Oprah's Book Club - Recent Selections

This riveting saga of an American family captures the deep and ancient alliance between humans and dogs, and the power of fate through one boy's epic journey into the wild.

Humanity now, perhaps more than in any previous time, has an opportunity to create a new, saner, more loving world. This will involve a radical inner leap from the current egoic consciousness to an entirely new one. In very practical terms, Tolle leads readers into this new consciousness to learn to live and breathe freely.

The spellbinding epic set in twelfth-century England, The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of the lives entwined in the building of the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has ever known — and a struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state, and brother against brother.

Love in the Time of Cholera
By Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
Grossman, Edith
2007/10 - Vintage Books USA
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A masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds three people's lives together for more than 50 years.

Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Virgin Suicides; Engrossing story of family secrets and the coming of age of the protagonist who lives with a unique genetic anomaly.

The Road
By McCarthy, Cormac
2007/03 - Vintage Books USA
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The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

In this luminous memoir, a true American icon, whose body of work is arguably the most morally significant in cinematic history, looks back on his celebrated life and career, exploring elements of character and personal values to take his own measure as a man, as a husband and father, and as an actor.

Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.

"The most lacerating tale of drug addiction since William S. Burroughs' Junky." --"The Boston Globe"
"Again and again, the book delivers recollections that leave the reader winded and unsteady. James Frey's staggering recovery memoir could well be seen as the final word on the topic."--"San Francisco Chronicle"
"A brutal, beautifully written memoir."--"The Denver Post"
"Gripping . . . A great story . . . You can't help but cheer his victory." --"Los Angeles Times Book Review"

As I Lay Dying is the harrowing, darkly comic tale of the Bundren family's trek across Mississippi to bury Addie, their wife and mother, as told by each of the family members--including Addie herself.

First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling," the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers--the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason.

Light in August is the story of Lena Grove's search for the father of her unborn child, and features one of Faulkner's most memorable characters: Joe Christmas, a desperate drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.

Anna Karenina
By Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich
2004/06 - Penguin Books
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Anna Karenina is the wife of a prominant Russian government official. She leads a correct but confining upper-middle-class existence. She seems content with her life as a proper companion to her dignified, unaffectionate husband and an adoring mother to her young son, until she meets Count Vronsky, a young officer of the guards. He pursues her and she falls madly in love with him. Her husband refuses to divorce her, so she gives up everything, including her beloved son, to be with Vronsky. After a short time, Vronsky becomes bored and unhappy with their life as social outcasts. He abandons her, returns to the military and is immediately accepted back into society. Anna, a fallen woman, shunned by respectable society, throws herself under a train.