I was most interested in the lace makers themselves, whose relationships with each other are rooted in a lifetime of history, lending the kind of security that only comes over time. Kate becomes a catalyst for change, but the women make it their own. With warm characters, a setting that is equal parts timeless history and inevitable change, and an unhurried pace, The Lace Makers of Glenmara is an excellent choice for a book group read or a companion on a rainy Seattle afternoon.

In "The Brown Coast," Tower enunciates Bob Munroe's dysfunctional existence.  He's been kicked out by his wife and is temporarily residing at a dilapidated rental his uncle has let decompose.  Rather than work on reconstruction of the house and himself, Bob is content with drinking binges with the white trash neighbors and strolls on the beach.    

"You have not slept well.  Don't open your eyes.  Stick out your tongue.  Search for that little sore on your upper lip.  Pray that it healed in the night."  Prepubescent Yancey is caught in a tragic cycle of bullying and self-pity.  He loathes his unsympathetic stepfather, and is consumed with his daydreaming thoughts.  "Leopard" adequately captures the randomness of his adolescent mind.  Much like a wounded, mistreated animal, he's repugnant yet craves attention. 

Tower has an amazing ability to invoke sympathy towards his characters, even though they can be impulsive and frightening.  The stories revolve around failed relationships and damaged psyches, yet there is a slight humor to the somber situations.  Will there be a denotation or happy ending?  The nine superb stories in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned are bound to make you shudder, flinch and chuckle.

Not much transpires over the course of the book: Ruthie becomes increasingly immersed in Sylvie's shapeless world of midnight wanderings and random adventures, while Lucille begins to see that they are no longer normal and pulls away.  Again, it's not about what happens - it's about where you are.  Fingerbone is not a town where you'd go to do something...it's a place to live.

At first I assumed it was a mystery, but it turns out that the novel has multiple storylines. I was constantly surprised by the turns it takes as it weaves layer upon layer. The author has a very eloquent writing style that seems to be of another world.  In fact, this book is very difficult to describe. I just know that I was immersed in the story until I finished it.

The Shadow of the Wind is by the Spanish writer, Carlos Ruiz Zafón. It was translated into English a few years after it was first published. I am sure that anyone who loves books will more than likely love this one.

E. L. Doctorow's novel Homer and Langley is an epic of a different sort.  It covers the long lives of the reclusive Collyer brothers.  The story does not go out into the world, but rather it brings the vagaries of human history into their crumbling mansion on New York's  5th Avenue.

Older brother Langley was both physically and mentally damaged by mustard gas during World War I.  Younger brother Homer, who lost his site as a teenager, stayed home to manage the family home after their parents' deaths.

Over the course of about seven decades, the brothers collect all manner of whole and broken objects (newspapers, knick knacks, bicycles, lamps, a Model T) and store them in ceiling high piles around their home.  However, they also welcome in the human objects of the day:  a gangster, a jazz musician, an interned Japanese couple, a group of hippies. 

The people come and go but the things stay.  The once elegant Collyer home becomes a derelict fire-trap targeted by various financial institutions and utility companies.  Langley's obsessions border on madness, but his love for his brother is constant.  Homer's brilliance is manifest in his writing and his piano, but he too seems to drift as the story comes to its inevitable ending.

Doctorow is a major talent and his novels are full of atmosphere and emotion.  He is a storyteller to read and savor.

Prince believes in the Labrador Pact, which states that it is all Labradors' sacred duty to protect their families and keep them together. This proves a difficult job for Prince, whose family, the Hunters, is plagued by every home-wrecking issue in the book: infidelity, drugs, suicide, and depression, to name a few.  As Prince desperately tries to hold his family together, he finally makes a decision that will be his own undoing.

Like Sight Hound by Pam Houston, The Labrador Pact by Matt Haig is not a cutesy animal book.  Prince begins his story in the veterinarian's office where he is waiting to be put down, and ends in the same place.  But finding out how he got there, while discovering the unique perspective a dog has on the workings of a family, will keep you reading.

Polygamy has been a source of contention in the Mormon Church. Joseph Smith, the founder of the church, introduced his followers to the practice of polygamy. The church officially denounced polygamy in 1890, after pressure from leading politicians to adhere to U.S. law.

The 19th Wife has two story lines about how polygamy affected family's lives.

Ann Eliza Young was Brigham Young's 19th wife in the late 1800s. She shocked her community by separating from her husband, seeking divorce and independence. She traveled the nation on a lecture tour, expounding on the hardships bestowed among women in plural marriages. She became a spokesperson for women's rights and helped bring attention to this plight of the Mormon faith.

In current day Utah, Jordan Scott's mother is charged with the murder of his father in their polygamist household. Jordan had been thrown out of this polygamist community years before, yet returns to discover the truth about the charges facing his mom. He is encouraged by charitable organizations that help people escape polygamist households.

Ebershoff has skill in weaving historical fiction with a modern day mystery whodunit. These connected stories are well crafted and provide voyeuristic opportunity into a private and secretive society.

He quite successfully does both and lands in the town of Argus, North Dakota.  Argus is rife with family secrets and scandals and proves a tough place to make a living during both the twenties and thirties. When he brings Eva and her son Franz over, though, they settle in, have three sons themselves and develop several close friendships.

The strongest is with Delphine who comes to work for them.  She's spent most of her life taking care of her drunk father and knows very little about her mother who passed away when she was very young.  Recently she returned to town with a flamboyant man, Cyprian, who she was in a circus act with and who she caught making out with another man.

