October 5 H Is For Hawk

When Helen Macdonald's father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer, she'd never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk. But in her grief, she saw that the goshawk's fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own. Resolving to raise the deadly creature to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel, and turned to the guidance of The Once and Future King author T.H. White's chronicle The Goshawk to begin her endeavor. Projecting herself "in the hawk's wild mind to tame her" tested the limits of Macdonald's humanity and changed her life.

by Helen Macdonald

November 2 Good Kings Bad Kings

Bellwether Award winner Susan Nussbaum’s powerful novel invites us into the lives of a group of typical teenagers—alienated, funny, yearning for autonomy—except that they live in an institution for juveniles with disabilities. This unfamiliar, isolated landscape is much the same as the world outside: friendships are forged, trust is built, love affairs are kindled, and rules are broken. But those who call it home have little or no control over their fate. Good Kings Bad Kings challenges our definitions of what it means to be disabled in a story told with remarkable authenticity and in voices that resound with humor and spirit.

December 7 A Manual for Cleaning Women

With her trademark blend of humor and melancholy, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday—uncovering moments of grace in the cafeterias and Laundromats of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Northern California upper classes, and from the perspective of a cleaning woman alone in a hotel dining room in Mexico City. The women of Berlin's stories are lost, but they are also strong, clever, and extraordinarily real. They laugh, they mourn, they drink. With the wit of Lorrie Moore and the grit of Raymond Carver, they navigate a world of jockeys, doctors, and switchboard operators.

300 pages, © 2015

by Susan Nussbaum 298 pages, © 2013

by Lucia Berlin 403 pages, © 2015

UMFPL DAYTIME BOOK CLUB

2017 Reading List

UPPER MORELAND FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY

109 Park Avenue, Willow Grove PA 19090

(215) 659-0741 www.umfpl.org

Join us on the first Thursday of every month at 2:30pm

September 7 Fates and Furies

At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but with an electric thrill we understand that things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed. With stunning revelations and multiple threads, and in prose that is vibrantly alive and original, Groff delivers a deeply satisfying novel about love, art, creativity, and power that is unlike anything that has come before it. Profound, surprising, propulsive, and emotionally riveting, it stirs both the mind and the heart.

by Lauren Groff 390 pages, © 2015

January 5 Frog

Nobel Prize-winner Mo Yan chronicles the history of modern China through the lens of the nation's controversial one-child policy. In her youth, Gugu—the daughter of a famous doctor and staunch Communist—is revered for her skill as a midwife. But when her lover defects, Gugu's own loyalty to the Party is questioned. She proves her allegiance by enforcing the one-child policy, keeping tabs on the number of children in the village, and performing abortions on women as many as eight months pregnant. Frog depicts a world of desperate families, illegal surrogates, and the guilt of those who must enforce the policy.

by Mo Yan

March 2 My Brilliant Friend

The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets, Elena and Lila learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, the two remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change. Through their lives, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between the unforgettable Elena and Lila.

403 pages, © 2015

April 6 South of Broad

Leopold Bloom King is the son of an amiable high school science teacher. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a Joyce scholar. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at thirteen, the family struggles with his shattering death. Eventually he becomes part of a tight group of friends: Sheba and Trevor Poe, glamorous twins with an alcoholic mother and a prison-escapee father; hardscrabble mountain runaways Niles and Starla Whitehead; socialite Molly Huger and her boyfriend, Chadworth Rutledge X; and a widening circle whose liaisons ripple from 1960s counterculture through the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

by Pat Conroy 514 pages, © 2009

by Elena Ferrante 331 pages, © 2012

June 1 The Hare with Amber Eyes

Edmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. When he inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese carvings, called netsuke, he wanted to know who had touched them, and how the collection had managed to survive. So begins this moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of the netsuke and of his family, the Ephrussis, over five generations. A nineteenth-century banking dynasty in Paris and Vienna, the Ephrussis were as rich and respected as the Rothchilds. Yet by the end of the World War II, when the netsuke were hidden from the Nazis in Vienna, this collection was all that remained of their vast empire.

by Edmond de Waal 418 pages, © 2010

July 6 Running the Rift

Running the Rift follows the progress of Jean Patrick Nkuba from the day he knows that running will be his life to the moment he must run to save it. A naturally gifted athlete, he sprints over the thousand hills of Rwanda and dreams of becoming his country’s first Olympic medal winner in track. But Jean Patrick is a Tutsi in a world that has become increasingly restrictive and violent for his people. As tensions mount between the Hutu and Tutsi, he holds fast to his dream that running might deliver him, and his people, from the brutality around them.

August 3 Mr. Fox

Fairytale romances end with a wedding. The fairytales that don’t get more complicated. In this book, celebrated writer Mr. Fox can’t stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It’s not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently. Meanwhile, Daphne becomes convinced that her husband is having an affair, and finds her way into Mary and Mr. Fox’s game. And so Mr. Fox is offered a choice: Will it be a life with the girl of his dreams, or a life with an all-too-real woman who delights him more than he cares to admit?

February 2 Frankenstein

At once a Gothic thriller, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, Frankenstein tells the story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein. Obsessed with discovering "the cause of generation and life" and "bestowing animation upon lifeless matter," Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts but, upon bringing it to life, he recoils in horror at the creature’s hideousness. Tormented by isolation and loneliness, the once-innocent creature turns to evil and unleashes a campaign of murderous revenge against his creator, Frankenstein.

by Mary Shelley 304 pages, © 1818

by Naomi Benaron 365 pages, © 2012

by Helen Oyeyemi 336 pages, © 2011

May 4 Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch

After studying Freud in Paris, Mr. Muo returns home to introduce psychoanalysis to 21st century China. But his hidden purpose—to free his sweetheart, now a political prisoner—leads him to the sadistic magistrate, Judge Di. The price of the bureaucrat's clemency? A virgin maiden. Muo's quest will take him from a Chengdu mortuary to a panda habitat, from an insane asylum to the marauding Lolo people. He will lose a tooth, his virginity, and his faith in psychoanalytic insight. But his quixotic idealism will not waver, even as he comes to see that the chivalrous heart may have room for more than one true love.

by Dai Sijie 287 pages, © 2005