by Hilary Mantel

United Kingdom. 560 Pages. 2008.

Set in England in the 1520s, Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey’s clerk, and later his successor.

Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages.

From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.

About the Author:

Hilary Mantel was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, England on 6 July 1952. She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She was employed as a social worker, and lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. In 1987 she was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for an article about Jeddah, and she was film critic for The Spectator from 1987 to 1991.

Her novels include Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), set in Jeddah; Fludd (1989), set in a mill village in the north of England and winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize; A Place of Greater Safety (1992), an epic account of the events of the French revolution that won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award; A Change of Climate (1994), the story of a missionary couple whose lives are torn apart by the loss of their child; and An Experiment in Love (1995), about the events in the lives of three schoolfriends from the north of England who arrive at London University in 1970, winner of the 1996 Hawthornden Prize.

Her other works include The Giant, O’Brien (1998) tells the story of Charles O’Brien who leaves his home in Ireland to make his fortune as a sideshow attraction in London. Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (2003), is an autobiography in fiction and non-fiction, taking the reader from early childhood through to the discoveries in adulthood that led her to writing; and Learning to Talk: Short Stories (2003).

Hilary Mantel’s novel Beyond Black (2005) tells the story of Alison, a Home Counties psychic, and her assistant, Colette. It was shortlisted for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize and for the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her latest novel is Wolf Hall (2009).

In 2006 she was also awarded a CBE.

by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

United Kingdom. 288 pages. 2008.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society begins in January 1946, when popular author Juliet Ashton, much like her fellow British citizens, is emerging from the dark days of World War II. As Juliet exchanges a series of letters with her publisher and her best friend, readers immediately warm to this author in search of a new subject in the aftermath of war. By the time Juliet receives an unexpected query from Dawsey Adams, we are caught in a delightful web of letters and vivid personalities and eager for Juliet to find the inspiration she seeks.

Dawsey, a farmer on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel, has come into possession of a book that once belonged to Juliet. Spurred by a mutual admiration for the writer, the two launch an epistolary conversation that reveals much about Dawsey’s Guernsey and the islanders’ recent lives under Nazi occupation. Juliet is especially interested to learn about the curious beginnings of “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society,” and before long she is exchanging letters with its other members — not only Dawsey but Isola the vegetable seller, Eben the fisherman, and blacksmith Will Thisbee, creator of the famous potato peel pie.

As Juliet soon discovers, the most compelling island character is Elizabeth, the courageous founder of the society, who lives in the memories of all who knew her. Each person who writes to Juliet adds another chapter to the story of Elizabeth’s remarkable wartime experiences. Touched by the stories the letters deliver, Juliet can’t help but travel to Guernsey herself — a decision that will have surprising consequences for everyone involved.

Drawn together by their love of books and affection for each other, the unforgettable characters of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society collectively tell a moving tale of endurance and friendship. Through the chorus of voices they have created, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows have composed a rich tale that celebrates the power of hope and human connection in the shadows of war.  (Barnes & Noble)

About the Authors:

Born in 1934 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, Mary Ann Shaffer made a career working with books — as an editor, librarian, and bookseller — before her death in February 2008. She died knowing that her novel was scheduled for publication and in the good hands of her niece and coauthor, Annie Barrows. Also a veteran of the publishing industry, having been an editor at a textbook company and at Chronicle Books before becoming a writing teacher, Barrow has written nonfiction for adults under the pen name Ann Fiery. Her energetic series for young readers, Ivy and Bean, has received multiple awards, including an ALA Notable Children’s Book designation. She lives in northern California. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is the first novel for both authors.  (Barnes & Noble)

Click here for the readers guide by Random House.

by Wilhelm Genazino
Original: Ein Regenschirm für diesen Tag
Translated from the German by Philip Boehm

Germany. 192 pages. 2001.
ISBN 0811215830

This brief and poignant novel from Germany explores existential questions as its 46-year-old narrator reflects on broken relationships and other failures, and struggles to come to terms with life.

The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt by Wilhelm Genazino, 2004 recipient of the Georg-Büchner-Preis, Germany’s highest literary honor, is finally available to English-speaking readers in a pitch-perfect translation by Philip Boehm.

Employed by a high-end shoe manufacturer to test new products, the narrator spends his days wandering through his native city, encountering faces from his past (primarily female) and experiencing anew the many manifestations of the mystery of life. In the grand tradition of literary flâneurs, he takes note of his surroundings, from the significant to the mundane, and assembles them into a sort of mental collage that is at once self-portrait and cityscape.

Most remarkable in Genazino’s work is the humor with which he invests this melancholic character. Though at times he fears that he teeters on the brink of insanity, he good-naturedly pursues the strange twists of fate that land him variously behind a table at the flea market, in a newspaper office, by the banks of a flooded river, or in a friend’s bed. As Peter von Matt wrote in Der Spiegel, “Indeed, there is hardly a subtler humorist among today’s writers than Genazino.” (New Directions Publishing Corp.)

