Mehran: Homo sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money and human rights. Starting from this provocative idea, Sapiens goes on to retell the history of our species from a completely fresh perspective. It explains that money is the most pluralistic system of mutual trust ever devised; that capitalism is the most successful religion ever invented; that the treatment of animals in modern agriculture is probably the worst crime in history; and that even though we are far more powerful than our ancient ancestors, we aren’t much happier. By combining profound insights with a remarkably vivid language, Sapiens acquired cult status among diverse audiences, captivating teenagers as well as university professors, animal rights activists alongside government ministers. By 2018, over 10 million copies have been sold, and the book has been translated into nearly 50 languages.

GenevaBookClub: Vanity Fair was published as a series of installments, beginning in 1847. Even before all installments had been published, the work was an enormous hit. Thackeray was hailed for his realistic satire, and yet at the same time criticized for his ruthless depiction of his characters. It is difficult to locate any redeeming qualities in the characters of Vanity Fair, as each character seems totally consumed by the pursuit of social mobility and wealth. In particular, the novel's heroine (if she can be properly labeled as such) seems entirely devoid of conscience.

GenevaBookClub: Romeo and Juliet, which ranks among Shakespeare's most popular and well-known plays, is considered by some critics to be the first and greatest example of romantic tragedy written during the Renaissance. The play centres on two youths from feuding families who, upon falling in love, attempt to defy social custom, patriarchal power, and destiny. Their efforts meet with disastrous results, including the deaths of Tybalt and Mercutio, as well as the tragic demise of Romeo and Juliet.

GenevaBookClub: The story of a Redmond Barry, charming young Anglo-Irishman who transforms into a conniving, manipulative rogue. Is forced to flee Ireland and joins the English army in the 7 years war. Encounters another Irishman and together they cheat and lie their way across Europe. Barry manipulates noble women to increase his standing. Biopic view of life in 18th century Europe Cult 1975 Stanley Kubrick film, famous for it’s use of only natural lighting.

GenevaBookClub: Lord of the Flies is a 1954 dystopian novel by Nobel Prize-winning English author William Golding about a group of British boys stuck on an uninhabited island who try to govern themselves with disastrous results. Its stances on the already controversial subjects of human nature and individual welfare versus the common good earned it position 68 on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990–1999.

GenevaBookClub: Voltaire's Candide is about a man who believes in the philosophy that: "what happens, happens for the best in the end." that was taught to him by his personal philosopher Dr. Pangloss. Candide goes through many, many trials and everyone he meets has had something terrible happen to them. He searches the world over for his love Cunégonde. And in the end finds that the simplest things in life: love, friends, and health are all that matters.

GenevaBookClub: Awe and exhiliration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

GenevaBookClub: An extended essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled Women and Fiction, and hence the essay, are considered nonfiction. The essay is seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.

GenevaBookClub: The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women. As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.

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: 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: Introducing one of the most famous characters in literature, Jean Valjean—the noble peasant imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread—Les Misérables ranks among the greatest novels of all time. In it, Victor Hugo takes readers deep into the Parisian underworld, immerses them in a battle between good and evil, and carries them to the barricades during the uprising of 1832 with a breathtaking realism that is unsurpassed in modern prose. Within his dramatic story are themes that capture the intellect and the emotions: crime and punishment, the relentless persecution of Valjean by Inspector Javert, the desperation of the prostitute Fantine, the amorality of the rogue Thénardier, and the universal desire to escape the prisons of our own minds. Les Misérables gave Victor Hugo a canvas upon which he portrayed his criticism of the French political and judicial systems, but the portrait that resulted is larger than life, epic in scope—an extravagant spectacle that dazzles the senses even as it touches the heart.

GenevaBookClub: This extraordinary historical novel, set in Medieval Paris under the twin towers of its greatest structure and supreme symbol, the cathedral of Notre-Dame, is the haunting drama of Quasimodo, the hunchback; Esmeralda, the gypsy dancer; and Claude Frollo, the priest tortured by the specter of his own damnation. Shaped by a profound sense of tragic irony, it is a work that gives full play to Victor Hugo's brilliant historical imagination and his remarkable powers of description.

