Little Bee by Chris Cleave (9/2011-PC) The meeting
Summary
Using alternating first-person perspectives, the novel tells the stories of Little Bee, a Nigerian refugee, and Sarah O'Rourke (née Summers), a magazine editor from Surrey. After spending two years detained in a British immigration detention centre, Little Bee is illegally released after a fellow refugee performs sexual favours for a detention officer. She travels to the home of Sarah and her husband Andrew, whom she met two years previously on a beach in the Niger Delta. Sarah is initially unaware of Little Bee's presence, until Andrew, haunted by guilt of their shared past, commits suicide. Little Bee reveals herself to Sarah on the day of Andrew's funeral, and helps her to care for her four-year-old son Charlie.
Through a mutual reflection on their past, it is revealed that Sarah and Andrew were on holiday at the time of their meeting with Little Bee. The trip was an attempt to salvage their marriage after Andrew discovered Sarah had been unfaithful to him, embarking on an affair with Home Office employee Lawrence Osborn. While walking on the beach one morning, they were approached by a then 14-year-old Little Bee, and her older sister Nkiruka. The girls were being pursued by soldiers who had burned down their village and intended for there to be no witnesses left alive. The soldiers arrived and murdered a guard from the O'Rourkes' hotel, but offered to spare the lives of the girls if Andrew would amputate his own middle finger with a machete. Afraid, and believing the soldiers would murder the girls anyway, Andrew refused, but Sarah complied in his place. The soldiers took both girls away, leaving the couple in doubt as to whether the soldiers would leave one girl alive in response, as they promised.
Little Bee explains that although Nkiruka was gang raped, murdered, and cannibalised by the soldiers, she was allowed to escape, and stowed away in the cargo hold of a ship bound for England. Sarah allows Little Bee to stay with her, intent on helping her become a legal British citizen. Lawrence, who is still involved with Sarah, disapproves of her actions and contemplates turning Little Bee in to the police. When he informs Little Bee that he is considering this, she responds that allowing her to stay would be what is best for Sarah, so if Lawrence turns her in, Little Bee will get revenge by telling his wife Linda about his affair. The two reach an uneasy truce. After spending several days together, Sarah, Lawrence, Little Bee and Charlie take a trip to the park. Charlie goes missing, and Little Bee calls the police while Sarah searches for him. Although he is quickly found, the police become suspicious of Little Bee, and discover that she is in the country illegally.
Little Bee is detained and quickly deported back to Nigeria, where she believes she will be killed. Lawrence uses his Home Office connections to track Little Bee's deportation details, and Sarah and Charlie are able to accompany her back home. Sarah believes that Little Bee will be safe as long as she is present, and together they begin collecting stories for a book Andrew had begun, and which Sarah intends to finish on his behalf, about the atrocities committed in the Nigerian oil conflict. During a trip to the same beach where they first encountered one another, soldiers arrive to take Little Bee away. Despite being captured, Little Bee is not dispirited, and instead is ultimately hopeful at the sight of Charlie playing happily with a group of Nigerian children.
from Wikipedia
The Red Thread by Ann Hood(10/2011-KH) The Meeting
Summary
In 2005, three years after our five year old daughter Grace died suddenly from a virulent form of strep, my husband Lorne, our eleven year old son Sam and I found ourselves on a plane heading to China to adopt a baby girl. Our journey into adoption came from a belief that even in such heartbreak and despair, we could love again. As soon as they placed eleven month old Annabelle in my arms, I knew that our hope of rebuilding our family again was indeed possible.
During the adoption process-the orientation, the miles of paperwork, the home visits, the long waits at the INS, and then the even longer wait for our referral from China-we met many other families and heard their own stories about what led them to fly halfway around the world to bring home a baby. Like ours, their stories were all unique, filled with disappointment and promise, despair and hope.