About the Author:

Wilhelm Genazino (born 22 January 1943, Mannheim) is a German journalist and author.

In the 1960s, he studied German, philosophy and sociology at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. He worked as a journalist until 1965. During this time, he worked, inter alia, for the satirical magazine Pardon and co-edited the magazine Lesezeichen. Since 1970 he has been working as a freelance author. In 1977 he achieved a breakthrough as a serious writer with his trilogy Abschaffel. In 1990 he became a member of the Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt. After living in Heidelberg for a long time, Genazino moved to Frankfurt in 2004. That same year he was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize, the most prestigious award for German literature. (Wikipedia)

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR: Philip Boehm is a playwright, theater director, and author of numerous translations from Polish and German. He won the Austrian State Prize for Literary Translations in 1990. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

by Emine Sevgin Özdamar

Germany. 333 pages. 2007.

The Bridge of the Golden Horn is a coming-of-age novel, a sentimental education that is also a political, cultural and intellectual one. In 1966, at the age of sixteen, the unnamed heroine lies about her age and signs up as a migrant worker in Germany. She leaves Istanbul, works on an assembly line in West Berlin making radios, and lives in a women’s factory hostel. But Özdamar’s novel is not about the problems of assembly line work it’s a witty, picaresque account of a precocious teenager refusing to become wise, of a hectic four years lived between Berlin and Istanbul, of a young woman who is obsessed by theatre, film, poetry and left-wing politics. These are sometimes grim years, particularly in Turkey, but they also have a hope and optimism that seem almost unimaginable today.

About the Author:

Emine Sevgi Özdamar (born August 10, 1946 in Malatya, Turkey), is a Turkish-German actress and author.

Özdamar is a writer, actress and director and has received a lot of recognition for her work. A lover of poetry, she found great inspiration in the works of Heinrich Heine. She also found inspiration in the works of Bertolt Brecht, especially from an album of his songs which she had bought in the 60’s in Berlin. She later decided to study with Brecht’s disciple Benno Besson in Berlin, where she currently resides. (Wikipedia)

by Jim Fergus

United States. 320 pages. 1998.

An American western with a most unusual twist, this is an imaginative fictional account of the participation of May Dodd and others in the controversial “Brides for Indians” program, a clandestine U.S. government-sponsored program intended to instruct “savages” in the ways of civilization and to assimilate the Indians into white culture through the offspring of these unions. May’s personal journals, loaded with humor and intelligent reflection, describe the adventures of some very colorful white brides (including one black one), their marriages to Cheyenne warriors, and the natural abundance of life on the prairie before the final press of the white man’s civilization. Fergus is gifted in his ability to portray the perceptions and emotions of women. He writes with tremendous insight and sensitivity about the individual community and the political and religious issues of the time, many of which are still relevant today. This book is artistically rendered with meticulous attention to small details that bring to life the daily concerns of a group of hardy souls at a pivotal time in U.S. history.

Click here for the reading group guide for One Thousand White Women.

About the Author:

Jim Fergus (born March 23, 1950; Chicago) is an American author and journalist.

He attended high school in Massachusetts and graduated as an English major from Colorado College in 1971. In 1980, he moved to the tiny town of Rand, Colorado (pop. 13), to begin his career as a full-time freelance writer. He was a contributing editor of Rocky Mountain Magazine, as well as a correspondent of Outside magazine. His articles, essays, interviews and profiles have appeared in a wide variety of national magazines and newspapers, including Newsweek, Newsday, The Denver Post, The Paris Review, Texas Monthly, Esquire, Fly Fisherman, Outdoor Life, and Field & Stream.

Fergus is the author of several works of nonfiction and two novels. One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd, his first, won the 1999 Fiction of the Year Award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association.

He lives presently in southern Arizona.

by Muriel Barbery

France. 336 pages. 2006.

We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building’s tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.

Then there’s Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma’s trust and to see through Renée’s timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.

About the Author:

Muriel Barbery (born 28 May 1969 in Casablanca, Morocco) is a French novelist and professor of philosophy.

Barbery entered the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud in 1990 and obtained her agrégation in philosophy in 1993. She then taught philosophy at the Université de Bourgogne, in a lycée, and at the Saint-Lô IUFM.

Her novel L’Élégance du hérisson (translated into English as The Elegance of the Hedgehog) topped the French best-seller lists for 30 consecutive weeks and, reprinted 50 times, had by May 2008 sold more than a million copies. (Wikipedia)

by Mohammed Hanif

Pakistan. 336 pages. 2008.

Intrigue and subterfuge combine with bad luck and good in this darkly comic debut about love, betrayal, tyranny, family, and a conspiracy trying its damnedest to happen.