GenevaBookClub: Esmeralda, a beautiful Gypsy with a kind and generous heart, captures the hearts of many men, including those of a Captain Phoebus and a poor street poet, Pierre Gringoire, but especially those of Quasimodo and his adoptive father, Claude Frollo, the Archdeacon of Notre Dame. Frollo is torn between his obsessive love and the rules of the church. He orders Quasimodo to kidnap her, but the hunchback is suddenly captured by Phoebus and his guards who save Esmeralda. Quasimodo is sentenced to be flogged and turned on the pillory for one hour, followed by another hour's public exposure. He calls for water. Esmeralda, seeing his thirst, offers him a drink. It saves him, and she captures his heart. Esmeralda is later charged with the attempted murder of Phoebus, whom Frollo actually attempted to kill in jealousy, after seeing him about to have sex with Esmeralda, and is tortured and sentenced to death by hanging. As she is being led to the gallows, Quasimodo swings down by the bell rope of Notre Dame...

GenevaBookClub: A collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. Scholars generally date the collection's genesis to around the 9th century. The stories proceed from a singular, original tale; some are framed within other tales, while others begin and end of their own accord. Historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques and various forms of erotica. In one story, a misogynist king begins to marry a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next morning, before she has a chance to dishonour him. The tales vary widely. Some editions contain stories from only a few hundred nights, while others include 1001 or more.

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: Tommy Orange is a 38 year old American novelist and writer from Oakland, California. This is his first book. Told as a series of loosely connected stories centered around Oakland, California that all come together by the end of the book. Many of the characters are young, not full-blood and living on the margins of modern America. 300 pages, published in 2019. Finalist for 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.

GenevaBookClub: The story of America's space program from its inception in the 1950's up to the end of the Gemini program (so it doesn't include the Apollo program which culminated on the moon landings from 1969). A wonderful recital of larger-than-life, heroic, risk-taking on an epic scale with a budget to match. Wolfe's style, dubbed the new journalism, doesn't pull any punches and is full of funny, pithy comments on the people who first put Americans into space. It's a story of technology, politics and above all of hard-bitten test pilots who aren't afraid to put their lives on the line and who've watched their friends die doing the same.

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: 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: Buddenbrooks was Mann's first novel, written when Mann was in his early twenties. Published in German in 1901, it's the saga of a merchant family based in the Hansa port of Lübeck during the 19th century, over 3 generations. It combines historical perspective with a keenly observed protrait of the bourgeoisie, and is written in Mann's characteristic detached, ironic style. The story and characters closely match Mann's own family history which explains its realism. The novel was an immediate success in Germany, and together with "The Magic Mountain" was the main reason for Mann receiving the Nobel prize for literature.

GenevaBookClub: Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (English, 1651): Named after the biblical Leviathan, this book concerns the structure of society and legitimate government, and is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory. Written during the English Civil War, Hobbes argues for a social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign. Hobbes wrote that chaos or civil war — situations identified with a state of nature and the famous Latin motto Bellum omnium contra omnes ("the war of all against all") — could only be averted by a strong central government.

GenevaBookClub: Michael Henchard, a successful grain merchant, is the Mayor of the Wessex market town of Casterbridge and he has been keeping a dark secret for eighteen years. As his secret threatens to surface, and business competition arrives, his life becomes increasingly difficult. "The Mayor of Casterbridge" charts the course of one man's character and the dramatic change of an isolated rural community into a modern city.

GenevaBookClub: Poor farmer Durbeyfield has been told by the village parson that he has noble relatives: the D'Urbervilles. His wife decides to send their daughter Tess to them in order to make a claim on their family's ancestral home in Wessex. Alec D'Urberville, the son of the squire, rapes Tess and she is pregnant - and becomes a “ruined” woman. Banned because is challenged sexual double standards of the time. Considered Thomas Hardy’s greatest novel.

GenevaBookClub: On Discworld, a dying wizard tries to pass on his powers to an eighth son of an eighth son, who is just at that moment being born. The fact that the son is actually a daughter is discovered just a little too late. The town witch insists on turning the baby into a perfectly normal witch, thus mending the magical damage of the wizard's mistake. But now the young girl will be forced to penetrate the inner sanctum of the Unseen University--and attempt to save the world with one well-placed kick in some enchanted shins! Reissue.

GenevaBookClub: Ta-Nehisi Coates is a 45 year old journalist and author and this is his first book. He has just published a brilliant first novel – The Water Dancer. The style is light, ironic at times also deeply moving at times - but never strident or lecturing. It is personal, intimate and revealing. He writes about growing up an African American man in Baltimore, the brutal location for the fabulous series ‘The Wire’. The book reveals a lot about African American urban America, the crack epidemic, fathers and sons, the difficulty of African American manhood and the role of the women in the family. Countless awards as well as a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ grant.

