BOOK GROUPS: RECOMMENDED TITLES

Over the years, we have noted a number of books that work well with groups. We have divided these novels and story collections into the following categories: historical, international, social issues, literature classics, humor, short stories, family, relationships. You might also visit our list of P&P customers' favorite books and authors of the last 25 years.

Historical

A Month in the Country
by J.L. Carr
This quiet, dreamy novel finds healing and redemption in ways unexpected. Tom Birkin travels to Oxgodby to restore a medieval mural of the apocalypse. The job is fitting as he has just survived “hell on Earth” in the form of World War I (Random House, $12.95).

In the Memory of the Forest
by Charles Powers
Set in post-war Poland, In the Memory of the Forest focuses on the years immediately after the fall of Communism. This is a subtle and beautifully articulated work by journalist Charles Powers (Penguin, $15).

The Assault
by Harry Mulisch
An astonishing psychological novel, The Assault recollects events set in motion in wartime Netherlands when a Nazi officer is assassinated and a family is selected to “pay for the crime.” The surviving son is left trying to understand what happened that night (Random House, $13).

Perfume
by Patrick Suskind
This inimitable tale of an 18th century Parisian murderer obsessed with capturing the essence of beautiful young virgins delves into the morality of action and storytelling (Random House, $13.95).

Libra
by Don DeLillo
A fictional account of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, Libra is a gripping story full of insight about the short, unhappy life of Kennedy’s assassin (Penguin, $15).

Mariette in Ecstasy
by Ron Hansen
A novel about a fervent young woman who becomes a nun and experiences an intense spiritual experience. Question: is she a saint or is she crazy (Harper Collins, $13)?

Independent People
by Halldor Laxness
The story of a family in Iceland between the wars. Laxness brilliantly writes about family, politics, and an old world struggling to enter a more modern one (Random House, $15).

Montenegro
by Starling Lawrence
Auberon Harwell, sent to evaluate Britain’s prospects as the Ottoman Empire is disintegrating, becomes entangled in events larger and more deadly than anticipated. Lawrence’s assiduously researched historical novel promises intrigue and suspense even as Harwell’s doom seems imminent (Harper Collins, $13.95).

Remembering Babylon
by David Malouf
Set in Australia in the mid 1840s, Remembering Babylon tells the story of a European raised in the wild by Aborigines and rejected by both cultures until a courageous Scottish family stands up for him. The writing is tremendous (Random House, $13).

The Conformist
by Alberto Moravia
The conformist, Marcello Clerici, is asked to kill his former professor by the fascist Mussolini government. Moravia's novel is a deep psychologically examination of what becomes of a people caught in a society of control (Random House, $17).

The Night Inspector
by Frederick Busch
William Bartholomew does not adapt well to post Civil War Manhattan. He was shot in the face and wears a mask under which he carries a vitriolic tongue and a matched bitterness. But when he meets Herman Melville, this dark historical fiction becomes a caper as the two men set off for Florida to emancipate a group of black children (Random House, $14).

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers
Compassionate and incisive, this is McCullers’ first novel, but perhaps her best. She chronicles a 1930 Georgia mill town and the connection Mick Kelly, a passionately musical adolescent, discovers with deaf-mute John Singer and the other misfits in her town (Houghtin Mifflin, $12).

The Living
by Annie Dillard
This novel about pioneer in the Pacific Northwest life evokes rich characters and is keen-eyed in observing the grace of optimism and the persistent failings that cling to all societies, old and new (Harper Collins, $14.95).

Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier
Beautifully written in the dialect of the North Carolina mountain region, Cold Mountain tells the story of Inman, a Confederate deserter making his way on foot from Virginia to his sweetheart, Ada, in North Carolina (Random House, $14.95).

International

Reading in the Dark
by Seamus Deane
Deane shows how "the troubles" in Northern Ireland left no one untouched as ordinary families are forced to choose sides and endure spying and retribution (Random House, $12.95).

Heat and Dust
by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
A woman retraces the steps of her grandmother in India and discovers a scandal that has lived on long after her grandmother’s death (Simon & Schuster, $13).

A Burnt-out Case
by Graham Greene
A world-weary visitor comes to a leper colony in the Belgian Congo to try to live simply. Even in the back woods, he is not left alone, but pursued. Questions about faith and purpose abound as in all of Greene’s books (Penguin, $13).

