First Thursday

Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life.  As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease.  Fiercely independent, Alice struggles to maintain her lifestyle and live in the moment, even as her sense of self is being stripped away.

Beginning in Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation in 1940, Suite Francaise tells the remarkable story of men and women thrown together in circumstances beyond their control.  As Parisians flee the city, human folly surfaces in every imaginable way; a wealthy mother searches for sweets in a town without food, a couple is terrified at the thought of losing their jobs, even as their world begins to fall apart.  Moving to a provincial village now occupied by German soldiers, the locals must learn to coexist with the enemy--in their town, their homes, and even in their hearts.

Set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s, The Painted Veil is the story of the beautiful but love-starved Kitty Fane.  When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to the heart of a cholera epidemic, where she is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life and to learn how to love.

In 1931 Carbon Hill, Alabama, a small coal-mining town, nine-year-old Tess Moore watches a woman shove the cover off the family well and toss in a baby without a word. The apparent murder forces the Moore family to face the darker side of their community and understand the motivations of their family and friends.

As a young woman, Roseanne McNulty was one of the most beautiful girls in County Sligo, Ireland. Now, as her hundredth year draws near, she is a patient at Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, and she decides to record the events of her life. As Roseanne revisits her past she learns that Roscommon Hospital will close in a few months and that her caregiver, Dr. Grene, has been asked to evaluate the patients and decide if they can return to society. As Dr. Grene researches her case he discovers a document written by a local priest that tells a very different story of Roseanne's life than what she recalls.

Revolving around junior high school teacher Olive Kitteridge and her neighbors living along the coast of Maine, these thirteen linked short stories feature wonderfully vivid characters dealing with the regrets and tragedies of everyday lives.  Olive Kitteridge was one of the most critically acclaimed titles released in 2008, earning a National Book Award nomination and winning the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Born in a village in the heartland of India, Balram, the son of a rickshaw puller, is taken out of school by his family and put to work in a teashop. As he crushes coals and wipes tables, he nurses a dream of escape--of breaking away from the banks of Mother Ganga, into whose depths have seeped the remains of a hundred generations.  The White Tiger is a tale of two Indias.  Balram's journey from the darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success is utterly amoral, brilliantly irreverent, deeply endearing and altogether unforgettable.  Winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize.

Set in a small Wisconsin farming and manufacturing town still crumbling a decade after the depression of the 1890s, A Reliable Wife tells the story of Ralph Truitt, a wealthy businessman who advertises for "a reliable wife" in newspapers across America.  The woman he chooses describes herself as a "simple, honest woman," but in truth she is both complex and devious.  Catherine's plan in accepting the marriage offer is simple: she will win this man's devotion, and then she will poison him and leave Wisconsin a wealthy widow.  What she has not counted on is the passion she finds in this seemingly solid, forthright man.

Be prepared to meet three unforgettable women in Mississippi in 1962: twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss; Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child; and Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk.

Please note that the First Thursday book group will be meeting on the second Thursday for December's meeting.