GenevaBookClub: Through the beloved Billy Pilgrim, we see the central themes of Vonnegut’s humanism along with his satirical take on how disgusting it is when humans don’t use their (limited) free will to prevent simple atrocities. A great example of how we use humor to deal with hardship, and the conflict between the way heroism is conveyed through stories for actions in situations that perhaps could have been avoided altogether. “So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

GenevaBookClub: The story of Seymour "Swede" Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk." The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and was included in Time's "All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels.

GenevaBookClub: In 1956, Stevens, a long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, decides to take a motoring trip through the West Country. The six-day excursion becomes a journey into the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars, and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper. Ishiguro's dazzling novel is a sad and humorous love story, a meditation on the condition of modern man, and an elegy for England at a time of acute change.

GenevaBookClub: On his third birthday Oskar decides to stop growing. Haunted by the deaths of his parents and wielding his tin drum Oskar recounts the events of his extraordinary life; from the long nightmare of the Nazi era to his anarchic adventures in post-war Germany.

GenevaBookClub: In the early 19th century, 38 German Lutheran families, escaping the threat of persecution under the Prussian king, arrived in Port Adelaide, eventually establishing a small settlement in the Adelaide Hills. It was the first of several waves of German immigration to the area, the newcomers building villages and cultivating the land, all the while holding to their own religion, customs and traditions. In The Last Garden, Eva Hornung takes the bare bones of this history and transforms them into an allegorical tale of faith and renewal. In this quiet and subtle piece of writing, she explores not only the stultifying effects of social and spiritual isolation but also the prodigious healing power of the natural world. Fifteen-year-old Benedict Orion returns home from boarding school one summer to find both his parents dead

GenevaBookClub: Published in 2015; set in 1970s Vietnam and Los Angeles. Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Viet Thanh Nguyen (born 1971) is a Vietnamese-American professor, the son of refugees from South Vietnam who fled to the US in 1975 after the fall of Saigon. A spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature and film. The story starts in April 1975 at the fall of Saigon. It follows soldiers in the defeated South Vietnamese army, who flee Vietnam to start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, a captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong.

GenevaBookClub: Published in 1934; set in 1920s Burma, which was a British colony George Orwell (1903-1950) worked as a colonial policeman in Burma from 1922 to 1927. Burmese Days, his first novel, grew out of reflection on his own days as a colonial policeman in Burma during the 1920s. It tells the story of John Flory, a timber merchant, and his troubles relating to the other expats that he has to live and work with It provides a very caustic view of British colonialism at the ground level, where Orwell’s characters (and Orwell himself) must do “the dirty work of empire”.

GenevaBookClub: Eco’s first novel. Not only an intricate detective story. Combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory. In 1327 a young Benedictine novice, Adso of Melk, and a learned Franciscan, William of Baskerville, visit a Benedictine monastery in northern Italy for a theological debate. The abbot, Abo of Fossanova, asks William to look into the recent death of the illuminator Adelmo of Otranto, who fell from the octagonal Aedificium, which houses the abbey’s labyrinthine library. “Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means”. The meaning of “truth” from theological, philosophical, and historical perspectives The power of words and interpretation. The power of the culture and the reading.

GenevaBookClub: 'Paradise': Worthy Women, Unredeemable Men. “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” So begins Toni Morrison’s Paradise, her first novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 -- addresses the same great themes of her 1987 masterpiece, "Beloved": the loss of innocence, the paralyzing power of ancient memories and the difficulty of accepting loss and change and pain. It deals with the blighted legacy of slavery. It examines the emotional and physical violence that human beings are capable of inflicting upon one another. And it suggests that redemption is to be found not in obsessively remembering the past but in letting go.

GenevaBookClub: In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

GenevaBookClub: Set in the sweltering summer of 1938 in Portugal, a country under the Fascist shadow of Spain, PEREIRA MAINTAINS tells a tale of reluctant heroism. Dr. Pereira, an editor at a second-rate Lisbon newspaper, wants nothing to do with European politics. He's happy to translate 19th-century French stories. His closest confidante is a photograph of his late wife. All this changes when he meets Francesco Monteiro Rossi, an oddly charismatic young man. Pereira gives Rossi work, and continues to pay him, even after discovering that he is using the money to recruit for the anti-Franco International Brigade. PEREIRA MAINTAINS chronicles Pereira's ascent to consciousness, culminating in a devastating and reckless act of rebellion.