The Death of Vishnu
by Manil Suri
Containing elements of Indian mythology, slapstick humor, and Bollywood panache, The Death of Vishnu tells the story of the tenants in a Bombay apartment house. The title character, Vishnu, dies in the first chapter, but continues to affect all their lives in the most unexpected ways (Harper Collins, $13.95).

The Bone People
by Keri Hulme
A rich and alluring story set in New Zealand, The Bone People tells the story of a Maori-European artist whose life is changed when she meets a strange speechless boy. The writing is mesmerizing in this singularly original novel (Penguin, $15).

The Danish Girl
by David Ebershoff
A quiet and unassuming portrait of the space between a married couple going through extraordinary changes. Loosely based on the life of Danish artist Einar Wegener, his American wife, and Lili, the woman he becomes (Penguin, $14).

This Earth of Mankind
by Pramoedya Toer
Written during his 14 years as a political prisoner, Toer’s novel about Indonesia during the early 20th century, as new ideas and new technologies offer the promise of a better life, is a strong condemnation of colonial and racially stratified societies (Penguin, $15).

Anil's Ghost
by Michael Ondaatje
Anil, a UN official who investigates human rights violations, returns home to Sri Lanka to discover the root of the many "disappearances" taking place in her war-torn country. There she meets two brothers and an "eye painter" who carry the deep scars of war and who will take her closer to the truth (Random House, $13).

Sister of My Heart
by Chitra Divakaruni
This enchanting novel follows two cousins who were born on the same day and who share a bond that cannot be broken by the men they marry or the oceans that separate them (Random House, $13.95).

The Famished Road
by Ben Okri
This novel of love and survival tells the story of Azaro, a spirit-child who decides to stay in the human world "to make happy the bruised face of the woman who would become my mother." However, his choice to stay means he must evade and outwit the spirits who would like to draw him back into their world (Random House, $15).

Thousand Cranes
by Yasunari Kawabata
Kawabata’s richly textured novel examines quiet, just-beneath-the-surface passions when Kikuji attends a tea party with Mrs. Ota, the rival of his dead father's mistress (Random House, $12).

July’s People
by Nadine Gordimer
The complex and tense relationships between blacks and whites in 1980s South Africa are vividly portrayed in July’s People as the Smaleses, a white family sympathetic to the cause of black South Africans, must flee their home when revolution erupts (Penguin, $13).

The Glass Palace
by Amitav Ghosh
This epic and inventive novel follows multiple generations as they weave in and out of the tumultuous histories of Burma and Malaya (Random House, $14.95).

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
by José Saramago
Returning in 1936 to his native Lisbon after 15 years in Brazil, Ricardo Reis, a doctor, sees patients, registers Europe’s increasingly threatening political climate, and holds conversations with a recently deceased poet who, in a symmetrical reversal of gestation and birth, has nine months gradually to fade away (Harcourt, $14).

Disgrace
by J.M. Coetzee
Set in post-apartheid South Africa, this fast-paced novel features David Lurie, an academic dismissed from his teaching job, and the new relationship he forges with his daughter on her farm. The pair’s contrasting responses to violence open wider questions of justice and retribution (Penguin, $14).

Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
by Gil Courtemanche
Told from the perspective of a Canadian journalist in love with a half-Tutsi/half-Hutu woman, this novel is an unflinching and uncompromising look at Rwanda’s 1994 genocide (Random House, $13.95).

The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
In The Poisonwood Bible, Nathan Price, a zealot preacher, moves his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo to convert the natives. The story is told by the women in the family as tragedy strikes, the resonances of which carry on for decades (Harper Collins, $14.95).

Wild Ginger
by Anchee Min
Anchee Min draws on her own experiences as a Red Guard during the Chinese Cultural Revolution to tell the story of the fictional Red Guard Wild Ginger, a young woman who discovers the passion and madness of Mao’s China (Houghton Mifflin, $13).

Social Issues

A Lesson Before Dying
by Ernest Gaines
In Ernest Gaines’ remarkable novel, a young, unhappy school teacher in Louisiana is encouraged by his aunt to help a man facing execution for murder and in the process comes to terms with himself and his society (Random House, $12.95).

Caucasia
by Danzy Senna
A great look at the politics of the late 60’s and 70’s as well as a wonderful exploration of race. What does it mean to be black or White (Penguin, $14)?

The Tortilla Curtain
by T.C. Boyle
A happy, liberal, yuppie couple has their lives thrown out of balance when they become entwined with a Mexican immigrant and his young bride. The confrontation puts their liberal principles to the test. A marvelous satiric work (Penguin, $14).

