgic about Havana's beautiful blue clouds of DDT) that his unsparing indictments of practically everyone concerned, including himself, seem all the more remarkable.
Dreams from my father : A story of race and inheritance - Barack Obama [1/2007]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0307383415
Obama argues with himself on almost every page of this lively autobiographical conversation. He gets you to agree with him, and then he brings in a counternarrative that seems just as convincing. Son of a white American mother and of a black Kenyan father whom he never knew, Obama grew up mainly in Hawaii. After college, he worked for three years as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side. Then, finally, he went to Kenya, to find the world of his dead father, his "authentic" self. Will the truth set you free, Obama asks? Or will it disappoint? Both, it seems. His search for himself as a black American is rooted in the particulars of his daily life; it also reads like a wry commentary about all of us. He dismisses stereotypes of the "tragic mulatto" and then shows how much we are all caught between messy contradictions and disparate communities. He discovers that Kenya has 400 different tribes, each of them with stereotypes of the others. Obama is candid about racism and poverty and corruption, in Chicago and in Kenya. Yet he does find community and authenticity, not in any romantic cliche{‚}, but with "honest, decent men and women who have attainable ambitions and the determination to see them through." Hazel Rochman
Cellophane : a novel - Marie Arana [11/2006]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0385336640
"Don Victor Sobrevilla, a lovable, eccentric engineer, always dreamed of founding a paper factory in the heart of the Peruvian rainforest, and at the opening of this miraculous novel his dream has come true - until he discovers the recipe for cellophane. In a life already filled with signs and portents, the family dog suddenly begins to cough strangely. A wild little boy turns blue. All at once Don Victor is overwhelmed by memories of his erotic past; his proper wife, Dona Mariana, reveals the shocking truth about her origins; the three Sobrevilla children turn their love upside down; the family priest blurts out a long-held secret ..." "A hilarious, transforming plague of truth has descended on the once well-behaved Sobrevillas, only the beginning of this novel."--BOOK JACKET.
Palace walk - Naguib Mahfouz [10/2006]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0385264666
This extraordinary novel provides a close look into Cairo society at the end of World War I. Mahfouz's vehicle for this examination is the family of al-Sayyid Ahmad, a middle-class merchant who runs his family strictly according to the Qur'an and directs his own behavior according to his desires. Consequently, while his wife and two daughters remain cloistered at home, and his three sons live in fear of his harsh will, al-Sayyid Ahmad nightly explores the pleasures of Cairo. Written by the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize, Palace Walk begins Mahfouz's highly acclaimed ``Cairo Trilogy,'' which follows Egypt's development from 1917 to nationalism and Nasser in the 1950s. This novel's enchanting style and sweeping social tapestry ensure a large audience, one that will eagerly await the English translation of the entire trilogy. A significant addition to any collection. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/89.
Paul E. Hutchison, Fishermans Paradise, Bellefonte, Pa. Copyright 1989 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
A fine balance : a novel - Rohinton Mistry [9/2006]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 140003065X
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.
My invented country : a nostalgic journey through Chile - Isabel Allende [5/2006]
Call Number: B All
ISBN/ISSN: 006054564X
Allende was inspired to write this glimmering and audacious memoir of her life as a traveler, exile, and immigrant by an eerie overlaying of dates. She lost a country, she writes, on Tuesday, September 11, 1973, when a military coup brought down Chile's democratic government, then headed by Salvador Allende, a cousin of her father's. And she gained a country on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, when the terrorist attacks induced her to recognize her deep allegiance to the U.S., her adopted land. Drawing on the profoundly fluent storytelling skills and canniness that make her fiction so scintillating and her memoirs so powerful, Allende retraces her circuitous path from Santiago circa 1940 to today's San Francisco, remembering her family and critiquing her country with equal measures of nostalgia and pain, fury and humor. She observes curtly that in her eccentric family "happiness was irrelevant," but she saves her sharpest remarks for her dissection of the Chilean sensibility, zestfully analyzing Chile's obsession with class, all-out machismo, habitual hypocrisy, intolerance, conservatism, clannishness, and gloominess. She claims that Chileans love bureaucracy, "states of emergency," funerals, and soap operas, and that, in the Chile of her youth, "intellectual scorn for women was absolute." Allende's conjuring of her "invented," or imaginatively remembered, country is riveting in its frankness and compassion, and her account of why and how she became a writer is profoundly moving. ((Reviewed April 1, 2003)) Copyright 2003 Booklist Reviews
Don't let's go to the dogs tonight : an African childhood - Alexandra Fuller [4/2006]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0375507507
In Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller's endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller's debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.
Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi [3/2006]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0375422307
"Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's wise, funny, and heartbreaking memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran's last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country." "Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran: the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life and the toll repressive regimes exact on the individual spirit. Marjane's child's-eye-view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love."--BOOK JACKET.
The ditchdigger's daughters : a black family's astonishing success story - Yvonne S. Thornton & Jo Coudert [2/2006]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0758201168
In "The Ditchdigger's Daughters, " Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton offers a loving portrait of her father, a ditchdigger in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey who dreamed that all six of his daughters would become doctors. With the help of his equally remarkable wife, the girls have all become successful, independent women--two are doctors, one became a dentist, one a lawyer, one a nurse, and one a court stenographer.
