The Dwarves

The bestselling series from Europe

For countless millennia, the dwarves of the Fifthling Kingdom have defended the stone gateway into Girdlegard. Many and varied foes have hurled themselves against the portal and died attempting to breach it. No man or beast has ever succeeded. Until now. . .

Abandoned as a child, Tungdil the blacksmith labors contentedly in the land of Ionandar, the only dwarf in a kingdom of men. Although he does not want for friends, Tungdil is very much aware that he is alone—indeed, he has not so much as set eyes on another dwarf. But all that is about to change.

Sent out into the world to deliver a message and reacquaint himself with his people, the young foundling finds himself thrust into a battle for which he has not been trained. Not only his own safety, but the life of every man, woman and child in Girdlegard depends upon his ability to embrace his heritage. Although he has many unanswered questions, Tungdil is certain of one thing—no matter where he was raised, he is a true dwarf.

And no one has ever questioned the courage of the dwarves.

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Death in the Andes

Written by the 2010 Nobel Prize winning author & “Peru's best novelist—one of the world's best.” —The New Yorker

In a remote Andean village, three men have disappeared. Peruvian Army corporal Lituma and his deputy Tomás have been dispatched to investigate, and to guard the town from the Shining Path guerrillas they assume are responsible. But the townspeople do not trust the officers, and they have their own ideas about what forces claimed the bodies of the missing men. To pass the time, and to cope with their homesickness, Tomás entertains Lituma nightly with the sensuous, surreal tale of his precarious love affair with a wayward prostitute. His stories are intermingled with the ongoing mystery of the missing men.

Death in the Andes is an atmospheric suspense story and a political allegory, a panoramic view of contemporary Peru from one of the world's great novelists.

“Remarkable . . . a fantastically picturesque landscape of Indians and llamas, snowy peaks, hunger, and violence.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Meticulously realistic descriptions of this high, unforgiving landscape and the haunted people who perch there . . . merge into a surreal portrait of a place both specific and universal.” —Time

(A special thank you to book club member, Elke Richelsen for the suggestion.)

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Blood of the Dawn

Blood of the Dawn follows three women whose lives intertwine and are ripped apart during what's known as “the time of fear” in Peruvian history when the Shining Path militant insurgency was at its peak. The novel rewrites the conflict through the voice of women, activating memory through a mixture of politics, desire, and pain in lucid, brutal prose.

The stories of the three women converge at the end, in a series of horrifically violent passages—they're as different from one another as can be, but they end up sharing the same experience. It's as upsetting as you could possibly imagine.

“Blood of the Dawn is a short novel, and maybe that's why it's so effective. Salazar Jiménez and translator Elizabeth Bryer make every word count, and the result is a work of concentrated intensity with no room for the reader to escape the horrors that fill just about every page. It's a novel that never lets the reader blink, until the terrifying last words … The violence that permeated Peru in the 1980s and 1990s is unspeakable, which is exactly why it needs to be spoken. That's what Jiménez does in this beautiful, horrifying work of art.” —NPR

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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The Blue Hour

Adrián Ormache, a high-flying lawyer with a beautiful wife and two daughters, leads a privileged and glamorous life in one of Lima’s wealthiest neighborhoods. But when his mother dies, he discovers a letter amongst her possessions making shocking claims about her now long-dead husband, Adrián’s father—a commander in the army during the Peruvian Civil War of the 1980s. As well as being linked to atrocities committed against the ‘Shining Path’ guerrillas, it appears that he also kidnapped and kept a local girl, whose family now seeks retribution.

Shocked out of his comfortable existence, Adrián becomes obsessed with finding the girl and sets out to face the harrowing realities of Peru’s recent past, and uncover the truth about his father.

“The strength of the plot pivots on the lovers’ ambiguous feelings for one another—the intensity of their mismatched love and hatred is perfectly drawn.” —Times Literary Supplement

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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Sexographies

In fierce and sumptuous first-person accounts, renowned Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener records infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison, participating in sexual exchanges in swingers clubs, traveling the dark paths of the city in the company of prostitutes, undergoing a complicated process of egg donation, and participating in a ritual of ayahuasca ingestion in the Amazon jungle—all while taking us on inward journeys that explore immigration, maternity, fear of death, ugliness, and threesomes. Fortunately, our eagle-eyed voyeur emerges from her narrative forays unscathed and ready to take on the kinks, obsessions, and messiness of our lives. Sexographies is an eye-opening, kamikaze journey across the contours of the human body and mind.