But just as compelling were the stories we heard about the mothers in China who, due to the one child policy there, were forced to abandon their baby girls. Annabelle was found early on a September morning in a box at the orphanage door in the city of Loudi in the province of Hunan. We will never know the story of who left here there, or under what circumstances. Usually, the babies are left right after birth, often with the umbilical cord stump still attached. Annabelle was slightly older, around five months. It is possible that her story is slightly different. Perhaps her mother died. Perhaps her family tried to hide her-a second daughter?-and was discovered. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
As a writer and as her mom, Annabelle's secret history fascinated me. When I began to write a new novel, I wanted to capture the emotional journey of couples embarking on adoption. But I also wanted to explore the brave women who abandon their children in the hope of giving them a better life.
THE RED THREAD is the story of six couples adopting babies from China. It is also the story of Maya, who runs the adoption agency after losing her baby daughter. And it is the story of six women in China who are forced to give up a baby girl they love. The Chinese legend of the red thread is that our children are connected to us by an invisible red thread. No matter how tangled or frayed it becomes, our child is waiting for us at the other end. Who is at the end of your red thread? Maya asks each couple. In THE RED THREAD, I imagine that magical enduring connection.
from AnnHood.us.com
The Postmistress by Sarah Blake(11/2011-JD) The Meeting
Summary
What would happen if a postmistress chose not to deliver the mail?
It is 1940. While the war is raging in Europe, President Roosevelt promises he won't send American boys over to fight.
Iris James is the postmistress of Franklin, Massachusetts a small town at the end of Cape Cod. She firmly believes her job is to deliver and keep people's secrets, to pass along the news of love and sorrow that letters carry. Faithfully she stamps and sends the letters between people such as the newlyweds Emma and Will Fitch, who has gone to London to help out during the Blitz. But one day she slips a letter into her pocket, and leaves it there.
Meanwhile, seemingly fearless radio gal, Frankie Bard is reporting the Blitz from London, her dispatches crinkling across the Atlantic, imploring listeners to pay attention. Then in the last desperate days of the summer of 1941, she rides the trains out of Germany, reporting on what is happening to the refugees there.
Alternating between an America on the eve of entering into World War II, still safe and snug in its inability to grasp the danger at hand, an a Europe being torn apart by war, the two stories collide in a letter, bringing the war finally home to Franklin. sarahblakebooks.com
The Good Wife Strikes Back by Elizabeth Buchan(01/2012-MB) The Meeting
SummaryA battlefield or the deep peace of the double bed? A poignant and compulsive novel of the fascinating tangle of marriage... Fanny Savage has always been the dutiful wife. Married to Will, a politician with big ambitions, her life is a whirlwind of public engagements. Bound by loyalty to the party, she is required to look good and remain silent. But Fanny is no fool. She's well aware that the world outside her privileged home is one that seethes with despair, danger, division and lack of faith. she knows how fragile happiness can be. After twenty years of marriage and self-sacrifice, she begins to question her own concepts of fulfilment. elizabethbuchan.com
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks(02/2012-LAB) The Meeting
Summary
Inspired by the true story of a mysterious codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, People of the Book is a sweeping adventure through five centuries of history. From its creation in Muslim-ruled, medieval Spain, the illuminated manuscript makes a series of perilous journeys: through Inquisition-era Venice, fin-de-siecle Vienna, and the Nazi sacking of Sarajevo.
In 1996, Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famed manuscript, which has been rescued once again from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with figurative paintings. When Hanna, a caustic loner with a passion for her work, discovers a series of tiny artifacts in its ancient binding—an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—she becomes determined to unlock the book’s mysteries. As she seeks the counsel of scientists and specialists, the reader is ushered into an exquisitely detailed and atmospheric past, tracing the book’s journey from its creation to its salvation.
In Bosnia during World War II, a Muslim risks his life to protect it from the Nazis. In the hedonistic salons of Vienna in 1894, the book becomes a pawn in an emerging contest between the city’s cultured cosmopolitanism and its rising anti-Semitism. In Venice in 1609, a Catholic priest saves it from Inquisition book burnings. In Tarragona in 1492, the scribe who wrote the text has his family destroyed amid the agonies of enforced exile. And in Seville in 1480, the reason for the Haggadah’s extraordinary illuminations is finally disclosed.
geraldinebrooks.com
Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay (04/2012-AMS) The Meeting
Summary
Sarah's Key (French: Elle s'appelait Sarah) is a novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, first published in September 2006. Two main parallel plots are followed through the book. The first is that of ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski, a Jewish girl born in Paris, who is arrested with her parents during the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup. Before they go, she locks her four-year-old brother in a cupboard, thinking the family should be back in a few hours. The second plot follows Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris, who is asked to write an article in honour of the 60th anniversary of the roundup.
