January
2003

THE BLUE FLOWER
by Penelope Fitzgerald

This award-winning novel is the fictionalized story of Friedrich von Hardenberg, a young man of the late eighteenth century destined to become one of Germany's great Romantic poets. His attachment to a plain, simple twelve-year-old girl shocks his family and friends who do not understand that Sophie will become his muse. Much research was done to evoke an era and make it accurate and real to the reader. The author's shrewd understanding of personal relationships and her elegant writing bring Friedrich, his family and his world entirely alive.

February
2003

THE SIXTEEN PLEASURES
by Robert Hellenga

In 1966, twenty-nine-year-old Margot Harrington heads to Florence to help protect its priceless books from the great floods.  While working in a convent, she is entrusted with a priceless find - a shockingly erotic volume bound with a prayer book. Margot finds adventure and falls in love with a married man as she attempts to sell the volume in order to keep the convent library intact. Colorful characters and a suspenseful plot enliven this appealing first novel of spiritual desire and earthly longing.

March
2003

FAHRENHEIT 451
by Ray Bradbury

"The system was simple. Everyone understood it. Books were for burning, along with the houses in which they were hidden." Ray Bradbury's classic novel of censorship and defiance is a beautifully crafted story of a fireman whose job it is to start fires. Guy Montag is happy in his job until a chance meeting with a misfit teenage girl begins to open his eyes to the world around him.

Commentary on mass media, the "dumbing down" of society, big government, censorship and war makes this 1953 novel eerily pertinent today.

April
2003

THE MISSING WORLD
by Margot Livesey

Jonathan has been given a second chance. His girlfriend Hazel is injured in a car accident and loses the last three years of her life. She can only remember the good times and not the lies and the infidelity that led her to leave him. Hazel, who suffers from seizures, is at first an invalid and later something more like a prisoner in Jonathan's house. A down-on-her-luck actress and a phobic American roofer become involved in her rescue.

A beautifully crafted page-turner from a riveting storyteller, this darkly humorous novel of psychological suspense presents a penetrating analysis of the ways in which desire misleads and entangles us.

May
2003

POPE JOAN
by Donna Woolfolk Cross

A woman pope? The author makes an excellent and entertaining case that, in the ninth century, a woman sat on the papal throne for two years. Brilliant and talented, the young Joan rebels against medieval social strictures forbidding the education of women. She runs away from a repressive home to attend a cathedral school with her brother. When he dies in a Viking raid, Joan assumes his identity and eventually travels to Rome as John Anglicus. Her intelligence and her skills as a healer enable her to become the confidante of two popes. In the midst of vicious papal politics, Joan becomes pope herself. A vivid and compelling recreation of the Dark Ages, this historical novel brims with fairs, weddings, stupendous banquets, famine, plague and brutal battles.

June
2003

WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE
by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary creative vision are on display in this short story collection by the acclaimed author of Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five. Contemporary tales (a shy clerk comes commandingly alive only as an actor in amateur theatricals) share the stage with science fiction (an anti-aging potion has pushed the world of 2158 to a population of twelve billion, which largely exists on processed seaweed and sawdust.) The author and the narrator often seem to be one and the same, enabling the reader to experience the world through Vonnegut's senses.

September
2003

SISTER OF MY HEART
By Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni

Set in the two worlds of San Francisco and India, this exceptionally moving novel tells a story at once familiar and exotic. Beautiful, mystical Sudha and plain, practical Anju are born on the same day. The cousins grow up together and form a bond so strong it seems nothing can break it. However, when both reluctantly agree to arranged marriages, each discovers a devastating secret that changes their relationship forever. The author believes in the power of stories and the strength of the women who tell them. Her sumptuous prose blends the chills of reality with the rich imaginings of a fairy tale.

October
2003

SMUGGLER'S MOON
By Bruce Alexander

Sir John Fielding, a blind, eighteenth century London judge and his orphan accomplice investigate reports of smuggling at a seaside town. Murder quickly raises the stakes as the pair deal with ghosts, pirates, and waterfront ruffians.

The blind judge is a real historical figure. With his half-brother Henry Fielding (author of Tom Jones and a judge himself) he was responsible for a number of reforms in police work and criminal justice.

This is the eighth in Alexander's critically acclaimed series in which he successfully captures the flavor of the bustling, crime-ridden London streets of the time.

November
2003

IN A SUNBURNED COUNTRY
By Bill Bryson

Australia is one tough country. There are more things to kill you there than anywhere else in the world including all ten of the world's most poisonous snakes, the paralytic tick, and venomous seashells. Pitfalls aside, the author revels in the beauty of this land, with its ravishing beaches and countless unique species. ("80% of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, lives nowhere else.")

Bill Bryson - travel writer, humorist, naturalist, and historian - is a perfect guide to this immense and fascinating land. He draws readers in, campfire style, relating wacky anecdotes and random facts with infusions of whimsical humor. Potential tourists and armchair travelers alike will enjoy his hysterical, enlightening, and sometimes moving descriptions of people and places we've never even imagined.

December
2003

THE LAKE OF DEAD LANGUAGES
By Carol Goodman

History eerily repeats itself in this dark tale set at a private school for girls in remote upstate New York. Single mother Jane Hudson returns to teach Latin despite the fact that both her roommates died as suicides while she was a student there. Now someone has found her journal written during that tragic time and a macabre re-enactment of the past begins. The dark and shocking secrets of Jane's adolescence progressively absorb the reader as sexual rites, pagan rituals and forbidden love come together in this chilling exploration of youthful innocence and guilt. Just what exactly is happening at Heart Lake School...and why? You will want to know the answers.