Macquarie Regional Library

Book Clubs | Book Club Kits

Book Club Kits

1. Atonement by Ian McEwan.
2. The boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne.
3. Breath by Tim Winton.
4. The Broken Shore by Peter Temple.
5. The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby.
6. For One More Day by Mitch Albom.
7. Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink.
8. The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide.
9. Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer.
10. Just like tomorrow by Faiza Guene.
11. The Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez with Kristin Ohlson.
12. Life of Pi by Yann Martel.
13. Mao's Last Dancer by Li Cunxin.
14. The Messenger by Markus Zusak.
15. The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham.
16. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant.
17. Romulus, My Father by Raimond Gaita.
18. A short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka.
19. Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky.
20. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.
21. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.
22. Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom.
23. The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett.

1. Atonement by Ian McEwan.

On a summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives and her precocious imagination bring about a crime that will change all their lives. The repercussions follows through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century.

Book Discussion Notes

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. Bruno longs to be an explorer and decides that there must be more to this desolate new place than meets the eye. While exploring his new environment, he meets another boy whose life and circumstances are very different to his own, and their meeting results in a friendship that has devastating consequences.

On the wild, lonely coast of Western Australia, two thrillseeking and barely adolescent boys fall into the enigmatic thrall of veteran big-wave surfer Sando. Together they form an odd but elite trio. The grown man initiates the boys into a kind of Spartan ethos, a regimen of risk and challenge, where they test themselves in storm swells on remote and shark-infested reefs, pushing each other to the edges of endurance, courage, and sanity. But where is all this heading? Why is their mentor’s past such forbidden territory.

Shaken by a recent scrape with death, big-city detective Joe Cashin is posted to a quiet town in on the Australian coast. But soon the whole community is thrown into unrest by the murder of a local philanthropist, a man with some very disturbing secrets. The Broken Shore is a brilliantly intricate crime procedural, and a moving novel about a place, a family, politics, and power.

In December 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the 43-year-old editor of French Elle, suffered a massive stroke that left him permanently paralyzed, a victim of “locked in syndrome.” Once known for his gregariousness and wit, Bauby now finds himself imprisoned in an inert body, able to communicate only by blinking his left eye. The miracle is that in doing so he was able to compose this stunningly eloquent memoir.

As a child, Charley Benetto was told by his father, “You can be a mama’s boy or a daddy’s boy, but you can’t be both.” So he chooses his father, only to see the man disappear when Charley is on the verge of adolescence. Decades later, Charley is a broken man. His life has been crumbled by alcohol and regret. He loses his job. He leaves his family. He hits bottom after discovering his only daughter has shut him out of her wedding. And he decides to take his own life. But upon failing even to do that, he staggers back to his old house, only to make an astonishing discovery. His mother -- who died eight years earlier -- is still living there, and welcomes him home as if nothing ever happened.

A child of World War II, Peter Debauer grew up with his mother and scant memories of his father, a victim of war. Now an adult, Peter embarks upon a search for the truth surrounding his mother's unwavering, but shaky history and the possibility of finding his missing father after all these years. The search takes him across Europe, to the United States, and back: finding witnesses, falling in and out of love, chasing fragments of a story and a person who may or may not exist. Within a maze of reinvented identities, Peter pieces together a portrait of a man who uses words as one might use a change of clothing, as he assumes a new guise in any given situation simply to stay alive...

Delia has made a living writing a series of hugely successful modern household guides, as well as an acerbic domestic advice column. As the book opens, she is not yet forty, but has only a short time to live. She is preoccupied with how to prepare herself and her family for death. What she needs, more than anything, is a manual -- exactly the kind she is the expert at writing. Realising this could be her greatest achievement she sets to work. But, in the writing, Delia is forced to confront the ghosts of her past.

In April 1992 Christopher Johnson McCandless hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his body was found by a moose hunter -along with a camera with five rolls of film, an SOS note, and a cryptic diary written in the back pages of a book about edible plants.

The Paradise projects are only a few metro stops from Paris, but here it's a whole different kind of France. Doria's father, the Beard, has headed back to their hometown in Morocco, leaving her and her mom to cope with their mektoub—their destiny—alone. It seems like fate’s dealt them an impossible hand, but Doria might still make a new life. She’ll take the Arabic word kif-kif (same old, same old) and mix it up with the French verb kiffer (to really like something). Now she has a whole new motto: KIFFE KIFFE TOMORROW.

