Realistic Fiction

This month the Canton Seniors Book Group will meet on Thursday, November 17 from 2:00-3:00PM in Canton Public Library's Group Study Room A.  Request a copy of this month's book at the Information Desk.

A New York Times Bestseller.  Suffocated by her unexceptional life, Carrie Bell longs for a chance to begin again, and is granted that chance, terribly, when her fiancé is injured in an accident. This is a riveting novel about self-knowledge and the conflict between who we want to be to others and who we must be for ourselves.

Canton Seniors Book Discussion: November 17, 2016

The Canton Seniors Book Group meets on the fourth Thursday of the month (except in November) from 2:00-3:00PM in the Friends' Activity Room.  We read a variety of fiction and non-fiction selections. Copies of the month's selection are distributed at the book discussion or request a copy at Canton Public Library's Information Desk.  Join us in this open, no-registration-required conversation.

Suffocated by her unexceptional life, Carrie Bell longs for a chance to begin again, and is granted that chance, terribly, when her fiancé is injured in an accident. This is a riveting novel about self-knowledge and the conflict between who we want to be to others and who we must be for ourselves.

Upcoming sessions

There are no upcoming sessions available.

Canton Seniors Book Discussion

The Canton Seniors Book Group meets on the fourth Thursday of the month (except in November) from 2:00-3:00PM in the Friends' Activity Room.  We read a variety of fiction and non-fiction selections. Copies of the month's selection are distributed at the book discussion or request a copy at Canton Public Library's Information Desk.  Join us in this open, no-registration-required conversation.

Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey
Also available in: e-book | audiobook | e-audiobook

In this darkly riveting debut novel--a sophisticated psychological mystery that is also an heartbreakingly honest meditation on memory, identity, and aging--an elderly woman descending into dementia embarks on a desperate quest to find the best friend she believes has disappeared, and her search for the truth will go back decades and have shattering consequences. Maud, an aging grandmother, is slowly losing her memory--and her grip on everyday life. Yet she refuses to forget her best friend Elizabeth, whom she is convinced is missing and in terrible danger. But no one will listen to Maud--not her frustrated daughter, Helen, not her caretakers, not the police, and especially not Elizabeth's mercurial son, Peter. Armed with handwritten notes she leaves for herself and an overwhelming feeling that Elizabeth needs her help, Maud resolves to discover the truth and save her beloved friend. This singular obsession forms a cornerstone of Maud's rapidly dissolving present. But the clues she discovers seem only to lead her deeper into her past, to another unsolved disappearance: her sister, Sukey, who vanished shortly after World War II. As vivid memories of a tragedy that occurred more fifty years ago come flooding back, Maud discovers new momentum in her search for her friend. Could the mystery of Sukey's disappearance hold the key to finding Elizabeth?

Upcoming sessions

There are no upcoming sessions available.

You love Raina Telgemeier, but are looking for something for a slightly older reader? Try these.

Tomboy by Liz Prince

Eschewing female stereotypes throughout her early years and failing to gain acceptance on the boys' baseball team, Liz learns to embrace her own views on gender as she comes of age, in an anecdotal graphic novel memoir.

The unlikely friendship between basketball team captain Charlie and robotics club president Nate is challenged when Nate declares war on the cheerleaders over funding that will either pay for new uniforms or a robotics competition.

All the Raina Telgemeier graphic novels are checked out, and anything similar. So now you're looking for similar chapter books. Here are a few.

Rescuing a squirrel after an accident involving a vacuum cleaner, comic-reading cynic Flora Belle Buckman is astonished when the squirrel, Ulysses, demonstrates astonishing powers of strength and flight after being revived.

Can you say catastrophe? by Laurie B. Friedman

April Sinclair would like to blame someone for her mostly miserable life, and since her parents won't take responsibility, she blames the stork. Her teenage years kick off with a humiliating 13th birthday party. Is there any silver lining to her summer?

If you are a fan of historical fiction, are a fan of Jodi Picoult or Tracy Chevalier, but prefer Large Print...

A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante' s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her protagonists, the unforgettable Elena and Lila.

