Reading Lists

Book clubs offer an interactive and educational way to discuss contemporary fiction. Below is a list of novels that will be reviewed this year as well as suggestions from previous years. For more information and advice about forming a new book club or facilitating an existing group please contact Tina at turman@rogers.com.
Click on 2015-2019 titles for synopses.

• Title: The Association of Small Bombs
  Author: Karan Mahajan
  

  
  The Association of Small Bombs originally titled Contempt is no small story nor is Karan Mashajan in anyway a small thinker. The story is complex, confusing and captivating.

  The novel spans 30 years and three countries, and winds around two families and several protagonists who are in some way large or “small” connected to one another either through family, friends, work, circumstance or chance.

  Mahajan’s, novel, is possibly the only memorial that the 1996 Kashmiri separatists bombing of the Lajpat Nagar market in New Delhi is ever likely to get. In the wake of Beirut, Paris, San Bernardino, Istanbul, and Jakarta the novel tells the story of this forgotten “small bomb” and its aftermath, with nearly equal time for the survivors, attackers, and the victims’ families. “A bomb,” writes Mahajan, “ is a tantrum directed at all.”
• Title: News of The World
  Author: Paulete Jiles
  

  
  The News of The World is a beautifully written novel that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor and trust.

  Set in the Old West with its unforgiving landscape the novel reflects hardship and the tremendous loss suffered by individuals. However it has an overriding sense of tenderness that draws the reader in and keeps us emotionally involved with the story and the main characters Jefferson Kidd and young Johanna Leonberg all the while blending history and fiction.

  “In my writing I go through archives and oral histories and also travel to places where events happened. The landscape seems to hold a sense of all the things that ever happened there, written in the watercourses and the stones.”
• Title: The Break
  Author: Katherena Vermette
  

  
  The Break is a novel of utmost sadness, personal history, human strength and despair. It touches us in ways that are at one time foreign yet recognizable while raising real life issues that can and cannot be altered. It is a story of family, loss, abuse, racism and yet is also a story of love, connectedness and understanding.

  Part mystery, part family narrative, and part colonial critique the novel begins from the perspective of the crime’s only witness a young Metis woman. Through the overlapping perspectives of that woman’s family and community, including her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, a police officer, and the assailant the pieces of this vicious crime and the history of the community begins to tie together.

  “This was a really hard book to write, and it was a really hard book to put out in the world. I wanted to talk about the impact of sexual violence, and the impact of the legacy of sexual violence. You can’t really do that lightly.”
• Title: Commonwealth
  Author: Ann Patchett
  

  
  Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration and the ownership of stories. It opens hidden secrets and the bonds shared by family regardless of loss guilt and circumstance. As Patchett explains “I’ve been writing the same book my whole life – that you’re in one family, and all of a sudden, you’re in another family and it’s not your choice and you can’t get out.” Finally, she asked herself: “I wonder if I wrote the story that I’m so carefully not writing, if I might be free of it?” Commonwealth is exactly that and more as it follows two fictionalized intertwined families while touching upon the personal experiences of the author.
• Title: My Grandfather’s Gallery
  Author: Anne Sinclair
  

  
  In the epilogue of "My Grandfather’s Gallery," French political journalist Anne Sinclair writes that her slim book began as a homage to her grandfather, the influential art dealer Paul Rosenberg, rather than a biography. Sinclair wanted to evoke "a man who was a stranger to me yesterday, yet who today seems quite familiar." In doing so, she successfully tells the story of her grandfather’s life, thematically reassembling it from several vantage points. In telling that tale, she also recounts her own discovery of a part of her heritage she previously had chosen to ignore. My Grandfather’s Story speaks to the art of collecting, but more importantly, it reminds us of the many truths, struggles and loss both private and public incurred by Nazi Germany.
• Title: Vanessa and Her Sister
  Author: Priya Parma
  

  
  London, 1905. The city is alight with change and the Stephen siblings are at the forefront. Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby and Adrian are leaving behind their childhood home and taking a house in the leafy heart of avant-garde Bloomsbury. There they bring together a glittering circle of brilliant, artistic friends who will come to be known as the legendary Bloomsbury Group. While placing the reader in the centre of this exciting time in art and literature Parma offers a story not yet told, by focusing on Vanessa, her art, life and relationship with her struggling and brilliant sister, Virginia Wolf.
• Title: The Children Act
  Author: Ian McEwan
  

  
  The Children Act tells the story of a British High Court judge whose docket is overwhelmed by the woes of families and the faithful. This includes divorcing Jewish parents, unequally Orthodox, disputing their daughters’ education and Catholic parents who refuse to separate their conjoined twins, even if it means that they will die. The novel raises many challenging questions. Most importantly it asks how should the judge rule and in reflection would we do so in the same situation? On the one hand the question involves sanctity of life, while on the other, personal autonomy. Once again McEwan has written a thought provoking moving tale about life, relationships and uncertainty.
• Title: The Betrayers
  Author: David Bezmosgis
  

  
  Bezmozgis’ novel unfolds in merely a day. Its scope is vast as it encompasses decades, countries, and moral questions that cut to the heart of what it means to do the right thing. Baruch Kotler, an Israeli politician and former Soviet Jewish dissident, has faced his share of public scandal by the time we meet him in Yalta with his young mistress, Leora. This brilliant and thoughtful novel delves into the psyches of its characters, offering intriguing moments of revelation into how we betray each other, and how we justify our betrayals.
• Title: The Gravity of Birds
  Author: Tracy Guezman
  

  
  This debut novel is the story of two sisters and the deep secrets one has held from the other for generations. It moves in time from 1963, when the sisters first meet artist Thomas Beyber who impacts their relationship and changes their lives forever to 2007 at which time Thomas in poor health, summons an old friend and archivist to locate paintings he did many years prior. The Gravity of Birds has a weight of its own filled with mystery, loss, family, the power of art and how it relates to life.
• Title: The Tsar of Love and Techno
  Author: Anthony Marra
  

  
  Although at times challenging and confusing Marra’s The Tsar of Love and Techno is a collection of stories that are woven together by charters and themes and is non the less brilliantly written. This remarkable work introduces a cast of characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking including a 1930s Soviet censor who painstakingly corrects offending photographs while bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. In addition there is a chorus of women who recount their stories and those of their grandmothers as two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military and great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape painting. In beautifully written prose, rich with character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work from one of our greatest new literary talents.