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Bookclub Suggestions

Tuesday, Oct 16, 2012 at 11:13am

Here are a few Bookclub Suggestions from the booksellers of McNally Robinson.

Everybody Has Everything by Katrina Onstad
On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry
Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Suspicion by Rachel Wyatt
The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco
Blood and Salt by Barbara Sapergia
Four New Messages by Joshua Cohen
The Cook by Wayne Macauley

Categories: Book Clubs, Saskatoon, Winnipeg

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On Canaan's Side

- Sebastian Barry

Trade paperback $23.00
Reader Reward Price: $20.70

Longlisted for the Booker Prize, a mesmerizing new novel from the award-winning author of Old God's Time

A first-person narrative of Lilly Bere's life, On Canaan's Side opens as the eighty-five-year-old Irish émigré mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. Lilly, the daughter of a Dublin policeman, revisits her eventful past, going back to the moment she was forced to flee Ireland at the end of the First World War. She continues her tale in America, where--far from her family--she first tastes the sweetness of love and the bitterness of betrayal.

Spanning nearly seven decades, Sebastian Barry's extraordinary fifth novel explores memory, war, family ties, love, and loss, distilling the complexity and beauty of life into his haunting prose.

The Shadow of the Wind

- Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Lucia Graves

Trade paperback $25.99
Reader Reward Price: $23.39

Barcelona, 1945—A great world city lies shrouded in secrets after the war, and a boy mourning the loss of his mother finds solace in his love for an extraordinary book called The Shadow of the Wind, by an author named Julian Carax. When the boy searches for Carax’s other books, it begins to dawn on him, to his horror, that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book the man has ever written. Soon the boy realizes that The Shadow of the Wind is as dangerous to own as it is impossible to forget, for the mystery of its author’s identity holds the key to an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love that someone will go to any lengths to keep secret.

The Prague Cemetery

- Umberto Eco, Richard Dixon

Trade paperback $27.99
Reader Reward Price: $25.19

The Prague Cemetery is the #1 international bestselling historical novel from the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco.

Nineteenth-century Europe--from Turin to Prague to Paris--abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night.

Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. Conspiracies rule history. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat.

But what if behind all of these conspiracies, both real and imagined, lay one lone man?

"Choreographed by a truth that is itself so strange a novelist need hardly expand on it to produce a wondrous tale. . . . Eco is to be applauded for bringing this stranger-than-fiction truth vividly to life." --The New York Times

Four New Messages

- Joshua Cohen

Trade paperback $24.00
Reader Reward Price: $21.60

A quartet of audacious fictions that capture the pathos and absurdity of life in the age of the internet, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus

*A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice*
* One of Flavorwire's "50 Books That Define the Past Five Years in Literature"

A spectacularly talented young writer has returned from the present with Four New Messages, urgent and visionary dispatches that seek to save art, sex, and even alienation from corporatism and technology run rampant.

In "Emission," a hapless drug dealer in Princeton is humiliated when a cruel co-ed exposes him exposing himself on a blog gone viral. "McDonald's" tells of a frustrated pharmaceutical copywriter whose imaginative flights fail to bring solace because of a certain word he cannot put down on paper. In "The College Borough" a father visiting NYU with his daughter remembers a former writing teacher, a New Yorker exiled to the Midwest who refuses to read his students' stories, asking them instead to build a replica of the Flatiron Building. "Sent" begins mythically in the woods of Russia, but in a few virtuosic pages plunges into the present, where an aspiring journalist finds himself in a village that shelters all the women who've starred in all the internet porn he's ever enjoyed.

Highbrow and low-down, these four intensely felt stories explain what happens when the virtual begins to colonize the real -- they harness the torrential power and verbal dexterity that have established Cohen as one of America's most brilliant younger writers.