About the Book
“The Turner House” is a moving and celebratory portrait of a family and a city in transition.
The house on Detroit’s Yarrow Street has been home to the colorful and complicated Turners for more than 50 years. The family matriarch’s failing health, the declining neighborhood and an underwater mortgage force a family meeting to decide the house’s fate. Cha-Cha, the oldest son and unofficial head of the Turner clan, wrangles with his family’s past and the varied demands of his 12 siblings in this entertaining and vividly drawn family saga. In Angela Flournoy’s novel, the story of the Turners is also the story of Detroit, the Great Migration and this country’s recent economic turmoil.
Continue reading “2017 One Read Winner: About “The Turner House” and Angela Flournoy”
About the Book
“Bettyville” is a funny, tender memoir about a son coming home to a place he never quite fit to care for his aging mother.
Hodgman, after working for years as an editor in New York City, returns to Paris, Missouri and finds that his hometown and his mother Betty are both in extreme decline. The two share a fierce love, but a deep silence, as Betty has never been able to understand or accept his homosexuality. Hodgman reflects on his recovery from addiction, losing loved ones to the AIDS epidemic and his struggles to care for the still feisty but failing Betty. Funny, honest and tenderhearted, this memoir illuminates how a person is shaped by a family and community that are at once loving and damaging, flawed and beautiful.
Continue reading “2016 One READ Winner: About “Bettyville” and George Hodgman”
About the Book
“Station Eleven” is a literary, post-apocalyptic page-turner.
Twenty years after a deadly flu outbreak kills most of the world’s population, what survives? What matters? This haunting novel begins with the on-stage death of famous actor Arthur Leander during his performance of King Lear, which coincides with the beginning of the pandemic. The narrative moves back and forth between Leander’s younger life and 20 years after his death, weaving the stories of a handful of people connected to him – some closely, like his ex-wife, and some by the smallest thread, like the EMT who attempted to save his life or the child actress with whom Leander briefly shared a stage. A lyrically written examination of the importance of art and what it means to be human.
The book’s UK publisher describes “Station Eleven” as “thrilling, unique and deeply moving … a beautiful novel that asks questions about art and fame and about the relationships that sustain us through anything — even the end of the world.”
Continue reading “2015 One READ Winner: About “Station Eleven” and Emily St. John Mandel”
About the Book
“The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics” is an uplifting and fast-paced Cinderella story.
This nonfiction work describes the journey of nine working class young men from the University of Washington as they row their way out of obscurity and into the gold-medal race at the 1936 Olympic Games in Hitler’s Berlin. The story of poor, twice-orphaned Joe Rantz anchors this cinematic tale of passion and perseverance set against the struggles of the Great Depression and a looming Second World War. Drawing on interviews, journals and period photographs, Brown tells the fascinating story of these unlikely American heroes.
The book’s publisher calls “The Boys in the Boat” an “irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times.”
Continue reading “2014 One READ Winner: About “The Boys in the Boat” and Daniel Brown”
About the Book
“The Ruins of Us” is a fast-paced work of contemporary fiction that explores the terrain of family relationships complicated by cultural conflict.
After more than 20 years of marriage to wealthy Saudi Abdullah al-Baylani, Rosalie, an American expatriate, discovers that her husband has taken a Palestinian second wife, which makes her contemplate escaping both the marriage and the country she has grown to love. Leaving will not be easy, however, given the country’s restrictions on women and the needs of her teenage children – a headstrong daughter becoming increasingly westernized and a son succumbing to radicalism.
The book’s publisher describes “The Ruins of Us” as “a timely story about intolerance, family and the injustices we endure for love.” Continue reading “2013 One Read Winner: About “The Ruins of Us” and Keija Parssinen”
About the Book
“The Tiger’s Wife” is a work of contemporary fiction rich with both history and legend, reality and myth. Natalia is a young physician in the former Yugoslavia, on her way to an orphanage to provide vaccinations to the children there, when she learns that her grandfather has died far from home. She becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for “the deathless man,” a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As she looks for answers, she uncovers an extraordinary World War II era story of a deaf-mute woman in her grandfather’s boyhood village who befriended a tiger escaped from a zoo. Continue reading “2012 One Read Winner: About Téa Obreht and “The Tiger’s Wife””
About the Author
What do goldfish surgery, helper monkeys, food addictions and human tissue ownership have in common? They are all topics explored in science writer Rebecca Skloot’s work.
While taking a community college biology course at the age of 16, Skloot learned about Henrietta Lacks and her immortal cells, known as HeLa, cultured by scientists and used in research around the world. Her curiosity about the woman behind this line of cells grew as she gave up her long-held goal of becoming a veterinarian and discovered an aptitude for writing. Skloot has a B.S. in biological sciences and an MFA in creative nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover; and many other publications, and she is co-editor of “The Best American Science Writing 2011.” “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” is her first book.
Continue reading “2011 One Read Winner: About Rebecca Skloot and “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks””
About the Author
Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of “You Remind Me of Me,” which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Ballantine has also published two collections of his short stories: “Fitting Ends” and “Among the Missing,” which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award.
Continue reading “2010 One Read Winner: About Dan Chaon & “Await Your Reply””
About the Author
Andrea Barrett did not start out to be a fiction writer; she wanted to be a scientist. “I really wanted to be Darwin in a skirt wandering through the Galapagos or the Amazon naming birds and trees,” she says. Instead, Barrett has translated her fascination with science and the natural world into award-winning novels and short stories. Barrett is especially drawn to the history of exploration and the suffering men and women were willing to endure in the pursuit of knowledge. The “Voyage of the Narwhal” (1998) tells of a harrowing expedition to the Arctic, while in the title story from “Ship Fever,” a doctor struggles through a typhus epidemic.
Continue reading “2009 One Read Winner: About Andrea Barrett and “The Air We Breathe””
(from the author, originally published by Powell’s Books)
“Can’t cook, but doesn’t bite.” It is only the line atop a classified advertisement in a weekly newspaper, that of “an A-1 housekeeper, sound morals, exceptional disposition” seeking to relocate to Montana early in the twentieth century. But for young Paul Milliron, his two younger brothers and his widower father, and his rambunctious fellow students in their one-room school, it spells abracadabra.
Paul is the voice of the book: a bit wry, contemplative, and literally bedeviled by dreams — lifelong, he has had the disturbing knack of vividly recalling the episodes of imagination that swirl in his mind at night. Paul has risen to become the state superintendent of education, and at the vantage point of 1957, strapped for budget in what he knows is going to be a changed world of education because of the Soviet landing of Sputnik, he is facing what is more like a nightmare, everything he has believed in is “eclipsed by this Russian kettle of gadgetry orbiting overhead.” In his heart he knows the powerful political pressures on him to “consolidate” the rural one-room schools, which will be the death knell of those perky idiosyncratic little institutions such as the one that produced him at Marias Coulee.
Before his crucial convocation of rural educators to give them his decision, though, he impulsively drives out to Marias Coulee, now a scatter of mostly abandoned homesteads just beyond the northern fringe of a successful irrigation project. There the story begins, with Paul swept back in memory to 1910 when the Milliron family’s hard-bargained new housekeeper, Rose Llewelynn, and her unannounced brother step down from the train, “bringing several kinds of education to the waiting four of us.”
One Read 2023: “When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky” by Margaret Verble