“The most striking quality of Sexographies is Wiener’s fearlessness―her ability to broach any topic without the slightest flinch, however unfamiliar or achingly personal…. her essays do not deal solely in sex, as the title of the collection may suggest, but in the exploration of identity and gender. How are we to make sense of our own bodies and the bodies of others? Why is it that we with the internet at our fingertips supposedly know more than ever, yet often experience less and are less open to the experiences of others? Wiener urges us to ask these questions in order to uncover the artificial boundaries that have confined us to our own experiences. Nothing is off limits to Gabriela Wiener and she spares her readers no detail of her adventures. The result is Sexographies―an addictive and darkly funny collection that surprises at every turn.” —The Arkansas International

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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The Word of the Speechless

The Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro is one of the masters of the short story and a major contributor to the great flourishing of Latin American literature that followed the Second World War. In a letter to an editor, Ribeyro said about his stories, “in most of [them] those who are deprived of words in life find expression—the marginalized, the forgotten, those condemned to an existence without harmony and without voice. I have restored to them the breath they’ve been denied, and I’ve allowed them to modulate their own longings, outbursts, and distress.”

This is work of deep humanity, imbued with a disorienting lyricism that is Ribeyro’s alone. The Word of the Speechless, edited and translated by Katherine Silver, introduces readers to an indispensable and unforgettable voice of Latin American fiction.

“A magnificent storyteller, one of the best of Latin America and probably of the Spanish language, unjustly not recognized as such.” —Mario Vargas Llosa

(Group read suggestion from Ivor Watkins, book club moderator.)

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The Whale Rider

An international bestseller & winner of the New Zealand Booksellers' Choice Award written by a multiple-award winning Maori author

Eight-year-old Kahu craves her great-grandfather's love and attention. But he is focused on his duties as chief of a Maori tribe in Whangara, on the East Coast of New Zealand—a tribe that claims descent from the legendary “whale rider.” In every generation since the whale rider, a male has inherited the title of chief. But now there is no male heir—there's only Kahu. She should be the next in line for the title, but her great-grandfather is blinded by tradition and sees no use for a girl.

Kahu will not be ignored. And in her struggle she has a unique ally: the whale rider himself, from whom she has inherited the ability to communicate with whales. Once that sacred gift is revealed, Kahu may be able to re-establish her people's ancestral connections, earn her great-grandfather's attention, and lead her tribe to a bold new future.

“A profoundly enchanting story that will hold [you] in its grip right up to its tender conclusion.” —Curled Up

(A special thank you to book club member, Suzanne Bradley for the suggestion.)

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Baby

Cynthia is 21, bored, and desperately waiting for something big to happen. Her striking fitness instructor, Anahera, is ready to throw in the towel on her job and marriage. Emptying Cynthia's father's bank account, they run away and buy “Baby,” an old boat docked in a beautiful bay, where Cynthia dreams they will live in a state of love. But when Gordon the German comes to live on board Baby, two’s company and three’s a crowd, especially when you’re a psychopath living on a tiny boat. Gordon soon becomes a rival for Anahera’s affections, and perhaps even worse than that, he dares to hold a mirror up to Cynthia and her narcissism.

“Cynthia, the simpering, scheming, covetous emotional sinkhole of Jochems’s debut novel, Baby, is alive and squirming; a memorable addition to the growing coteries of unapologetic antiheroines (dis)gracing the pages of contemporary fiction … There are echoes here of Megan Abbott, Emma Cline, Zoë Heller and Miranda July: writers drawn to the intricacies and ferocious possibilities of female friendship. There’s a dollop, too, of Tom Ripley and a dash of Lord of the Flies. What Jochems adds is a cloying grotesqueness. Baby is a novel of close-quarters living: of masticating mouths and human stink; of piss and vomit, sunburn and bruises, pimples and dandruff; of new fat expanding under the skin. A novel of bodies.” —The Guardian

“From page one, Baby is a dryly funny study of a young woman driven to shocking acts by what seems like boredom and lust alone, devoid of any semblance of a conscience … Come to Baby for a full-blown psychopath who makes you laugh out loud despite your horror.” —The Saturday Age

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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Can You Tolerate This?

A dazzling—and already prizewinning—collection of essays on youth and aging, ambition and disappointment, Katherine Mansfield tourism and New Zealand punk rock, and the limitations of the body.

