Victor Dalmau is a young doctor when he is caught up in the
Spanish Civil War, a tragedy that leaves his life - and the fate of his
country - forever changed. Together with his sister-in-law, the pianist
Roser Bruguera, he is forced out of his beloved Barcelona and into
exile.
When opportunity to seek refuge in Chile arises, they
take it, boarding a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda to the
promised 'long petal of sea and wine and snow' over the seas. There,
they find themselves enmeshed in a rich web of characters who come
together in love and tragedy over the course of four generations,
destined to witness the battle between freedom and repression as it
plays out across the world.
A masterful work of historical fiction about hope, exile and belonging, A Long Petal of the Sea is Isabel Allende at the height of her powers.
Here you can find information on the many titles housed in the Millcreek Community Center Library's book club collection. We have summaries of each book, as well as links to our catalogue, and other resources for reading groups. All titles can be checked out singly or as a set to anyone with a Salt Lake County Library card.
Showing posts with label Large Cast of Characters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Large Cast of Characters. Show all posts
Thursday, January 13, 2022
A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende
That September 2, 1939, the day of the Spanish exiles' splendid arrival in Chile, the Second World War broke out in Europe.
318 pages (January 2020)
Book Page at BookBrowse.
To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's
home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for
the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library
card number to access this resource outside a county library.)
Inside the book | Isabel Allende (from Penguin Random House):
Isabel Allende on her memories of Pablo Neruda (from Penguin Random House):
This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.
Title Read-alikes: In the Night of Time by Antonia Molina Muñoz; Guernica by Dave Boling; The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste; The Treasure of the Spanish Civil War by Serge Pey; Uncertain Glory by Joan Sales; The Wrong Blood by Manuel de Lope; Love and Ruin by Paula McLain; Exit West by Mohsin Hamid; Dark at the Crossing by Elliot Ackerman; The Dutch House by Ann Patchett; The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See; Afterlife by Julia Alvarez; The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich and The Separate Rose by Pablo Neruda.
Saturday, May 18, 2019
The Overstory by Richard Powers
A monumental novel about trees and people by one of our most "prodigiously talented" (The New York Times Book Review) novelists.
An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers--each summoned in different ways by trees--are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.
In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of--and paean to--the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours--vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity's self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? "Listen. There's something you need to hear."
An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers--each summoned in different ways by trees--are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.
In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of--and paean to--the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours--vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity's self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? "Listen. There's something you need to hear."
To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's
home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for
the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library
card number to access this resource outside a county library.)
Review from The New York Times
Richard Powers reads from The Overstory:
This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.
Title Read-alikes: Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver; The Trees by Ali Shaw; Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton; Greenwood by Michael Christie; Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl; Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver; The Flight of Birds by Joshual Lobb; Forage by Rose McLarney; Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy; The Inner Coast by Donovan Hohn; In Our Bones by Pernell Plath Meier; Black Sunday by Tola Rotimi Abraham; Doomstead Days by Brian Teare; and Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier.
Friday, June 8, 2012
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
An unforgettable journey into one man's remarkable life, and an epic
story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of
healing others set in 1960s & 1970s Ethiopia and 1980s America.Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.
Yet it will be love, not politics—their passion for the same woman—that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him—nearly destroying him—Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.
667 pages (February 2009)
Book Page at BookBrowse.
Lit Guide from LitLovers. To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's
home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for
the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library
card number to access this resource outside a county library.)
Book Trailer:
Abraham Verghese talks about the inspiration behind Cutting for Stone:
This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.
Title Read-alikes: In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume; The House at the Edge of Night by Catherine Banner; Beneath the Lion's Gaze by Maaza Mengiste; The Girls by Lori Lansens; The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne; Chang and Eng by Darin Strauss; The Golden Son by Shilpi Somaya Gowda; The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini; The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu; The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers; Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford; State of Wonder by Ann Patchett; and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.
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