Erasure
by Percival Everitt
Thelonius “Monk” Ellison is an African-American writer who has struggled his whole career to get outside of the box of “African-American fiction”. Monk writes a parody of “ghetto fiction” that thrusts him reluctantly into the public eye (Little Brown, $14.95).

House of Sand and Fog
by Andres Dubus III
When Amir Behrani, an immigrant from Iran, buys a house at auction he will unwittingly step into a desperate struggle between his immigrant dream and Kathy Nicolo’s attempts to hold onto her former life (Random House, $14.95).

Literature Classics

The Violent Bear It Away
by Flannery O’Connor
Featuring Francis Marion Tarwater, an orphan raised by his great uncle to carry on in the old man’s footsteps as a religious prophet, this novel is a funny, bizarre look at the South (FSG, $14).

Pnin
by Vladimir Nabokov
Pnin tries to teach Russian language courses at a college very like Cornell in this highly-literary variation on the absent-minded professor. As he stumbles and bumps his way through American culture, he’s comic, a touch poignant, and thoroughly endearing (Random House, $12.95).

Mrs. Dalloway
by Viriginia Woolf
The life of one Clarissa Dalloway is crystallized into a single day as she prepares for a party. The result is an abyss of memory and psychological illumination (Harcourt, $13).

The Razor’s Edge
by W. Somerset Maugham
This floating world of post WWII American expatriates populated by a glittering cast of characters spans a cross-section of society (Penguin, $14).

Giants in the Earth
by O.E. Rolvaag
A great classic of the immigrant experience. This is the story of a family’s efforts to make a life on the unforgiving plains of Nebraska at the end of the 19th century (Harper Collins, $13).

All the King’s Men
by Robert Penn Warren
The greatest of all American political novels. Drawing on Huey Long’s dirt-poor-to-governor life, Warren has fashioned an eloquent and gripping story of the changes in Louisiana as the old landed classes give way to that of the Snopes (Harcourt $15).

Light in August
by William Faulkner
A more straightforward book than many of his others, but still a great introduction to one of America’s greatest writers. The Faulknerian themes of race and class conflict are cast in the richest prose (Random House, $13.95).

Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A love story stretched over fifty-one years, nine months, and four days raises questions of fate and faith (Vintage, $14).

Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
Still vital after all this time, Rabbit’s story is a great way to understand our culture at mid-century. Rabbit Angstrom, the faded athlete and failing husband is an everyman striving to do right but remaining ultimately all too human (Random House, $14.95).

Time Will Darken It
by William Maxwell
When Austin King’s distant Southern relatives visit him in Illinois they set in motion events that will threaten everything he holds dear. This quiet domestic drama is masterfully restrained even in its bitter truths (Random House, $15).

So Long, See You Tomorrow
by William Maxwell
Set in Illinois in the period between the two world wars, this lyrical and carefully constructed novel explores how we understand the past and what we owe to those we have known (Random House, $11).

Uncle Tom’s Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe
In post-Katrina America, being “sold down the river” takes on new meaning. Stowe’s controversial 19th century novel forever changed the lexicon of race in America, but more importantly its political and emotional impact remains relevant (Random House, $8.95).

A Death in the Family
by James Agee
Jay Follett returns home to see his father who he believes is dying. His father does not die, but as Jay travels home to his wife and son he is killed in a car accident. Agee’s beautiful last novel shifts back and forth in time and between the lives of those left behind to create a powerful but tender story (Random House, $13).

The Day of the Locust
by Nathaniel West
West’s grotesque about Hollywood artifice and ambition remains shockingly relevant more than 60 years later. The Day of the Locust is the single great Hollywood novel (Penguin, $6.95).

Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
Yates’ novel of American ambition as it turns to disillusion follows April and Frank Wheeler as they desperately seek to differentiate themselves from the blasé 1950s suburban world in which they live (Random House, $14.95).

The Reef
by Edith Wharton
A social novel that turns on the triangulations of three characters living in France, The Reef was Wharton’s most personal work (Simon & Schuster, $14).

O Pioneers!
by Willa Cather
Set in 19th century Nebraska, Cather’s classic novel about strong and fiercely independent Alexandra Bergson conveys both the harsh realities of life on the plains and the promise settlers pursued as they pushed west (Random House, $9).

Humor

Straight Man
by Richard Russo
Richard Russo's satire of academic life is at once hilarious and touching (Random House, $14.95).

Louisiana Power and Light
by John Dufresne
The story of Billy Wayne Fontana of Monroe, Louisiana is funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always thoughtful. Great storytelling built on a memorable ensemble of characters (Penguin, $15).