July 1942
The first plot follows the Starzynski family. On 16 July 1942, French police raided the Starzynski house, arresting ten-year-old Sarah and her parents. Her four-year-old brother, who remains unnamed until towards the end of the novel, is too scared to come and asks Sarah to lock him in a secret closet in the wall in their room. They are taken to Velodrome d'Hiver and kept there for two days. They are transported to Drancy internment camp afterwards. Sarah is separated from her parents and they are killed. When the SS starts taking children to the gas chambers, Sarah and a girl named Rachel escape. Sarah desperately wants to go back to Paris because she wants to save her brother. They find refuge with an elderly couple who takes them into their house, but Rachel falls ill with what is probably diphteria or typhus fever. The couple, Jules and Geneviève Dufaure, are compelled to call a Nazi doctor, who takes Rachel away and she presumably dies. Jules and Geneviève cut Sarah's hair, dress her in boys' clothes and help her get to her former home in Paris. She had been keeping the key to the closet in her pocket the whole time. She knocks at the door, screaming her brother's name, which is revealed to be Michel. A young boy opens the door and Sarah rushes into the house, nearly kicking the door to her former room and quickly opens the closet. She collapses and starts to cry hysterically. The boy's father comes into the room and removes Michel, who had died by then, from the closet.
May 2002
The second plot follows Julia Jarmond. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts but moved to Paris in her early 20s and married a Frenchman named Bertrand Tezac and had a daughter, Zoë. Sometime prior to the action of the book, Bertrand had cheated on Julia with a woman named Amélie after Julia had suffered a miscarriage. The apartment they are thinking of buying happens to have belonged to the Starzynski family, but neither Julia, nor Bertrand are aware of this. But when Julia finds out and tells Bertrand, he does not seem to care. Julia's boss, Joshua, asks her to write an article about the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup, as the 60th anniversary was nearing. Julia tries to find out more about the roundup and becomes obsessed with the story of young Sarah Starzynski, who was recorded to have been taken to Drancy, but was not recorded to return, nor taken to a gas chamber. She does more research and finds out she ran away, but she loses her trace after that. She does a little more research and comes in touch with descendants of Jules and Geneviève and they tell her that Sarah lived with them after she found Michel's body, but she grew up a broken woman. Julia finds out she is pregnant, but Bertrand want her to get an abortion. He tells Julia to get an abortion, or he will leave her. She then decides she will choose the baby over Bertrand. She finds Sarah got married and had a son, whom Julia wants to meet. He is very reluctant to learn his mother's story and storms out when Julia starts asking questions. Julia continues to do research on Sarah. She soon finds out that Sarah was killed in a car accident when William was young.
The book ends with a prologue that tells us Julia left Bertrand and moved to [New York City] with Zoë and the baby. She meets up with William, who now wants to find out more about Sarah. When he asks Julia what the baby's name is, she replies 'Sarah'..
from wikipedia.org
The Midwife's Confession by Diane Chamberlain (06/2012-SF) The Meeting
Summary
Dear Anna, What I have to tell you is difficult to write, but I know it will be far more difficult for you to hear, and I’m so sorry. . . The unfinished letter is the only clue Tara and Emerson have to the reason behind their close friend Noelle’s suicide. Everything they knew about Noelle-her calling as a midwife, her passion for causes, her love for her friends and family-described a woman who embraced life. Yet there was so much they didn’t know. With the discovery of the letter and its heartbreaking secret, Noelle’s friends begin to uncover the truth about this complex woman who touched each of their lives–and the life of a desperate stranger–with love and betrayal, compassion and deceit. Told with sensitivity and insight, The Midwife’s Confession will have you turning pages late into the night. From the bestselling author of The Lies We Told and The Secret Life of Cee Cee Wilkescomes a story of deception that asks: How much is too much to forgive?
from dianechamberlain.com
