Reel Chat Recommends - Bellmore Memorial Library

Cutting For Stone (Feb 2009)
Abraham Verghese
Marion and Shiva Stone, twin
brothers born from a secret love
affair between an Indian nun and a
British surgeon in Addis Ababa,
come of age in an Ethiopia on the
brink of revolution, where their love
for the same woman drives them
apart.
Reel Chat
Recommends
The Poisonwood Bible (Nov
1998)
Barbara Kingsolver
The family of a fierce evangelical
Baptist missionary--Nathan Price,
his wife, and his four daughters-begins to unravel after they embark on a 1959 mission to the
Belgian Congo, where they find
their lives forever transformed over
the course of three decades by the
political and social upheaval of
Africa.
The Sweet Hereafter (Sep
1991)
Russell Banks
Four narrators--bus driver Dolores,
upright Bill, shrewd Mitchell, and teenaged Nichole--address agonizing
questions as they describe an accident that killed fourteen children and
the effects of the tragedy on themselves and their town.
Drowning Ruth (Sep 2000)
Christina Schwarz
From its chilling opening line, “Ruth
remembered drowning,” this debut
novel grabs the reader’s attention.
Throughout the psychological thriller, brutal Wisconsin weather and
WWI drama color a tale of family
rivalry, madness, secrets and
obsessive love.
Bellmore Memorial Library
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Sophie's choice (May 1979)
The Kite Runner (Jun 2003)
These books have been selected
for their similarity to the House of
Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
They have character-driven thought provoking
and emotionally intense plot lines often told
from multiple perspectives.
Atonement (Mar 2002)
A Thousand Acres (Nov 1991)
Jane Smiley
An Iowan farmer abruptly decides to
leave a thousand-acre farm, owned by
his family for generations, to his three
daughters and retire. The two eldest
are pleased with the decision but his
youngest daughter has been cut out by
her father and is angry. As their activity
on the land progresses, the daughters
notice a change in their father. Events begin to unfold
that will threaten and destroy the family and their farm.
William Styron
As the fierce lovemaking and fights of
Nathan, a paranoiac Jewish intellectual, and Sophie, a Polish-Catholic
concentration-camp survivor, intensify,
Stingo, a writer who lives below them
in a cheap rooming house, becomes
more and more involved in their lives.
A devastating secret is revealed at a
moment of crisis.
Khaled Hosseini
Traces the unlikely friendship of a
wealthy Afghan youth and a servant's
son, in a tale that spans the final days of
Afghanistan's monarchy through the
atrocities of the present day. Exquisitely
painful at times, this is a book readers
won’t easily forget.
Ian McEwan
In 1935 England, thirteen-year-old
Briony Tallis witnesses an event involving her sister Cecilia and her childhood friend Robbie Turner. She
becomes the victim of her own imagination, leading her on a lifelong search
for truth and absolution.
The Surrendered (Mar 2010)
Chang-rae Lee
Thirty years after vying
for the attentions of a beautiful, but
damaged missionary wife at an orphanage, Korean orphan June Han and
former GI Hector Brennan are reunited
by a plot that forces them to come to
terms with mysterious secrets from their
past.
Rules of Civility (Jul 2011)
Amor Towles
A chance encounter with a handsome banker in a jazz bar on New
Year's Eve 1938 catapults Wall
Street secretary Katey Kontent into
the upper echelons of New York
society, where she befriends a shy
multi-millionaire, an Upper East
Side ne'er-do-well, and a singleminded widow. The novel captures
how a single moment's tragedy can
change the lives of all involved.
A Map of the World (Jun 1994)
Last Man in Tower (Sep 2011)
Aravind Adiga
Refusing to leave his home when a
powerful real-estate developer offers
to buy out the residents of a crumbling apartment complex near the
infamous Dharavi slums, a retired
schoolteacher becomes a target of
violence by the developer and his
own neighbors
Midwives (Jan 1997)
Chris Bohjalian
A seasoned midwife, who has de voted herself to ushering life into the
world, faces the antagonism of the
law, the hostility of traditional doctors,
and the accusations of her own
conscience when she is charged with
responsibility in a patient’s tragic
death.
Jane Hamilton
On a dairy farm in the Midwest, Alice is
watching her neighbor's daughter when
she drowns in the pond. This marks the
beginning of a series of events that turns
Alice into a scapegoat and brings about
her family's downfall.
A Man in Full (Nov 1998)
Tom Wolfe
Charles Croker, a middle-aged,
egotistical former college football star
turned tycoon, finds his life turned
upside down and the delicate racial
balance of Atlanta threatened when
star running back Fareek Fanon, a
product of the city's slums, is accused
of raping an Atlanta aristocrat's
daughter.
T
The Garden of Last Days (May
2008)
Andre Dubus III
Explosive elements converge one early
September night in a Florida men's club
revealing the seamy underside of
American life at the moment before the
world changed.