Sister of my heart - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni [12/2005]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0385489501
Anju is the daughter of an upper-caste Calcutta family of distinction. Sudha is the daughter of the black sheep of that same family. Sudha is startlingly beautiful; Anju is not. Despite these differences, since the day the two girls were born--the same day their fathers died, mysteriously and violently--Sudha and Anju have been sisters of the heart. Bonded in ways even their mothers cannot comprehend, the two girls grow into womanhood as if their fates, as well as their hearts, are merged. When Sudha learns a dark family secret, that connection is threatened. For the first time in their lives, the girls know what it is to feel suspicion and distrust--Sudha, because she feels a new shame that she cannot share with Anju; and Anju, because she discovers the seductive power of her sister's beauty, a power Sudha herself is incapable of controlling. When, due to a change in family fortune, the girls are urged into arranged marriages, their lives take opposite turns. One travels to America, and one remains in India; both have lives of secrets. When tragedy strikes both of them, however, they discover that, despite distance and marriage, they must turn to each other once again. Exceptionally moving, dramatic, and exquisitely rendered, Sister of My Heart is a passionate novel about the extraordinary bond between two women, and the jealousies, loves, and family histories that threaten to tear them apart. Only a novelist of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's sensitivity could create a tale as potent as it is poignant, and as true to the complexities of the human heart.
Snow flower and the secret fan : a novel - Lisa See [11/2005]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 1400060281
Adult/High School–Lily at 80 reflects on her life, beginning with her daughter days in 19th-century rural China. Foot-binding was practiced by all but the poorest families, and the graphic descriptions of it are not for the fainthearted. Yet women had nu shu, their own secret language. At the instigation of a matchmaker, Lily and Snow Flower, a girl from a larger town and supposedly from a well-connected, wealthy family, become laotong, bound together for life. Even after Lily learns that Snow Flower is not from a better family, even when Lily marries above her and Snow Flower beneath her, they remain close, exchanging nu shu written on a fan. When war comes, Lily is separated from her husband and children. She survives the winter helped by Snow Flower's husband, a lowly butcher, until she is reunited with her family. As the years pass, the women's relationship changes; Lily grows more powerful in her community, bitter, and harder, until at last she breaks her bond with Snow Flower. They are not reunited until Lily tries to make the dying Snow Flower's last days comfortable. Their friendship, and this tale, illustrates the most profound of human emotions: love and hate, self-absorption and devotion, pride and humility, to name just a few. Even though the women's culture and upbringing may be vastly different from readers' own, the life lessons are much the same, and they will be remembered long after the details of this fascinating story are forgotten.–Molly Connally, Chantilly Regional Library, VA
The poisonwood Bible : a novel - Barbara Kingsolver [9/2005]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0060786507
The Poisonwood Bible is a story 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 everything 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. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. Book jacket.
Five quarters of the orange - Joanne Harris [8/2005]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0060198133
From the author of "Chocolat" comes an "unexpectedly sweet and powerful" ("New York Times") novel of a widow in her sixties returning to the French town she left as a child, and the clues to long-kept secrets she finds in her mother's recipe scrapbook.
The birth of Venus : a novel - Sarah Dunant [6/2005]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 1400060737
"Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family's Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter's abilities." "But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra's parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola's reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra's married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art."--BOOK JACKET.
The god of small things - Arundhati Roy [5/2005]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0060977493
The story of the tragic decline of an Indian family whose members suffer the terrible consequences of forbidden love, The God of Small Things is set in the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India. Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, the twins Rahel and Esthappen fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family -- their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts). When their English cousin and her mother arrive on a Christmas visit, the twins learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever. The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.
The kite runner - Khaled Hosseini [3/2005]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 1573222453
"Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable, beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Raised in the same household and sharing the same wet nurse, Amir and Hassan nonetheless grow up in different worlds; Amir is the son of a prominent and wealthy man, while Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant, is a Hazara, member of a shunned ethnic minority. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them. When the Soviets invade and Amir and his father flee the country for a new life in California, Amir thinks that he has escaped his past. And yet he cannot leave the memory of Hassan behind him." "The Kite Runner is a novel about friendship, betrayal, and the price of loyalty. It is about the bonds between fathers and sons, and the power of fathers over sons - their love, their sacrifices, and their lies. Written against a backdrop of history that has not been told in fiction before. The Kite Runner describes the rich culture and beauty of a land in the process of being destroyed. But with the devastation, Khaled Hosseini also gives us hope: through the novel's faith in the power of reading and storytelling, and in the possibilities he shows for redemption."--BOOK JACKET.
Balzac and the little Chinese seamstress - Dai Sijie [2/2005]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 037541309X
At the height of Mao's Cultural Revolution, two boys are exiled to the countryside for "reeducation." But the boys have a violin to distract them - as well as, before long, a beautiful young tailor's daughter and a stash of Western classics.
The tortilla curtain : a novel - T. Coraghessan Boyle [12/2004]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0670856045
Winner of the Prix Medicis Etranger Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Mexican illegals Candido and America Rincon desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine. And from the moment a freak accident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, these four and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.
The samurai's garden - Gail Tsukiyama [11/2004]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 0312144075
The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father, Tsukiyama uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s as a somber backdrop for her unusual story about a 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen who is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight. Matsu is a samurai of the soul, a man devoted to doing good and finding beauty in a cruel and arbitrary world, and Stephen is a noble student, learning to appreciate Matsu's generous and nurturing way of life and to love Matsu's soulmate, gentle Sachi, a woman afflicted with leprosy.
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith [9/2004]
Call Number: Copies available through the combined catalogs of CCC & Camden County Library System
ISBN/ISSN: 1400034779
This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith's widely acclaimed The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to "help people with problems in their lives." Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in Gaborone, she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that tugs at her heart, and lands her in danger, is a missing eleven-year-old boy, who may have been snatched by witchdoctors. The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency received two Booker Judges' Special Recommendations and was voted one of the International Books of the Year and the Millennium by the "Times Literary Supplement."