12 Book Club Recommendations for 2017

Tinkers, Paul Harding. An old clockmaker, George Crosby, is dying. As he slowly succumbs to death, his mind floats between his current life and memories of his life with his father and grandfather, and the complexities of those relationships. All were men that struggled with personal relationships in the pursuit of their own passions. This is a story about the sometimes tangled web that bonds family love and self-understanding.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Maria Semple. A woman, once a successful and highly acclaimed architect, is met with a failure that turns her away from her passion. Now a stay-at-home-mom, she finds herself feeling lost and leaves her family to rediscover who she was before her life took an unexpected change. Her daughter’s perseverance helps bring Bernadette back home, as mother and daughter both learn to dismiss the trivial and embrace their own truth.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Richard Flanagan has written a powerful and painful novel of love and war. He falls back upon Western and Eastern literature to help frame his story. Dorrigo Evans is a man who has suffered greatly, a war hero who struggled to reconcile his public heroism with his private failings. This is a story of surviving war, the painful endurance of love, and the tempering of a “heart made weak by time and fate.”