February 2008
 
 
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In This Issue:

- Spotlight on the contemporary Middle East

- New & Noteworthy for book groups

- This month's featured discussion guide: The Long Run

- Contest! Win a free finished hardcover copy of Sue Miller's new novel, The Senator's Wife

Explore the contemporary Middle East

 

 

 

 

 

With the presidential election fast approaching, the topic of the Middle East is ubiquitous. Here are a few select books from Random House, Inc. that are fertile ground for triggering discussion in your reading groups about everything from war to women's rights to religion in perhaps the world's most volatile region.

Penned by a key figure in Arab-Israeli peace efforts, The Much Too Promised Land explores the questions of why the US has failed to broker a solution in the Middle East, what it would take to do so, and why Americans, after so much failure, should even care.

Kabul Beauty School takes a look at the lives of women in Afghanistan through the once-misshapen lens of an American hairdresser.

In two dazzling works of fiction, Alan Drew and Mary Doria Russell explore the invisible barriers and the secrets of the Middle East. A forbidden relationship across religions throws a family into turmoil in Gardens of Water, while in Dreamers of the Day, plainspoken American Agnes Shanklin gets caught in the midst of historical luminaries and world-altering decisions.

This month's newest and most exciting titles for book groups!


Liam Callanan
All Saints

All Saints

978-0-385-33697-0 | $13.00 | Bantam | TR

The acclaimed author of The Cloud Atlas returns with a wondrous second novel. Set in a small beachfront Catholic high school, narrated by a beautifully complex theology teacher, All Saints is at once a mystery, a love story, and a powerful rumination on secrets, temptation, and faith.


Alice Munro
The View from Castle Rock

The View from Castle Rock

978-1-4000-7792-2 | $14.95 | Vintage | TR

Scottish immigrants experience love and loss on a journey that leads them to rural Ontario. Wives, mothers, fathers, and children move through uncertainty, ambivalence, and contemplation in these stories of hope, adversity, and wonder. Perhaps Munro's most personal collection yet.



Kris Radish
Searching for Paradise in Parker, PA

978-0-553-80530-7 | $22.00 | Bantam | HC

From the bestselling author of The Sunday List of Dreams comes a poignant, funny, and uplifting novel of a woman at midlife whose search for happiness within her marriage—and within herself—turns a whole town upside down.


Glenda Burgess
The Geography of Love: A Memoir

The Geography of Love

978-0-7679-2859-5 | $22.95 | Broadway | HC

Falling in love is arguably the greatest risk and leap of faith any of us take. There’s no guarantee for future happiness, no protection from the ugly scars of the past, no shield from tragedy--this powerful memoir reminds us why we bother in the first place.

 


Pauline W. Chen
Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality

978-0-307-27537-0 | $13.95 | Vintage | TR

Final Exam follows Dr. Pauline Chen over the course of her education and practice as she struggles to reconcile the lessons of her training with her innate sense of empathy and humanity. A meditation on mortality and a superb addition to the best medical literature of our time.


978-1-4000-7811-0 | $13.95 | Anchor | TR

One Autumn day in 1985, sixteen-year-old Mary Veal vanishes from her Massachusetts prep school. A few weeks later she reappears unharmed and with little memory of what happened to her--or at least little that she is willing to share. Was Mary abducted, or did she fake her disappearance?


Maragret Atwood
Moral Disorder

Moral Disorder

978-0-385-72164-6 | $13.95 | Anchor | TR

By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, shocking, and deeply personal, this book displays Atwood’s celebrated storytelling gifts. As the New York Times has said: "The reader has the sense that Atwood has complete access to her people's emotional histories, complete understanding of their hearts and imaginations.”


Susan Gregg Gilmore
Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen

978-0-307-39501-6 | $23.00 |
Shaye Areheart | HC

A teenager, determined to escape her small town, packs her bags on her eighteenth birthday for a new life in Atlanta. But when tragedy brings her home, she discovers that the importance of a community is greater than she'd anticipated.

The Long Run: A Novel
by Leo Furey

Good news! The library marketing department at Random House, Inc. will now be featuring a "Discussion Guide of the Month"! This month we're starting strong with The Long Run by Leo Furey.

By day, the boys at the Mount Kildare Orphanage are obedient students, but when the sun goes down the Dare Klub rules the night: raiding the bakery; stealing sacramental wine; and talking endlessly about girls, sex, and the merits of Floyd Patterson versus Willie Mays. The society is their haven. However, when the Brothers grow suspicious of them, they must find the courage to stick with it, which they find buried in the most unlikely of activities: running. Dead Poets Society meets Chariots of Fire in this classic coming-of-age story.

Check out the reading guide here! (For a printable pdf, click here).

 

Win a free hardcover edition of Sue Miller's new book, The Senator's Wife.
From the author of Oprah's Book Club selection While I Was Gone, this is a highly charged, superlative new novel about marriage and forgiveness: Meri's new neighbor Delia, wife of a notoriously unfaithful senator, keeps a surprisingly strong and complicated bond with her husband. As newlywed Meri wonders what keeps them together, she begins to see that Delia's life and her own are running strangely parallel, both reckoning with the contours and mysteries of marriage, one refined and abraded by years of complicated intimacy, the other barely begun. (Reading guide available!)

Be entered to win one of a dozen copies when you answer this question: What is this treacherous senator's name? (hint)

Please email your answer along with your address to library@randomhouse.com with the suject line, "Senator" for your chance to win. Don't forget to include your address! (Offer open only to librarians in the U.S.)

For more information, visit our Book Group Resources page.



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