GenevaBookClub: Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading chivalric romances that he determines to become a knight-errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, his exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray—he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants—Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together, and together they have haunted readers' imaginations for nearly four hundred years. With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote has been generally recognized as the first modern novel. The book has been enormously influential on a host of writers, from Fielding and Sterne to Flaubert, Dickens, Melville, and Faulkner, who reread it once a year, "just as some people read the Bible.

GenevaBookClub: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the climax of the series of Cold War espionage novels written by British author and former spy John le Carré. As in the previous books in the series, the protagonist is George Smiley, a taciturn, middle-aged intelligence officer who has been in and out of the "Circus" (MI6) more times than most people can count. But when the head of the Circus, aka Control, sends his best field agent behind the Iron Curtain to learn the identity of a mole within the upper echelon of the Circus things go very badly and the mole escapes detection again.

GenevaBookClub: Of Mice and Men is the tragic story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, that move from place to place in search of new job opportunities during the Great Depression in California. It is a frequently banned book, risky, controversial, and modern. It asks, and pretty much answers, all the big questions. Does prejudice suck? Yes; Are we all prejudiced? Yes. ; Are we each responsible for the welfare of other people? Yes.; Is killing someone ever OK? Yes. ; Is euthanasia preferable to a living Hell? Yes.; Are men and women different? Yes, and then again, no. ; Is sex scary? It can be. Even when it costs $2.50. Especially when it costs $2.50. ; Is having a dream a bad idea? Maybe yes, if you’re within certain groups of our society.; Is this the opposite of the American Dream? Well, now that you mention it.

GenevaBookClub: Oryx and Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future. Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey–with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake–through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.

GenevaBookClub: So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's witty comedy of manners--one of the most popular novels of all time--that features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues.

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: Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on the life of African-American women in the southern United States in the 1930s, addressing numerous issues including their exceedingly low position in American social culture. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000-2009 at number seventeen because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence.

GenevaBookClub: Persepolis is the story of Satrapi’s unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming—both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland. It is the chronicle of a girlhood and adolescence at once outrageous and familiar, a young life entwined with the history of her country yet filled with the universal trials and joys of growing up. Edgy, searingly observant, and candid, often heartbreaking but threaded throughout with raw humor and hard-earned wisdom—Persepolis is a stunning work from one of the most highly regarded, singularly talented graphic artists at work today. Newsweek ranked the book #5 on its list of the ten best fiction books of the decade. Originally published in French, it has been translated into several languages including English. Persepolis was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 2007 Academy Awards.

GenevaBookClub: Watchmen is a graphic novel originally published as a limited comic series between 1986 and 1987. Set in an alternate America where super powered beings are being stripped off of both their costumes and moral duties, Watchmen looks deep into the superhero psyche. Watchmen was recognized in Time's List of the 100 Best Novels as one of the best English language novels published since 1923 and is regarded my many as one of the most significant works of 20th Century literature. If you have never read a graphic novel, this is the best place to start. The depth, complexity and originality are outstanding.

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: The longest and most charming love letter in literature’, an homage to Woolf’s friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. The novel spans across three different setups in three different centuries: 18th century England, where Orlando is a young nobleman, 18th century Constantinople, where Orlando, an ambassador, awakes to find they are a woman, and 1928 England, the year of suffrage for women, when Orlando has married and had children, with new hopes for the future of women. Part satire, part stream-of-consciousness, part adventure novel, part psychoanalysis of a character Virginia Woolf admired. Readers hail it for the beautiful prose, combining old and new forms of aesthetic, the traditional East-West cultural crossings, and its discourse on gender across time. The novel has been adapted numerous times, most famously in a film, with Tilda Swindon taking on the lead role (1992), and most recently, as an opera at the Vienna State Opera, in December 2019.

GenevaBookClub: 9th on the 100 best English novels of the 20th Century, D. H. Lawrence’s great autobiographical novel paints a provocative portrait of an artist torn between affection for his mother and desire for two beautiful women. Set in the Nottinghamshire coalfields of Lawrence’s own boyhood, the story follows young Paul Morel’s growth into manhood in a British working-class family. Gertrude Morel, Paul’s puritanical mother, concentrates all her love and attention on Paul, nurturing his talents as a painter. When she muses that he might marry someday and desert her, the attentive son swears he will never leave her. Then Paul falls in love—with not one woman but two—and must eventually choose between them.

GenevaBookClub: Tim Winton is Australia's most decorated and beloved novelist. Short-listed twice for the Booker Prize and the winner of a record four Miles Franklin Literary Awards for Best Australian Novel. In The Shepherd's Hut, Winton crafts the story of Jaxie Clackton, a brutalized rural youth who flees from the scene of his father's violent death and strikes out for the vast wilds of Western Australia. All he carries with him is a rifle and a waterjug. All he wants is peace and freedom. But surviving in the harsh saltlands alone is a savage business. And once he discovers he's not alone out there, all Jaxie's plans go awry. He meets a fellow exile, the ruined priest Fintan MacGillis, a man he's never certain he can trust, but on whom his life will soon depend. The Shepherd's Hut is a thrilling tale of unlikely friendship and yearning, at once brutal and lyrical, from one of Australia's finest storytellers.

GenevaBookClub: Emerence is a domestic servant - strong, fierce, eccentric, and with a reputation for being a first-rate housekeeper. When Magda, a young Hungarian writer, takes her on she never imagines how important this woman will become to her. It takes twenty years for a complex trust between them to be slowly, carefully built. But Emerence has secrets and vulnerabilities beneath her indomitable exterior which will test Magda's friendship and change the complexion of both their lives irreversibly.

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.