Youth and frailty, ambition and anxiety, the limitations of the body and the challenges of personal transformation: these are the undercurrents that animate acclaimed poet Ashleigh Young’s first collection of essays. In Can You Tolerate This?—the title comes from the question chiropractors ask to test a patient’s pain threshold—Young ushers us into her early years in the faraway yet familiar landscape of New Zealand: fantasizing about Paul McCartney, cheering on her older brother’s fledging music career, and yearning for a larger and more creative life. As Young’s perspective expands, a series of historical portraits—a boy who grew new bone wherever he was injured, an early French postman who built a stone fortress by hand, a generation of Japanese shut-ins—strike unexpected personal harmonies, as an unselfconscious childhood gives way to painful shyness in adolescence. As we watch Young fall in and out of love, undertake an intense yoga practice that masks an eating disorder, and gradually find herself through her writing, a highly particular psyche comes into view: curious, tender, and exacting in her observations of herself and the world around her.

Can You Tolerate This? presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions—between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation—that define our lives.

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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Died in the Wool

World War II continues to rage on, and Inspector Alleyn continues to act as the Special Branch’s eyes and ears in New Zealand (a country admittedly not often thought of as playing a central role in the war). While his primary brief is spy-catching, he is happy to lend a hand in matters of old-fashioned policing, and that’s exactly what the Flossie Rubrick case initially appears to be.

A highly opinionated and influential Member of Parliament, Ms. Rubrick was also the wife of a sheep farmer, and she was last seen heading off to one of his storage sheds. Three weeks later, she has turned up—very dead, and packed in a bale of her own wool. Had she made political enemies? Had a mysterious legacy prompted her death? Or—as Alleyn increasingly thinks likely—could the shadowy world of international espionage have intruded, improbably, on this sheep farm in the back of beyond? 

Fans of Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, or Dorothy L. Sayers will adore Ngaio Marsh. These four authors together are in fact known as the “Queens of Crime” though many do not realize that Marsh is actually from New Zealand. While this is the 13th novel in the Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn series, each novel stands alone & only a few of take place in New Zealand with the remainder taking place in the UK.

“In Marsh’s ironic and witty hands, the mystery novel can be civilized literature.” —The New York Times

(A special thank you to book club member, Beth Cummings for the suggestion.)

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Trust No One

In this “outstanding psychological thriller” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) by the Edgar-nominated author of Joe Victim, a famous crime writer struggles to differentiate between his own reality and the frightening plot lines he’s created for the page.

Jerry Grey is known to most of the world by his crime writing pseudonym, Henry Cutter—a name that has been keeping readers on the edge of their seats for more than a decade. Recently diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s at the age of forty-nine, Jerry’s crime writing days are coming to an end. His twelve books tell stories of brutal murders committed by bad men, of a world out of balance, of victims finding the darkest forms of justice. As his dementia begins to break down the wall between his life and the lives of the characters he has created, Jerry confesses his worst secret: The stories are real. He knows this because he committed the crimes. Those close to him, including the nurses at the care home where he now lives, insist that it is all in his head, that his memory is being toyed with and manipulated by his unfortunate disease. But if that were true, then why are so many bad things happening? Why are people dying?

Hailed by critics as a “masterful” (Publishers Weekly) writer who consistently offers “ferocious storytelling that makes you think and feel” (The Listener) and whose fiction evokes “Breaking Bad reworked by the Coen Brothers” (Kirkus Reviews), Paul Cleave takes us down a cleverly twisted path to determine the fine line between an author and his characters, between fact and fiction.

Note: This book is also great on audio though the narrator is English, not a Kiwi (aka a New Zealander).

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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Wulf

Winner of both the New Zealand Society of Authors Best First Book Award & the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Awards

Wulf, Hamish Clayton's inventive, brilliant novel, explores a subject little covered in New Zealand fiction, and marks the emergence of a startlingly assured, exciting new voice.

1830s New Zealand: The great chief Te Rauparaha has conquered tiny Kapiti Island, from where his tribe of Ngati Toa launches brutal attacks on its southern enemies. Off the coast of Kapiti, an English ship arrives seeking to trade with the Maori, setting off a train of events that forever changes the course of New Zealand history.

From the very beginning, Wulf will grab you with its visual imagery. Narrated by an English sailor and conjuring up a land of power, secrets, and strangeness, this book will make you feel as if you too are trekking through dense native bush, wandering on a desolate sandy beach, and standing on a ship offshore of New Zealand knowing you are being watched by the fearsome locals.

“A powerfully imagined novel—assured, crisply poetic, and spellbinding in its unfurling narrative. . . . Clayton [is] a gifted writer for a new generation.” —NZ Books

“…the writing is so full of colour and richness that it is almost as if it is all taking place in some sort of enchanted wonderland.” —Booksellers New Zealand

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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Out of Bounds

Jane Addams Book Award
ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults
NY Public Library Books for the Teen Age
Parents' Choice Silver Honor

“We are the young people,
We will not be broken!
We demand freedom
And say
Away with slavery
In our land of Africa!"

