Popular Book Club Picks

Set in the 1830s and beginning on a slave plantation in Barbados, Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black tells the story of the eponymous Washington and his unlikely adventures as he meditates upon the complexities of race, relationships, science, and art. In 1830, Wash is an uneducated, orphaned slave boy around 10 or 11 years old taken under the wing of Big Kit, a powerful and intimidating field slave. Big Kit protects him from the other slaves... Read Washington Black Summary

Water for Elephants, a New York Times bestseller and author Sara Gruen’s third novel, was published in 2006 by Algonquin. The novel was adapted into a full-length film in 2011 starring Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattison.Gruen often features animals in her novels, and Water for Elephants is no exception, as she follows two lovers in a forbidden relationship set against the backdrop of a circus and its eclectic mix of characters and exotic animals. The... Read Water for Elephants Summary

We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves is Karen Joy Fowler’s seventh novel. The book was first published in 2013. The following year, it won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Fowler said that the book takes inspiration from a real 1930s experiment. In an interview with Carmen Maria Machado published in The American Reader, Fowler states that she believes that using animals for research purposes is wrong, and... Read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Summary

Published in 2014, Laura McBride’s first novel, We Are Called to Rise, narrates the story of four Las Vegas residents with different backgrounds whose lives become interconnected after a series of unexpected events leads to a family tragedy. Though they experience seemingly unrelated situations, they eventually play a role in each other’s lives to help heal the trauma created by loss, grief, and family abuse. This guide references the Scribd version of the Simon &... Read We Are Called to Rise Summary

... Read We Are Not Like Them Summary

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We Were the Mulvaneys is a novel by American writer Joyce Carol Oates, originally published in the US in 1996. Set largely in the rural Northeastern United States in the 1970s, this story deals with the myth of the ideal American family and the ruinous effects it can have when real-life events threaten the appearance of familial unity. After having been featured as an Oprah Book Club selection in January 2001, the novel became a... Read We Were the Mulvaneys Summary

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What Is the What is a 2006 novel by Dave Eggers. The story follows Valentino Achak Deng, one of tens of thousands of boys displaced and/or orphaned during the Second Sudanese War, which spanned nearly two decades, from 1987 to 2005. While a novel, What Is the What has been called by Eggers a “fictionalized autobiography.” As Deng explains in his introduction to the text, they decided that it should be considered a novel, because... Read What Is The What Summary

Lesley Nneka Arimah is a Nigerian writer who has lived in the United Kingdom and the United States. What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky is her debut collection of short stories, many of which have received literary awards, such as the O. Henry Prize and two awards for African writers: the Caine Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. At the heart of her stories, both realistic and speculative, are relationships... Read What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky Summary

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Winner of the 2007 Christian Book Award, Charles Martin’s 2006 novel, When Crickets Cry: a Novel of the Heart, is a work of Christian fiction set in rural Georgia. It tells the story of Reese, a former heart surgeon who’s hiding from his past and his relationship with Annie, a hopeful little girl with a failing heart. When these two characters unexpectedly cross paths, their stories become intertwined, bringing healing to Reese’s past and hope... Read When Crickets Cry Summary

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