For fourteen years, Letty Espinosa has worked three jobs around San Francisco to make ends meet while her mother raised her children-- Alex, now fifteen, and Luna, six-- in their tiny apartment on a forgotten spit of wetlands near the bay. But now Letty's parents are returning to Mexico, and Letty must step up and become a mother for the first time in her life. Navigating this new terrain is challenging for Letty, especially as Luna desperately misses her grandparents and Alex, who is falling in love with a classmate, is unwilling to give his mother a chance. Letty comes up with a plan to help the family escape the dangerous neighborhood and heartbreaking injustice that have marked their lives, but one wrong move could jeopardize everything she's worked for and her family's fragile hopes for the future.

I spy.  This month the focus is on espionage, real and fictional.

From the bestselling author of Istanbul Passage--called a "fast-moving thinking man's thriller" by The Wall Street Journal--comes a sweeping, atmospheric novel of postwar East Berlin, a city caught between political idealism and the harsh realities of Soviet occupation. Berlin 1948. Almost four years after the war's end, the city is still in ruins, a physical wasteland and a political symbol about to rupture. In the West, a defiant, blockaded city is barely surviving on airlifted supplies; in the East, the heady early days of political reconstruction are being undermined by the murky compromises of the Cold War. Espionage, like the black market, is a fact of life. Even culture has become a battleground, with German intellectuals being lured back from exile to add credibility to the competing sectors. Alex Meier, a young Jewish writer, fled the Nazis for America before the war. But the politics of his youth have now put him in the crosshairs of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Faced with deportation and the loss of his family, he makes a desperate bargain with the fledgling CIA: he will earn his way back to America by acting as their agent in his native Berlin. But almost from the start things go fatally wrong. A kidnapping misfires, an East German agent is killed, and Alex finds himself a wanted man. Worse, he discovers his real assignment--to spy on the woman he left behind, the only woman he has ever loved. Changing sides in Berlin is as easy as crossing a sector border. But where do we draw the lines of our moral boundaries? Betrayal? Survival? Murder? Filled with intrigue, and the moral ambiguity of conflicted loyalties, Joseph Kanon's new novel is a compelling thriller and a love story that brings a shadowy period of history vividly to life.

"Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers. The war is over. Bernie Gunther, our sardonic former Berlin homicide detective and unwilling SS officer, is now living on the French Riviera. It is 1956 and Bernie is the go-to guy at the Grand-Hotel du Cap-Ferrat, the man you turn to for touring tips or if you need a fourth for bridge. As it happens, a local writer needs just that, someone to fill the fourth seat in a regular game that is the usual evening diversion at the Villa Mauresque. Not just any writer. Perhaps the richest and most famous living writer in the world: W. Somerset Maugham. And it turns out it is not just a bridge partner that he needs; it's some professional advice. Maugham is being blackmailed--perhaps because of his unorthodox lifestyle. Or perhaps because of something in his past, because once upon a time, Maugham worked for the British secret service, and the people now blackmailing him are spies."--.

Michigan native, author, and poet Jim Harrison passed on this weekend. Harrison's body of work included, "...21 volumes of fiction, including 'Legends of the Fall', a collection of three novellas whose title piece, about a Montana family ravaged by World War I, became a 1994 film starring Brad Pitt; 14 books of poetry; two books of essays; a memoir; and a children’s book." (New York Times) He was known for tales of outdoors and rural life in the U.P. and his rugged, masculine characters were often compared to those of Hemingway. Below we offer a selection of his works, many available on audio Book CD, in honor of his career. His 2016 release, The ancient minstrel : novellas, can be found on the New Book Shelf.

An epic Western saga about a woman and the three sons of a Montana rancher who love her, told against the backdrop of World War I.

Legends of the fall by Jim Harrison

In a world where supermen rule comics, video games, and film, we offer a list of graphic novels created by women that range from dark to whimsical and otherworldly to all too similar to everyday life.

Exquisite corpse by Pénélope Bagieu

Zoe looks for escape from her mediocre existence in the arms of a shut-in harboring a big secret.

A collection of observations and oddities in stunning color.

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