GenevaBookClub: Forty-five-year-old Donna Koczynski is an ex-punk rocker, a recovering alcoholic, and the mother of two teenagers whose suburban existence detonates when she comes home early from a sales conference in Las Vegas to the surprise of a lifetime. As her world implodes, she sets off on an epic road trip to reclaim everything she believes she's sacrificed since her wild youth: Great friendship, passionate love, and her art. But as she careens across the U.S. from Detroit to New York to Memphis to Nashville, nothing turns out as she imagines. Ultimately, she finds herself resurrected on the other side of the globe, on a remote island embroiled in a crisis far bigger than her own. Irresistibly funny, whip-smart, and surprisingly moving, DONNA HAS LEFT THE BUILDING spins an unforgettable tale about what it means to be brave -- and to truly love -- in a tumultuous world

GenevaBookClub: In this, the first of Spike Milligan's uproarious recollections of life in the army, our hero takes us from the outbreak of war in 1939 ('it must have been something we said'), through his attempts to avoid enlistment ('time for my appendicitus, I thought') and his gunner training in Bexhill ('There was one drawback. No ammunition') to the landing at Algiers in 1943 ('I closed my eyes and faced the sun. I fell down a hatchway'). Filled with bathos, pathos and gales of ribald laughter, this is a barely sane helping of military goonery and superlative Milliganese.

GenevaBookClub: Hailed some feminists as the single most important theoretical work of this century, but ignored or reviled by others, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex occupies an anomalous place in the feminist canon. Yet it has had an undeniable impact not only on the development of critiques of sexual politics but on twentieth-century Western thinking about the concept of "woman" in general.

GenevaBookClub: A historical novel with strong lesbian themes written by Sarah Waters and published in 1998. Set in Victorian England during the 1890s, it tells a coming of age story about a young woman named Nan who falls in love with a male impersonator, follows her to London, and finds various ways to support herself as she journeys through the city. The picaresque plot elements have prompted scholars and reviewers to compare it to similar British urban adventure stories written by Charles Dickens and Daniel Defoe.

GenevaBookClub: Midnight's Children (by Salman Rushdie, English 1980) is a historical chronicle of modern India centering on the inextricably linked fates of two children born within the first hour of independence from Great Britain. Exactly at midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, two boys are born in a Bombay hospital, where they are switched by a nurse. Saleem Sinai, who will be raised by a well-to-do Muslim couple, is actually the illegitimate son of a low-caste Hindu woman and a departing British colonist. Shiva, the son of the Muslim couple, is given to a poor Hindu street performer whose unfaithful wife has died. Saleem represents modern India. Shiva is destined to be Saleem's enemy as well as India's most honored war hero. This multilayered novel places Saleem in every significant event that occurred on the Indian subcontinent in the 30 years after independence. Midnight's Children was awarded the Booker Prize for fiction in 1981.

GenevaBookClub: A philosophical novel, the first of Robert M. Pirsig's texts in which he explores his Metaphysics of Quality. The book describes, in first person, a 17-day journey on his motorcycle from Minnesota to California by the author and his son Chris, joined for the first nine days by close friends John and Sylvia Sutherland. The trip is punctuated by numerous philosophical discussions, referred to as Chautauquas by the author, on topics including epistemology, ethical emotivism and the philosophy of science.

GenevaBookClub: Richard Flanagan is a 59 year old novelist and environmental activist from Tasmania. He is rightfully applauded as an exceptional writer with a very diverse body of work. He does not have a style in that his books are all worth reading and all very different. The book is his first novel, a short tale that draws on his experience as a river guide on the Gordon River, Tasmania, who is drowning while reliving his past but also the past of his ancestors and Tasmania. The book is both amusing and affecting. 336 pages, published 2002. He has won the Man Booker Prize and numerous other awards. Aljaz Cosini is leading a group of tourists on a raft tour down Tasmania's wild Franklin River when his greatest fear is realized—a tourist falls overboard. An ordinary man with many regrets, Aljaz rises to an uncharacteristic heroism, and offers his own life in trade. Trapped under a rapid and drowning, Aljaz is beset with visions both horrible and fabulous. He sees Couta Ho, the beautiful, spirited woman he loved, and witnesses his uncle Reg having his teeth pulled and sold to pay for a ripple-iron house. He sees cities grow from the wild rain forest and a tree burst into flower in midwinter over his grandfather's forest grave. As the entirety of Tasmanian life—flora and fauna—sings him home, Aljaz arrives at a world where dreaming reasserts its power over thinking, where his family tree branches into stories of all human families, stories that ground him in the land and reveal the soul history of his country.

