The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid (9/2013-PC)
Summary
Changez is prodigious student who completes his Bachelors in Finance from Princeton University and joins Underwood Samson, a consultancy firm, as an analyst. He vacations in Greece, after graduating from Princeton, with fellow Princetonians where he meets Erica, who is an aspiring writer. He is instantly smitten by her, but his feelings remain almost unrequited because she is still grieving over the death of her childhood sweetheart Chris, who succumbed to lung cancer. After a date, they return to his place and he proceeds to have sex with her, but stops because of her frigidity and inability to get excited. After this incident, there is interlude where neither contact each other. But soon they go on another date, after which they have sex when Changez convinces Erica to close her eyes and fantasize that she is with Chris. Though Changez is satisfied at this development in their relationship, this irreversibly damages their relationship. Soon she gets herself admitted to a mental institution. He notices she is physically emaciated and no longer her former self. After this meeting he travels to Chile on his assignment. When he returns to meet her, it is found that she has left the institution and they found her clothes near Hudson river. Officially she is stated as a missing person, as her body has not been found.
In his professional life, he impresses his peers and gets earmarked by his superiors for his work, specially Jim, the person who recruited him and develops a good rapport with him and holds him in high esteem. This prompts the firm to send him to offshore assignments to the Philippines and Valparaíso, Chile. In Chile, he is very distracted due to developments in the world and finds himself to be a servant of American empire which has constantly interfered and manipulated his homeland. In the global scenario, the September 11 attacks, there is air of suspicion towards Pakistanis. Changez due to his privileged position in society escapes the harsh treatment and detention, but he notices a change in his treatment in public. To express solidarity with his countrymen, he starts to grow a beard. After 2001 Indian Parliament attack, India and Pakistan mobilize leading to a standoff. Noticing the American response to this situation, he has an epiphany how his country is being used as pawn. He returns from Chile to New York without completing the assignment and ends up losing his job. With no job, expiring Visa and no reason to stay in America, he moves back to Lahore.
After returning to Lahore, he becomes a professor of finance at the local university. His experience and insight in world issues gains his admiration among students. As a result he becomes a mentor to large groups of students on various issues. He and his students actively participated in demonstrations against policies which were detrimental to the sovereignty of Pakistan. In spite his non violent stance, one of relatively unknown student gets apprehended for an assassination attempt of an American representative. This brings the spotlight on Changez where he criticizes the policies of USA. This act makes people surrounding him think that someone might be sent to intimidate him or worse.
He keeps noting that the stranger is very apprehensive of their surrounding and he walks the stranger to his Hotel where the stranger reaches into his pocket for something which has metal glint. The narrator hopes it's his holder of business cards. The novel ends without revealing what the metal thing was, leaving the reader to wonder if the stranger was here to kill Changez.
from Wikipedia
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak's (10/2013-LAB)
Summary
The extraordinary #1 New York Times bestseller that will be in movie theaters on November 15, 2013, Markus Zusak's unforgettable story is about the ability of books to feed the soul.
It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.
Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.
In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.
from Goodreads
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker (11/2013-PE)
Summary
“It still amazes me how little we really knew. . . . Maybe everything that happened to me and my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.”
On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life—the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.
from theageofmiracles.com
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (1/2014-KH)
Summary
The story is a riveting saga of twin brothers, Marion and Shiva Stone, born of a tragic union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, and bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.
But it’s love, not politics – their passion for the same woman — that will tear them apart and force Marion to flee his homeland and make his way to America, finding refuge in his work at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him, wreaking havoc and destruction, Marion has to entrust his life to the two men he has trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.
from abrahamverghese.com
Bossypants by Tina Fey (2/2014-MB)
Summary
Ms. Fey deftly contrasts her show business and homebody aspects in “Bossypants,” very much the way her “30 Rock” character, Liz Lemon, flits between drudgery and fantasy. The voice of this book is quite similar to that of the television show, though Ms. Fey attributes much of the success of “30 Rock” to Alec Baldwin. She can’t say the same for her domesticated side. This book includes surprisingly down-to-earth chapters about Christmas holidays spent driving to visit in-laws and a honeymoon spent on a cruise ship. (“It’s just fun. Don’t overthink it.”) It also frets about whether Ms. Fey can have a second child while continuing to keep “30 Rock” aloft.
“Either way, everything will be fine,” she writes, setting up the last of this book’s virtually nonstop zingers. “But if you have an opinion, please feel free to offer it to me through the gap in the door of a public restroom. Everyone else does.”
from nytimes.com
Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd & Ann Kidd Taylor (3/2014-BD)
Summary
In this wise and engrossing dual memoir, Sue Monk Kidd and her daughter Ann chronicle their travels together through Greece, Turkey, and France at a time when each was on a quest to redefine herself and rediscover one another.
Sue, newly aware of aging and caught in a creative vacuum, struggles to enlarge a vision of swarming bees into a novel and to navigate the threshold into her fifties. Ann, heartbroken and lost, grapples with the classic question of what to do with her life. In voices candid and lyrical, this modern-day Demeter and Persephone explore a rich array of inspiring figures and sacred sites in Athens, Eleusis, Paris, Ephesus, Rocamadour, and places in between. They also give voice to a moving transformation of that most protean of human connections: the bond of mothers and daughters.
from suemonkkidd.com
Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple (5/2014-AMS)
Summary
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette’s intensifying allergy to Seattle – and people in general – has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.
To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence – creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a daughter’s unflinching love for her imperfect mother.
from mariasemple.com
The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty (5/2014-AMS)
Summary
At the heart of The Husband's Secret is a letter that's not meant to be read...
My Darling Cecilia, if you're reading this, then I've died...
Imagine your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret - something with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others too. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive . . .
Cecilia Fitzpatrick has achieved it all - she's an incredibly successful business woman, a pillar of her small community and a devoted wife and mother. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. But that letter is about to change everything, and not just for her: Rachel and Tess barely know Cecilia - or each other - but they too are about to feel the earth-shattering repercussions of her husband's secret.
What the reviewers said
“Intelligent and funny novel with a strong plot and intriguing premise” Sydney Morning Herald
‘Moriarty may be an edgier, more provocative successor to Maeve Binchy. There is real darkness here, but it is offset by the author’s natural wit…and irrepressible goodwill toward her characters.’Kirkus (Starred review)
In THE HUSBAND’S SECRET, Liane Moriarty has created a contemporary Pandora whose dilemma is spellbinding. Shocking, complex and thought-provoking, this is a story reading groups will devour. A knockout!" --Emily Giffin
from lianemoriarty.com