For almost fifty years, apartheid forced the young people of South Africa to live apart as Blacks, Whites, Indians, and “Coloreds.” This unique and dramatic collection of stories—by native South African and Carnegie Medalist Beverley Naidoo—is about young people's choices in a beautiful country made ugly by injustice.

Each story is set in a different decade during the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and features fictional characters caught up in very real events. Included is a Timeline Across Apartheid, which recounts some of the restrictive laws passed during this era, the events leading up to South Africa's first free democratic elections, and the establishment of a new “rainbow government” that leads the country today.

(A special thank you to book club member, Sarah Howe for the suggestion.)

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The Expedition to the Baobab Tree

In J.M.Coetzee’s stunning translation: a powerfully symbolic story in the voice of a slave that explores the depths of imagination, isolation, fear, and love.

A slave woman is the only survivor of a failed expedition into the depths of Southern Africa. She shelters in the hollow trunk of a baobab tree where she relives her earlier existence in a state of increasing isolation. We are the sole witnesses to her moving history: her capture as a young child, her life in a harbor city on the eastern coast as servant to various masters, her journey with her last owner and protector, and her life in the baobab tree.

“Thanks to Stockenström’s rich language (wonderfully translated by award-winning novelist and Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee) and brilliant use of symbolism, The Expedition to the Baobab Tree is a heartbreaking story about what we stand to lose as humans, and about how what we stand to lose can never be returned.” —Three Percent

“Using image-rich and poetic language, the illiterate narrator vividly evokes enslavement, isolation, and longing.” —Publishers Weekly

(A special thank you to book club member, Elke Richelsen for the suggestion.)

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Cry, the Beloved Country

“The greatest novel to emerge out of the tragedy of South Africa, and one of the best novels of our time.” —The New Republic

“A beautiful novel…its projection of character so immediate and full, its events so compelling, and its understanding so compassionate that to read the book is to share intimately, even to the point of catharsis, in the grave human experience.” —The NY Times

An Oprah Book Club selection, Cry, the Beloved Country, was an immediate worldwide bestseller when it was published in 1948. Alan Paton’s impassioned novel about a black man’s country under white man’s law is a work of searing beauty.

Cry, the Beloved Country, is the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son, Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. Remarkable for its lyricism, unforgettable for character and incident, Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man.

(A special thank you to book club member, Christine Jensen for the suggestion.)

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The Steam Pig

A beautiful blonde has been killed by a bicycle spoke to the heart, Bantu gangster style. Why?

Set in Apartheid-era South Africa, The Steam Pig is the first in the outstanding mystery series featuring the biracial police team duo of Lieutenant Kramer and Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi.

“James McClure's novel arrives like a slam in the kidneys . . . a gripping style, real characters, and an exotic locale. . . . The Steam Pig will not only keep the reader's nose to the page, it will also make [him] think.” —The NY Times Book Review

“This well-plotted, well-written murder mystery is exceptional ... sometimes grim, sometimes sourly comic, always shocking.” —The Atlantic

“That it takes place in the apartheid setting of South Africa, that it has a black and white police team so artfully conceived as to engender cheers, that it uses the power of subtlety over brash bias to make its points, sets it up as a memorable mystery.” —LA Times

“More than a good mystery story, which it is, The Steam Pig is also a revealing picture of the hate and sickness of apartheid society.” —The Washington Post

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Exotic Territory

An exceptional anthology of award-winning poets, Exotic Territory seeks to address a dearth of information in the English-speaking world about Paraguayan poetry. The twelve outstanding poets included here—José Luis Appleyard, Moncho Azuaga, Gladys Carmagnola, Susy Delgado, Oscar Ferreiro, Renée Ferrer, Joaquín Morales, Amanda Pedrozo, Jacobo Rauskin, Elvio Romero, Ricardo de La Vega, Carlos Villagra Marsal—represent a wide diversity of themes, styles, and perspectives in this little-known nation.

The majority of these poets have published extensively, have been recognized through literary awards and inclusion in national/international anthologies, and continue writing today.

To contextualize the poets and their poetry for readers unfamiliar with Paraguay, the introduction provides a brief background of its geography, history, government, economy, society, and artistic milieu. Following that is a wide selection of representative poems published previously in Spanish, with translations in English on facing pages. The book concludes with a brief biographical sketch of each poet, followed by an unprecedented and extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources intended to encourage those readers who might want to pursue further reading or research on any poet of interest.

