Seattle Picks: Book Group Best Bets--Fiction
Annotation:Online, he’s a monster. On the streets, he’s a pariah. And in reality, he’s just a kid. A provocative look at our estranged virtual and physical selves.
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Annotation:In 1665, Wampanoag Indian Caleb is the first Native American graduate of Harvard College. His friend, Bethia, the daughter of a Martha’s Vineyard preacher, narrates his coming-of-age and his educational and spiritual journey.
Annotation:Abused and abandoned at sixteen, Margo Crane, sharpshooter and river princess, takes off down Michigan’s Stark River on a Huckleberry Finn coming-of-age journey in her grandfather’s teak boat.
Annotation:On the gritty streets of Portland, Oregon, Jack Levitt escapes an orphanage for the city’s pool halls and brothels until time in prison opens him up to life’s possibilities in this thought-provoking reprint.
Annotation:A church “healing” session for a 13-year-old autistic boy goes terribly wrong, tearing apart a small town in the mountains of western North Carolina in this Southern gothic novel.
Annotation:A bloody Western romp that follows two hired assassins, Eli and Charlie, from Oregon City to California’s gold territory in 1851.
Annotation:This revelatory Irish novel of belonging, betrayal and misspent passion deftly calculates the depreciation of houses, and of home. Inaugural winner of the American Library Association’s Carnegie Medal.
Annotation:Set in small-town Mississippi, this mystery tells the story of a friendship broken by suspicion and misunderstanding as a police officer must investigate his childhood friend, who is suspected as a serial killer.
Annotation:At Westish College, a baseball prodigy’s star rises and falls, the esteemed college president has his first love affair with a young man, and the president’s daughter returns home after a failed marriage.
Annotation:Dana Yarboro and her mother are James Witherspoon’s secret family, whom his other wife and daughter know nothing about. When the two girls meet accidently and become friends, the bigamist’s secret is threatened.
Annotation:A letter from an old, ailing colleague spurs Harold to do the unexpected: walk 600 miles across rural England to hand deliver his reply in the hopes that it might keep Queenie Hennessy alive.
Annotation:Suffering from Alzheimer’s, retired surgeon Jennifer White cannot remember killing her best friend as the police suspect, nor can she fully rule out the possibility of her guilt.
Annotation:If language is reality, what will become of a naturally candid extraterrestrial race when they suddenly adopt that bizarre earthling behavior: telling lies?
Annotation:Three complex storylines come together as Dr. Natalia Stefanovi travels to an unnamed Balkan country to solve the mystery of her grandfather’s death far from his beloved home.
Annotation:Now an old woman, Granada remembers her life as a slave as she comforts a young girl with stories about the mysterious Polly Shine and other slaves who were important to her own healing.
Annotation:Emily Maxwell, a Pittsburgh widow, gets new wheels and a new lease on life in this quiet, contemplative novel about one woman’s daily thoughts and hopes.
Annotation:A Conradian mystery takes Marina Singh to the heart of the Amazon on an investigation of a pharmaceutical research station that’s been silent far too long.
Annotation:Perla lives with implied guilt from her father’s complicity in the disappearance of political dissidents during Argentina’s troubled 1970s and 80s, until one day a stranger relates a magical, strange tale.
Annotation:Four women who met in college in the 1970s in Bombay reconnect when one is diagnosed with brain cancer in this novel about the idealism of youth, friendship and the exigencies of time.
Annotation:This leisurely historical novel, the sequel to The Hummingbird’s Daughter, traces the American journeys of Teresita Urrea as pilgrims still beg for her healing and sinister forces try to exploit her talents.
Annotation:Treated like little social experiments all their lives, Annie and Buster have sometimes wished their performance artist parents would just grow up. Now mom and dad have vanished, or is this just their latest stunt?
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