Ali Shigri, Pakistan Air Force pilot and Silent Drill Commander of the Fury Squadron, is on a mission to avenge his father’s suspicious death, which the government calls a suicide.Ali’s target is none other than General Zia ul-Haq, dictator of Pakistani. Enlisting a rag-tag group of conspirators, including his cologne-bathed roommate, a hash-smoking American lieutenant, and a mango-besotted crow, Ali sets his elaborate plan in motion. There’s only one problem: the line of would-be Zia assassins is longer than he could have possibly known.

About the Author:

Mohammed Hanif is a Pakistan writer and journalist, born in Okara.

After leaving the Pakistan Air Force Academy to pursue a career in journalism, he worked for Newsline, India Today, and The Washington Post. He has written plays for the stage and screen, including a critically acclaimed BBC drama and the feature film The Long Night. Hanif is a graduate of University of East Anglia’s creative writing programme. He is currently head of BBC’s Urdu Service and lives in London.

by Daniel Alarcón

Peru. 288 pages. 2007.

A nameless, timeless South American country slowly emerges from a war everyone would prefer to forget. For ten years, Norma has been the voice of consolation for a people broken by violence, while hiding her own personal loss: her husband disappeared at the end of the war. Norma’s radio program is the most popular in the country, and every week the Indians in the mountains and poor of the barrios listen as she reads the names of those who have gone missing, those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Loved ones are reunited, and the lost are found.

But the life she has become accustomed to is forever changed when a young boy arrives from the jungle and provides a clue to the fate of her long-missing husband.

Stunning, timely, and absolutely mesmerizing, Lost City Radio probes the deepest questions of war and its meaning: from its devastating impact on a society transformed by violence to the emotional scarring each participant, observer, and survivor carries with them for years.

About the Author:

Daniel Alarcón is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning magazine published in his native Lima, Peru, and Visting Scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley.

He is author of two works of fiction, War by Candlelight (2006 PEN/Hemingway Award Finalist) and Lost City Radio, a novel published in more than a dozen countries. He has won numerous prizes, including a Whiting Award (2004), Guggenheim and Lannan Fellowships (2007), and a National Magazine Award (2008).

by Xiaolu Guo

United Kingdom/China. 304 pages. 2006.

Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang, the daughter of shoe factory owners in rural China, has come to London to study English. She calls herself Z because English people can’t pronounce her name, but she’s no better at their language. Set loose to find her way through a confusion of cultural gaffes and grammatical mishaps, she winds up lodging with a Chinese family and thinks she might as well not have left home. But then she meets an English man who changes everything. From the moment he smiles at her, she enters a new world of sex, freedom, and self-discovery. But she also realizes that, in the West, “love” does not always mean the same as in China, and that you can learn all the words in the English language and still not understand your lover.

Drawing on her diaries from when she first arrived in the UK, Xiaolu Guo winningly writes the story in steadily improving English grammar and vocabulary. Freshly humorous, sexy, and poignant, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is an utterly original novel about language, identity, and the cultural divide.

About the Author:

Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese novelist and filmmaker, who uses film and literary language to explore themes of alienation, memory, personal journeys, daily tragedies and develops her own vision of China’s past and its future in a global environment.

She was born in 1973. After graduating from the Beijing Film Academy, she published a number of books in China. Since 2002, she has been dividing her time between London and Beijing. She has written and directed award-winning documentaries including The Concrete Revolution. Her first feature film, How Is Your Fish Today?, was screened at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2007 International Women’s Film Festival. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, her third novel, is the first book she has written directly in English; it was short-listed for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction.

by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

Nigeria. 416 pages. 2009.

“Dear Friend, I do not come to you by chance. Upon my quest for a trusted and reliable foreign business man or company, I was given your contact by the Nigerian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. I hope that you can be trusted to handle a transaction of this magnitude.” The feelings that such unsolicited e-mails provoke — impatience, scorn, amusement — make most of us click the delete button daily. Nigerian e-mail scams are so notorious that few of us give them a thought. And yet these missives are an unsung literary form, a river of wheedling, flattery and grasping that flows directly from the desires of the human heart. The young Nigerian writer Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani is determined to follow them back to their source. Her pointed and poignant first novel is a lively, good-humored and provocative examination of the truth behind a global inbox of deceit…As the scams increase in scale and audacity, the novel begins to accomplish something more than simply poking fun at the lust and rapacity that make a small but lucrative fraction of Westerners susceptible to such scams. Significantly, the names of Nwaubani’s suckers are not Smith and Jones but rather Rumsfeld, Albright, Condoleezza and Letterman; they are little people with big people’s names and emotional resonance. (Washington Post)

About the Author:

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani was born in Enugu, Nigeria. She earned her very first income from winning a writing competition at the age of thirteen. As a teenager, she secretly dreamed of becoming a CIA or KGB spy. She ended up studying Psychology at the University of Ibadan instead. She lives in Abuja, Nigeria. I Do Not Come to You by Chance is her first novel.