• The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson
• People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
• Too Close to the Falls by Catherine Gildiner
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
• Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
• Here if You Need Me by Kate Braestrup
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

The true story of a family that is beyond eccentric, with a brilliant but alcoholic father and a tempestuous mother who is a frustrated artist. They all end up homeless, with the children left to fend for themselves. Even after the children grow up and prosper, the parents choose to live as homeless people.

A three-minute video with the author and her mother

An excellent audio interview with the author (click on "Full Story" to hear it)

A review in the New York Times

An interview with the author

Discussion questions

Welch, West Virginia, where the author spent much of her childhood, is a small town nestled among steep green hills. This aerial photo shows the setting, with the red pin marking the street they lived on, high on a steep hillside.

Here is a photo of downtown Welch. If I interpret the book and the map correctly, you could go from downtown to the Walls home by walking along the street that begins at the right of the photo and runs diagonally upward toward the middle. The Wall home would be about a half-mile past the point where the street bends to the right around the hill.

All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, which LAVA read in 2002, won the Booker Prize; Never Let Me Go was short-listed for the Booker.

What is the book about? The book reviews suggest several answers. Take your choice:

• Margaret Atwood, in Slate: "An Ishiguro novel is never about what it pretends to pretend to be about ... this is a brilliantly executed book by a master craftsman who has chosen a difficult subject: ourselves, seen through a glass, darkly."
• The Washington Post: "It is almost literally a novel about humanity: what constitutes it, what it means, how it can be honored or denied."
• San Francisco Chronicle: "Ishiguro may be asking just what entitles any of us to call ourselves human."
• New York Times: "So the dare Ishiguro has taken on might be this: to capture what is unmistakably human, what survives and insists on subtly expressing itself after you subtract the big stuff -- the specific baggage, the parents, orientation toward a culture, a past and possible futures -- that shapes people into individuals."
• New York Times: It is "an oblique and elegiac meditation on mortality and lost innocence."
• The Telegraph: "Never Let Me Go is a parable about mortality. The horribly indoctrinated voices of the Hailsham students who tell each other pathetic little stories to ward off the grisly truth about the future -- they belong to us."
• Sunday Times: "[T]he novel never hardens into anything as clear-cut as allegory but it resonates with disquieting suggestiveness ... Discomfitingly, he spotlights the out-of-sight-out-of-mind unfeelingness on which human comfort can depend."
• The Independent: The author is "gently hinting that we are all, to some extent, clones ... we are all, to some extent, pawns in someone else's game, our lives set out for us."
• The Guardian: "So what is Never Let Me Go really about? It's about the steady erosion of hope. It's about repressing what you know, which is that in this life people fail one another, grow old and fall to pieces ... It's about why we don't explode, why we don't just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been."
• The Telegraph: "[W]e all struggle with questions about the purpose of our existence. The terrible truth, as readers will guess from the start, is that Hailsham students, unlike the rest of us, actually have one."

A 14-minute video interview with Ishiguro dealing mostly with this book

A four-minute video by Ishiguro and actors in the film (released in 2010) that was based on the book.

In this interview, Mark Romanek, the film's director briefly discusses three Japanese concepts that he feels underlie the novel:

• Wabi-sabi is the beauty associated with worn and broken things. We encounted this concept when we read The Elegance of the Hedgehog last December.
• Mono no aware is the awareness of the transience of things and a gentle wistfulness at their passing.
• Yugen, in the director's words, refers to "the calm surface that belies the deep currents of emotion underneath. Yugen also expresses the notion of the joyful acceptance of the basic sadness of life."

The Wikipedia article on Ishiguro

Discussion questions from the publisher

"In this follow-up to her acclaimed Crow Lake, Lawson again explores the moral quandaries of life in the Canadian North. At the story's poles are Arthur Dunn, a stolid, salt-of-the-earth farmer, and his brother, Jake, a handsome, smooth-talking snake in the grass." (from Publishers Weekly) This novel was long-listed for the Booker Prize.

A three-minute video of the author discussing the book

A six-minute audio interview with the author about the book

A brief article about the author

Discussion questions (page down)

The Wikipedia article on Lawson

Several reviews. I particularly liked the one in the Washington Post and the one in The Guardian by novelist Penelope Lively.

Each chapter of the book begins with quotes from a newspaper called The Temiskaming Speaker.

Struan is a fictional small town "west and a little north of" the real and much larger town of New Liskeard in Ontario. Here is the location on Google maps.

At the end of chapter 9, Ian and Pete encounter a cloud of dragonflies hovering at the edge of a high cliff. It's true that Dragonflies sometimes swarm, but do insects ever fly that high? More than you ever imagined, according to this charming NPR animation. (Click on "Animation: Travel The Invisible Highway.")