Delphine is hardworking and loyal and has decided to stay in Argus to keep an eye out on her father.  She nurses Eva through a serious illness and mothers Eva's sons.  Fidelis and Delphine share some intense feelings for one another, but must keep them hidden.  Cyperian is close to Fidelis and Eva and Delphine are best friends. 

Despite all of Delphine's positive qualities she must endure a father who can't stay away from the sauce and who in fact has a dead family rotting in his basement which he was apparently too drunk to notice.  This discovery starts a round of legal investigations which could implicate her father for murder.  Yet she never stops caring for him.

What gets Fidelis through the tough times is singing with his friends.  A lot of the odd characters of the town come together at his place to sing and carry on almost every week.  Through pain, loss, war, and poverty the friendships in this singing club help hold the people in the town together.

Nothing is as it seems in the glitter of Shanghai. Political dissent and the rumble of war with the Japanese are heard in the background. Events are about to converge, and everything will change forever for Pearl and May. Their secure middle class life dissolves suddenly when their father, to pay off his mounting gambling debts, secretly sells the sisters through arranged marriages to two unknown Chinese Americans.

Pearl and May resist leaving their beautiful home city to join their new husbands in Los Angeles, but the decision is made for them with the Japanese invasion of Shanghai. The events of their escape forever shape Pearl and May in tragic and lasting ways. They are no longer "beautiful girls", but penniless refugee's steps ahead of the invading army.

The author gives us vivid insight into the emotional issues of losing one's cultural identity. As Pearl and May build a new life the two sisters must turn to each other for solace and courage. Their vastly different personalities don't mean they are always in accord, but sisterhood means they will never forsake each other.

The author provides historical period detail of Chinese cultural traditions, Chinese family life, Chinese acculturation in the US, the tangled nuances of immigration law and the history of the Japanese occupation of China. Shanghai Girls is a fascinating history of China in the 1930's and Chinese life in the United States in the 1940's and 1950's. This book is for those who like historical fiction combined with the intricacies of family.

Set at "the dawn of the new millenium", the nation is faced with a contested presidential election. In this story, though, it's the Democrat (Lockwood, the incumbent President) who initially wins the election. On the eve of the inaugural, the Republican presidential candidate (Mallory) receives incontrovertible evidence that the election was stolen via a sophisticated computer hack. Presented with the evidence, Lockwood has himself secretly sworn in before dawn and the ensuing media frenzy, creating a constitutional crisis and initiatiating impeachment proceedings.

But there is oh so much more: a philandering alcoholic Speaker of the House, an obsessive brilliant Supreme Court justice, shadowy operatives on both sides, a Middle East assassination, the inanity of partisan politics, and a mysterious highly connected woman with no past; for starters...

McCarry's forté is to combine a slolom of braided plot turns with really great writing. Shelley's Heart does not disappoint!

Lillian Leyb is only 22 when her entire family is brutally murdered in a Russian pogrom. During the turmoil, she is separated from her 3 year old daughter, who is presumed dead. After arriving in New York in 1924, Lillian manages to survive as a seamstress for a Yiddish theater company, becoming the mistress not only of the theater's star actor, Meyer Burstein, but also of his father, Reuben. When she hears a rumor that her daughter may be alive and living in Siberia, she sets off across the country on a precarious quest to find her. From Chicago, to Seattle, to the Yukon, Lillian meets fascinating, though usually tragic, characters who help, and sometimes hinder, her along the way.

With an ending I didn't expect, Away by Amy Bloom was a detailed and sensitive look at the underdogs of society in this era.

Penelope Lively

Matt and Lorna met on a park bench in St. James Garden in London in 1935. They were both young. He was a talented but poor artist; she was living at home, with parents who did not feel that art was a proper career for a son in law. Of course they got married. But their idyllic early married life in the Somerset hills was quickly ended by his death in the war. Lorna returned with her infant daughter to London, to find a new life and create a new family. The consequences of her first love and its sudden end reverberate through her life and that of her daughter and granddaughter.

Though we get to know three generations, this book is definitely not a saga. It takes place at a much more personal level, tightly focused on only a few characters. Lively is particularly adept at depicting family interactions, as each generation struggles to find its own way, understand the previous generation and cope with the next. The satisfaction in this domestic story comes from three dimensional characters the reader can care about and sensitive deft writing that draws you into their lives.

In my favorite of the bunch, Time of My Life by Allison Winn Scotch, Jillian Westfield's life as a wife and mother has become tedious, and she has begun to wonder if she made a wrong turn somehow. One morning she wakes up expecting another normal day, but instead she finds herself back in the apartment she shared with her previous boyfriend seven years in the past, thanks to the miracle of time travel. Whether she wants it or not, she has another chance to make the choices she has come to question. With the proverbial "twenty-twenty hindsight" she now has, how will she make those decisions? How will her new decisions affect the lives of the people she cares about, including her small daughter and her best friend? There are some interesting twists to the story as Jillian realizes some of the ramifications of her actions.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road follows a father and son as they cross the scorched, desolate terrain of a burnt out world. Although it is uncertain if the disaster is man-made or natural, the setting is definitely bleak and post-apocalyptic. The father carries a gun with very little ammunition, but for him it symbolizes protection and choice. If it gets bad enough he and his son have an escape mechanism.