(A special thank you to book club member, Beth Cummings for the suggestion.)

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The 1989 Coup d'Étát in Paraguay

The year 1989 was crucial for Paraguay. After a long period of 35 years of dictatorship, General Alfredo Stroessner was finally overthrown by a violent coup d’état. In a sort of prophetic way, he once said …”I came to power by arms and I will only leave by arms” and that came true on 2 February of that year.

The 1989 Coup d’état in Paraguay discusses Stroessner’s climb to power during a coup of 1954, fraudulent elections that got him re-elected seven times, and the ways Stroessner kept himself afloat through cooperation with the armed forces, a right-wing political party, and the USA. Arguably, longing to maintain his popularity, the dictator launched a large number of major development projects, including construction of roads, water and sewage facilities, three big hydro-electrical power stations, and a build-up of an airline. At the same time, abuse of human rights and oppression of any kind of political opposition became a norm: dozens of political prisoners were tortured and even executed, and thousands driven into exile.

As could be expected from a dictator with a military background, Stroessner prompted a major expansion and a build-up of the armed forces and the police, too. Nevertheless, it was the armed forces of Paraguay that brought about his demise: the coup that finally ended Stroessner’s rule was planned by General Andres Rodriguez, the Commander of the I Army Corps—and then with full support of large segments of the Army, Air Force, and the Navy of Paraguay.

A description of the coup in question, and how Stroessner was driven into exile in Brazil, is the centrepiece of this narrative. Containing over 100 photographs, colour profiles, maps and extensive tables, ‘The 1989 Coup d’etat in Paraguay’ is a unique study and a source of reference about an important episode in Latin American history.

(Group read suggestion from Ivor Watkins, book club moderator.)

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The Curse of Nemur

The Tom-raho, a subgroup of the Ishir of Paraguay, are one of the few remaining indigenous populations who have managed to keep both their language and spiritual beliefs intact. They have lived for many years in a remote region of the Gran Chaco, having limited contact with European or Latin American cultures. The survival of the Tom-raho has been tenuous at best; at the time of this writing there were only 87 surviving members.

Ticio Escobar, who lived extensively among the Tom-raho, draws on his acquired knowledge of Ishir beliefs to confront them with his own Western ideology, and records a unique dialogue between cultures that counters traditional anthropological interpretation. The Curse of Nemur—which is part field diary, part art critique, and part cultural anthropology—offers us a view of the world from an entirely new perspective, that of the Ishir. We acquire deep insights into their powerful and enigmatic narrative myths, which find expression in the forms of body painting, feather decoration, dream songs, shamanism, and ritual.

Through dramatic photographs and native drawings, and Escobar’s lucid observation, The Curse of Nemur illuminates the seamless connection of religious practice and art in Ishir culture. It offers a glimpse of an aesthetic “other” and in so doing, causes us to reexamine Western perspectives on the interpretation of art, belief, and Native American culture as well.

“A beautifully written, profoundly engaged exploration of the mythology of a small indigenous society. Original, sensitive, and thoughtful in execution…It's a smart, sometimes moving view of the cosmology of a little-known people and is valuable for anyone seeking to understand more about the pain, beauty, and complexity of indigenous experience in this hemisphere.” —Orin Starn, author of Ishi's Brain

“A compelling read.” —Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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The Emotional Life of the Toddler

Alicia F. Lieberman’s The Emotional Life of the Toddler is the seminal, detailed look into the varied and intense emotional life of children aged one to three. Hailed as “groundbreaking” by The Boston Globe after its initial publication, the new edition includes the latest research on this crucial stage of development.

Anyone who has followed an active toddler around for a day knows that a child of this age is a whirlwind of explosive, contradictory, and ever-changing emotions. Alicia F. Lieberman offers an in-depth examination of toddlers’ emotional development, and illuminates how to optimize this crucial stage so that toddlers can develop into emotionally healthy children and adults.

Drawing on her lifelong research, Dr. Lieberman addresses commonly asked questions and issues. Why, for example, is “no” often the favorite response of the toddler? How should parents deal with the anger they might feel when their toddler is being aggressively stubborn? Why does a crying toddler run to his mother for a hug only to push himself vigorously away as soon as she begins to embrace him? This updated edition also addresses 21st century concerns such as how to handle screen time on devices and parenting in a post-internet world.

With the help of numerous examples and vivid cases, Lieberman answers these and other questions, providing, in the process, a rich, insightful profile of the roller coaster emotional world of the toddler.

(Group read suggestion from Ivor Watkins, book club moderator.)

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