Book Discussion Notes

Rodriguez tells the story of the beauty school she founded and the vibrant women who were her students there. When Rodriguez opened the Kabul Beauty School, she not only empowered her students with a new sense of autonomy--in the strictly patriarchal culture, the beauty school proved a small haven, but also made some of the closest friends of her life.

Pi Patel is an unusual boy. The son of a zookeeper, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior, a fervent love of stories, and practices not only his native Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes.
The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days lost at sea.

Book Discussion Notes

From a desperately poor village in northeast China, at age eleven, Li Cunxin was chosen by Madame Mao's cultural delegates to be taken from his rural home and brought to Beijing, where he would study ballet. In 1979, the young dancer arrived in Texas as part of a cultural exchange, only to fall in love with America and with an American woman. Two years later, through a series of events worthy of the most exciting cloak-and-dagger fiction, he defected to the United States, where he quickly became known as one of the greatest ballet dancers in the world. This is his story, told in his own inimitable voice.

Meet Ed Kennedy. Underage cabdriver, pathetic cardplayer, and useless at romance. He lives in a shack with his coffee-addicted dog, the Doorman, and he’s hopelessly in love with his best friend, Audrey. His life is one of peaceful routine and incompetence, until he inadvertently stops a bank robbery. That’s when the first Ace arrives. That’s when Ed becomes the messenger...

Book Discussion Notes

Set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s, it is the story of the beautiful but shallow young Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to a remote region of China ravaged by a cholera epidemic.
Stripped of the British society of her youth and overwhelmed by the desolation around her, she is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life. She takes up work with children at a convent, but when her husband dies, she is forced to return to England to her father, her one remaining relative, to raise her unborn child. Though too late for her marriage, she has learned humility, independence, and how to love.

Book Discussion Notes

Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that tell of her father, Jacob, and his twelve sons.

Told in Dinah's voice, Anita Diamant imagines the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood, the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of the mothers, Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah who are the four wives of Jacob. They love Dinah and give her gifts that sustain her through childhood, a calling to midwifery, and a new home in a foreign land.

Book Discussion Notes

Romulus Gaita fled his home in his native Yugoslavia at the age of thirteen, and came to Australia with his young wife Christine and their four-year-old son soon after the end of World War II. Tragic events were to overtake them.
Raimond Gaita has an extraordinary story to tell about growing up with his father amid the stony paddocks and flowing grasses of country Australia.

When an elderly and newly widowed Ukrainian immigrant announces his intention to remarry, his daughters must set aside their longtime feud to thwart him. For their father’s intended is a voluptuous old-country gold digger with a proclivity for green satin underwear and an appetite for the good life of the West. The hostilities mount and family secrets spill out. This novel combines sex, bitchiness, wit, and genuine warmth in its celebration of the pleasure of growing old disgracefully.

A lost masterpiece of French literature, this epic novel of life under Nazi occupation was discovered 62 years after the author’s tragic death at Auschwitz. Part One, "A Storm in June," is set in the chaos and mayhem of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion. Part Two, "Dolce," opens in the provincial town of Bussy during the first influx of German soldiers. Each part features a rich cast of characters, people who never should have met, but come to form ambiguous relationships as they are forced to endure circumstances beyond their control.

Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry the troubled and bitter Rasheed, who is thirty years her senior. Nearly two decades later, in a climate of growing unrest, tragedy strikes fifteen-year-old Laila, who must leave her home and join Mariam's unhappy household. Laila and Mariam are to find consolation in each other, their friendship to grow as deep as the bond between sisters, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter. With the passing of time comes Taliban rule over Afghanistan, the streets of Kabul loud with the sound of gunfire and bombs, life a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear, the women's endurance tested beyond their worst imaginings.

This is the story of Clare, a beautiful art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry finds himself periodically displaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing.

Book Discussion Notes

Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher, or a colleague. Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, helped you see the world as a more profound place, gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it.

For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly twenty years ago. Mitch rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life. Knowing he was dying, Morrie visited with Mitch in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final “class”: lessons in how to live.

When her corgis stray into a mobile library parked near Buckingham Palace, the Queen feels duty-bound to borrow a book. Discovering the joy of reading she finds that her view of the world changes dramatically. The Queen comes to question the prescribed order of the world and loses patience with the routines of her role as monarch. Her new passion for reading initially alarms the palace staff and soon leads to surprising and very funny consequences for the country at large.

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To Register you Book Club for the use of the Macquarie Regional Library’s Book Club Kits please fill out the Book Club Registration Form and return it to your local branch.

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