Talk About Books

As the book opens, Joe and Joan Castleman are on a plane to Helsinki, where Joe is to receive a prestigious literary prize. Joan, the narrator, tells us that her husband is “one of those men who own the world” and describes him with a nice mixture of wifely regard and satirical distance. The story of the Castleman marriage is told in a series of flashbacks. Joan, painfully alive to the hackneyed nature of their match, recalls their early days: “It kills me to say it, but I was his student when we met. There we were in 1956, a typical couple, Joe intense and focused and tweedy, me a fluttering budgie circling him again and again.” The entire novel, in fact, is a kind of paean to the notion that clichés are clichés because they’re often true. The pathetic thing about the younger version of Joan is not that her story is unique; it’s the fact that there were — and still are — so many Joans, circling like so many budgies. A promising writer, Joan abandons her own career ...

Paul Coelho writes the story of a quest to fulfill one's destiny. The Alchemist follows the journey of an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago. Believing a recurring dream to be prophetic, he asks a Romani fortune teller in a nearby town about its meaning. The woman interprets the dream as a prophecy telling the boy that he will discover a treasure at the Egyptian pyramids. Early into his journey, he meets an old king named Melchizedek or the king of Salem, who tells him to sell his sheep so as to travel to Egypt and introduces the idea of a Personal Legend. Your Personal Legend "is what you have always wanted to accomplish. Everyone, when they are young, knows what their Personal Legend is".  Early in his arrival to Africa a man who claims to be able to take Santiago to the pyramids instead robs him of what money he had made from selling his sheep. Santiago then embarks on a long path of working for a crystal merchant so as to make enough money to ful...

Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag". In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a self-taught midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent. Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holo...

A woman goes missing in the Australian wilderness. Agent Aaron Falk of the Federal Police is still recovering from his last case, and the fire that burned his hand badly, when he gets a call from his new partner, Carmen Cooper, that a woman named Alice Russell has gone missing in the Giralang Ranges three hours outside Melbourne, where she had been taking part in a corporate retreat with her colleagues from the Bailey Tennants accountancy firm. This sparks a grim memory for Falk: more than 20 years ago, when the policeman was a teenager, a killer named Martin Kovac littered the same area with the bodies of young women he’d murdered. Kovac couldn't have taken Alice, because he’s dead, but her disappearance dredges up some horrific memories in the collective consciousness, which adds a creepy dimension to an increasingly puzzling case. Falk and Cooper don’t work missing persons—they’re financial investigators, and Alice was helping them with a case on the down low, gathering inf...

A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power, Homegoing   traces three hundred years in Ghana. Along the way, the lives of Gyasi's characters are shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, Esi is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade. She is shipped off to America where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America, where they experience the plantations of the South, the Civil War, the Great Migration, coal...

The only thing certain about a journey is that it has a beginning and an end for you never know what may happen along the way. And so it is with this journey into the minds and souls of two very different men; one of them in search of the truth, the other a man who may have already found it. In Roland Merullo's novel, Breakfast with Buddha , Otto Ringling, a husband, father, and editor, departs on a cross-country drive from his home in a New York City suburb to the North Dakota farmhouse in which he grew up. H e is a man on a no-nonsense mission: to settle the estate of his recently deceased parents. However, when his flaky sister convinces him to give a ride to her guru, a crimson-robed Skovordinian monk, Otto knows there will be a few bumps in the road. As they venture across America, Otto and the affable, wise, irritating, and inscrutable holy man engage in a battle of wits and wisdom. Otto, a born skeptic, sees his unwanted passenger as a challenge: a man who assu...

In The Stars are Fire , Anita Shreve's sets her novel in Maine during the real-life disaster of 1947 when a severe drought caused a series of massive fires that burned out of control for 10 days. In Acadia National Park. 10,000 acres went up in flames, along with most of the mansions on Bar Harbor’s Millionaires’ Row. Fishermen and the Coast Guard rescued thousands from the shoreline. Firefighters and evacuees were trapped behind a burning wall that cut through Kennebunkport. Sixteen people were killed, thousands left homeless. In this story, when the fire arrives, Grace Holland and her neighbors head to the water’s edge. Twenty-four years old, a mother of two young children and pregnant with a third — Grace holds her children in the frigid sea overnight as the flames send smoke and burning debris onto the beach. In the midst of crisis, she finds a strength she didn’t know she had, but her losses are devastating, and she faces a precarious future.  When the fir...