GenevaBookClub: Richard Dawkins' reformulation of the theory of natural selection has the rare distinction of having provoked as much excitement and interest outside the scientific community as within it. His theories have helped change the whole nature of the study of social biology, and have forced thousands of readers to rethink their beliefs about life. In this bestselling, now classic volume, Dawkins explains how the selfish gene can also be a subtle gene. The world of the selfish gene revolves around savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit, and yet, Dawkins argues, acts of apparent altruism do exist in nature. Bees, for example, will commit suicide when they sting to protect the hive, and birds will risk their lives to warn the flock of an approaching hawk. The Selfish Gene is a remarkable exposition of evolutionary thought, a work that has been hailed for its stylistic brilliance and deep scientific insights, and continues to stimulate whole new areas of research today.

GenevaBookClub: In 1908 English gentleman, Ernest Westlake, packed a tent, a bicycle and forty tins of food and sailed to Tasmania. On mountains, beaches and in sheep paddocks he collected over 13,000 Aboriginal stone tools. Rebe Taylor is an academic specializing in indigenous Australians and the effect of European settlement. She writes in a well-articulated and light academic style: lucid and unembellished. This is a deep book that draws on many threads to weave the satisfying conclusion. The book centers on Ernest Westlake, a most curious British amateur anthropologist with an obsessive interest (along with other peculiar interests) in stone age culture and technology. After collecting huge numbers of stone tools from Europe he is exposed to indigenous Tasmanian stone tools, and this takes him to Tasmania on a journey of discovery and exposure to the raw fringe of Empire. He cannot see what he sees: that Tasmanian indigenous culture remained (and remains) even after original Tasmanians were supposedly hunted to extinction. 456 pages, published in 2017. Winner of the Tasmanian Book Prize, 2017

GenevaBookClub: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid....He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. This is the Code of the Private Eye as defined by Raymond Chandler in his 1944 essay 'The Simple Act of Murder.' Such a man was Philip Marlowe, private eye, an educated, heroic, streetwise, rugged individualist and the hero of Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep. This work established Chandler as the master of the 'hard-boiled' detective novel, and his articulate and literary style of writing won him a large audience, which ranged from the man in the street to the most sophisticated intellectual. Selected as one of Time Magazine's All-Time 100 Novels, with the following review: "'I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be.' This sentence, from the first paragraph of The Big Sleep, marks the last time you can be fully confident that you know what's going on.

GenevaBookClub: Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television 'family'. But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people did not live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television. When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

GenevaBookClub: First published in 1952 and immediately hailed as a masterpiece, Invisible Man is one of those rare novels that have changed the shape of American literature. For not only does Ralph Ellison's nightmare journey across the racial divide tell unparalleled truths about the nature of bigotry and its effects on the minds of both victims and perpetrators, it gives us an entirely new model of what a novel can be. As he journeys from the Deep South to the streets and basements of Harlem, from a horrifying "battle royal" where black men are reduced to fighting animals, to a Communist rally where they are elevated to the status of trophies, Ralph Ellison's nameless protagonist ushers readers into a parallel universe that throws our own into harsh and even hilarious relief. Suspenseful and sardonic, narrated in a voice that takes in the symphonic range of the American language, black and white, Invisible Man is one of the most audacious and dazzling novels of our century.

GenevaBookClub: Born in 1875, the great German lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke published his first collection of poems in 1898 and went on to become renowned for his delicate depiction of the workings of the human heart. Drawn by some sympathetic note in his poems, young people often wrote to Rilke with their problems and hopes. From 1903 to 1908 Rilke wrote a series of remarkable responses to a young, would-be poet on poetry and on surviving as a sensitive observer in a harsh world. Those letters, still a fresh source of inspiration and insight, are accompanied here by a chronicle of Rilke's life that shows what he was experiencing in his own relationship to life and work when he wrote them.