Under the Net
by Iris Murdoch
Jake Donaghue is a young writer whose novel is failing and who loves someone who loves someone else who loves someone else. The existential crisis these events provoke make this novel insightful and hilarious (Penguin, $15).

Short Stories

Jesus’ Son
by Denis Johnson
Though slim, this collection of short stories trembles with neon garishness, coldly and coolly following the protagonist through a beautiful inferno (Harper Collins, $12).

Family

We Were the Mulvaneys
by Joyce Carol Oates
A dark look at a family’s precipitous and almost inexplicable fall from grace. Her 26th novel, it may be her best (Penguin, 13.95).

No Great Mischief
by Alistair Macleod
A wonderfully described evocation of life in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. The power of family and tradition and the passing of generations make this a great book group choice. MacLeod’s prose is musical and powerful (Vintage, $14).

Enduring Love
by Ian McEwan
When a group of strangers attempts to bring down a hot-air balloon one man falls to his death. Joe survives, but the mixed emotions he feels remembering the event become explosive when Jed, one of the helpers who has become obsessed with the incident, insinuates himself into Joe’s life and threatens to destroy it (Random House, $13).

The Book of Daniel
by E.L. Doctorow
Daniel Isaacson is supposed to be writing his dissertation in the Columbia University library, but instead he is writing a book that attempts to understand his life after it was shaken by the execution of his parents for spying for the Soviets. From the opening pages this book is provocative and absorbing (Penguin, $15).

Love Medicine
by Louise Erdrich
This novel-in-stories follows two extended families who live on and around a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota. Each chapter is told in a different voice, but the collective affect is heartbreaking yet hopeful (Harper Collins, $13.95).

The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
Comic and sorrowful, The Corrections portrays the Lambert family as its paterfamilias is dying and the personal lives of the children are spinning beyond their control (Picador, $15).

Caramelo
by Sandra Cisneros
Cisneros depicts joyous but fraught family life as Lala Reyes travels with her family to her father’s hometown in Mexico. Moving deftly between Lala’s observations of events and the stories her family members tell her, Cisneros conveys conflicting truths about family and belonging (Vintage, $13.95).

Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
Set in a small Idaho town beside a foggy lake, Robinson’s first novel follows Ruth and Lucille as they move in with their unstable aunt and must choose between the life they live with her or the “normal” life the town offers. This novel is dreamy and at times feels unmoored, but few books convey so lucidly the bewilderment of displacement and loss (Picador, $14).

Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson
With wisdom and a joyous appreciation for small pleasures, John Ames, a 76-year-old Iowa preacher, knows he will die soon so he sets out to write his “begats” to his 7-year-old son. Ames tells the history of middle America through two centuries and struggles with his own feelings about mortality and the world he will leave behind (Picador, $14).

An Experiment in Love
by Hilary Mantel
Carmel is her working-class family’s hope to rise in the world. She goes off to the University of London where she must negotiate complicated new territory fraught with rigid class distinctions, social pretensions, and eating disorders (Holt, $13).

Empire Falls
by Richard Russo
Miles Roby lives above the Empire Grill in the decaying mill town of Empire Falls, Maine. His wife has left him for the town’s fitness guru and his promising future is quickly become his past. Deep secrets and an explosive scene will force Miles to forge a new direction for his daughter and himself (Vintage, $14.95).

A Complicated Kindness
by Miriam Towes
Nomi is a sixteen year old Canadian Mennonite doomed, she fears, to a life working in the local chicken slaughterhouse. After both her mother and her sister leave town without a word, her father becomes sadder and more inward and Nomi is left to find her own way in this smart funny, and moving novel (Perseus, $13.95).

Relationships

Dale Loves Sophie to Death
by Robb Dew
Love and family are the subjects of Dew’s novel, published in 1982, about a woman who travels to her Midwestern hometown with her three children but leaves her husband behind in New England (Little Brown, $13.95).

Continental Drift
by Russell Banks
Continental Drift tells the story of a New Hampshire boiler repairman dissatisfied with his piece of the American dream who moves to Florida and sunnier climes. His story alternates with that of a Haitian mother who has escaped to Florida to save herself and her young son. The two lives intersect in dramatic and tragic circumstances (Harper Collins, $14.95).

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
by Alice Munro
A collection of stories by perhaps the greatest living short story writer. Any one of the stories can be richly discussed, as she shows that every person’s life makes a story (Random House, $14.95).