People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks
Tuesday, April 24 at 2 p.m.
In 1996, Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, which has been rescued from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with images.
The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime by Miles Harvey
Tuesday, May 29 at 2 p.m.
For archivists, this is a dark, but by no means unfamiliar, tale. It is, in part, the story of Gilbert Bland, a man with a history of petty crime who somewhat haphazardly stumbled upon the lucrative and relatively safe occupation of hacking maps out of old books in research repositories and selling them at enormous profit. 2000, 405 pp.
The Paris Wife: A Novel by Paula McLain
Tuesday, June 25 at 2 p.m.
A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley. In Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love when she meets Ernest. 2011, 336pp
Lady Macbeth by Susan Fraser King
Tuesday, July 31 at 2 p.m.
A captivating take on Lady Macbeth, who tells her side of the story with a forceful, uncompromising daring. Gruadh, the future Lady Macbeth and the daughter of 11th-century Scottish prince Bodhe, survives several kidnappings in her girlhood and, determined to uphold the traditions of fierce Celtic women warriors, learns how to fight. 2008, 352 pp.
The Informationist: A Thriller by Taylor Stevens
Tuesday, August 28 at 2 p.m.
This brilliant debut introduces a great new action heroine, Vanessa Michael Munroe, who doesn’t have to kick over a hornet’s nest to get attention, through her take-no-prisoners attitude. A young girl who went missing while a tourist in Africa lures Munroe from usual assignments to a hunt for information on a trail four years cold. 2011, 309 pp.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne
Tuesday, September 25 at 2 p.m.
Berlin, 1942: When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move from their home to a new house far far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence running alongside stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people he can see in the distance. 2006
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer
Tuesday, October 30 at 2 p.m.
On average, people squander forty days annually compensating for things they’ve forgotten. Joshua Foer used to be one of those people. But after a year of memory training, he found himself in the finals of the U.S. Memory Championship. Even more important, Foer found a vital truth we too often forget: In every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories. 2011,
Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres
Tuesday, November 27 at 2 p.m.
The setting is a small village in southwestern Anatolia in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. Everyone there speaks Turkish, though they write it in Greek letters. It’s a place that has room for a professional blasphemer; where a brokenhearted aga finds solace in the arms of a Circassian courtesan who isn’t Circassian at all; where a beautiful Christian girl named Philothei is engaged to a Muslim boy named Ibrahim. 2004, 576pp