Amazon's summary: "One of the earliest Jewish religious volumes to be illuminated with images, the Sarajevo Haggadah survived centuries of purges and wars thanks to people of all faiths who risked their lives to safeguard it. Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March, has turned the intriguing but sparely detailed history of this precious volume into an emotionally rich, thrilling fictionalization that retraces its turbulent journey."

Wikipedia's article on the Sarajevo Haggadah

A Bosnian web site about the Sarajevo Haggadah

The author's web site

Several reviews of the novel

A seven-minute interview with Brooks on public radio about the book

The character of rabbi Judah Aryeh in the "Wine Stains" chapter was based on Leon of Modena, who wrote an influention text that explained Judaism to Christians. He also admitted in his autobiography that he was a compulsive gambler.

Here is the real-life story of Dervis and Servet Korkut, upon whom the characters of Serif and Stela Kamal are based in the chapter called "An Insect's Wing." Dervis was the man who hid the Sarajevo Haggadah from the Nazis, and the Korkuts together sheltered a young Jewish guerilla fighter named Mira Popo (Lola in the novel). In an astonishing turn of events, Mira Papo's success in gaining recognition for the Korkut's courageous act was responsible for the rescue of the Korkut's adult daughter, Lamija, from the fighting in Kosovo in 1999. Lamija and her family, who are all Muslims, were flown to Israel and granted Israeli citizenship.

Geraldine Brooks wrote an article for The New Yorker called "The Book of Exodus" that includes the image from the Sarajevo Haggadah of a woman with African features seated at the seder table that plays a key role in the novel. This nine-page article also provides historical details about the Sarajevo Haggadah and its many rescuers, including the Korkuts.

In Islam, the phrase "people of the book" refers to religions that are mentioned in the Koran as followers of the God of Abraham, particularly Judaism and Christianity. In Judaism the phrase is sometimes used to refer to Jews and their relationship with the Hebrew scriptures.

The author's web site has many useful links, from which some of the links below are chosen.

An interview with the author and a reader's guide from the publisher

If you have time, be sure to read this amusing article Gildiner wrote for the Toronto Star about her book tours.

"How Catherine Gildiner Transformed Herself from Clinical Psychologist to Bestselling Author" is a brief biographical sketch.

A Question and Answer session with the author

This brief interview with the author summarizes the part of her life covered by After the Falls, the sequel to this book.

Four video interviews with Gildiner

A photo of Tryon's Folly, the house in Lewiston whose back entrance on the river was used to help runaway slaves get to Canada

Both of Gildiner's parents died from cancer at a fairly age, which Gildiner suspected was caused by the toxic chemical dump at the nearby Love Canal.

Wikipedia article on the Golem

Wikipedia article on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

This novel's fictional comic book, "The Escapist," has inspired an actual comic book with the same name.

Review in the New York Times

An article from the internet archive that originally appeared in the Washington Post Book World. In it, Chabon explains how one's own creation can become a Golem-like threat

The author's web site

A book by Fredric Wertham led to Sammy Clay's appearance before a Senate sub-committee that was investigating comics books. That part of the story was based on real events.

Rosa Luxemburg Sax is named after revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg

The review in the New York Times praised the book, but the one in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asserted that the stories of Burnham and Holmes were too unrelated to be woven together.

A "tour" of the Columbia Exposition (the "White City"), with text and photos

A helpful aerial view of the Exposition

A photo of the enormous ferris wheel at the Exposition that could carry more than 2000 riders

A rather lurid account of Holmes' "murder castle." The diagram of the floor plan is especially informative.

What was wrong with Holmes? This Wikipedia article discusses antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy and sociopathy.

A ten-minute audio interview with Larson on public radio

A long interview with Larson by Robert Birnbaum

This speech by Susan B. Anthony, a member of the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, was one of three that she gave at the Columbia Exposition. You can get the flavor of it by reading the first and last paragraphs if you don't have time to read it all.

Review in the Washington Post

When Braestrup accepted the Unitarian Universalist Association's Melcher Award, she gave a delightful talk that was recorded in this two-part video: First part (10 minutes)  Second part (2 1/2 minutes).  Unfortunately the beginning of the second video repeats the ending of the first. You can skip the duplicate section by beginning the second video at 3:28.

Braestrup's web site

The web site of the Maine Warden Service

How does one become a Unitarian Universalist minister? Here are the preparatory stages.

A three-minute video of Braestrup telling how she became a minister.

A short and interesting essay by Braestrup on the Greek words for three different kinds of love: eros, philos and especially agape.

"Blessing the Moose," another story from Braestrup's experiences as chaplain for the Maine Warden Service

Wikipedia articles on Guernsey and its capital Saint Peter Port

A detailed Wikipedia article on the German occupation of Guernsey and nearby islands

Co-author Annie Barrows' web site

NPR interview with Annie Barrows

Reviews in the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle

On page 167, Dawsey took Juliet to see a chapel decorated with mosaics of broken pottery