: William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to a university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life. As the years pass, Stoner encounters a series of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude. John Williams's deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges not only as an archetypal American but as an unlikely existential hero, standing in stark relief against an unforgiving world

Vlad Kovsky: William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to a university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life. As the years pass, Stoner encounters a series of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude. John Williams's deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges not only as an archetypal American but as an unlikely existential hero, standing in stark relief against an unforgiving world

GenevaBookClub: The Ship of Fools has established Cristina Peri Rossi, author of a dozen other books of poetry and prose, as a leading writer in Europe and Latin America. This is her most important work in English and is recognized as a modern classic. The novel seemingly takes the form of a mosaic of travel vignettes, as the reader follows the protagonist, Equis, a misfit who travels to a number of deliberately vague locations. By inviting the reader to see modern society through the eyes of the main character, Peri Rossi is using the technique of defamiliarization to produce a biting satire of today's world. Masculinity and power are dominant themes in this innovative novel by a major feminist writer. Biting satire . . . worthy of Gulliver’s Travels.” —Women’s Review of Books.

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: 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: '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: 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: This inscrutable novel is a haunting love story of subtlety and pathos. It opens with a man who enjoys the kind of perfect life you can’t imagine anyone wishing to abandon: a pleasant house in a pretty Swiss town, an affectionate wife, two healthy children, a sensible career. Thomas never argues with Astrid; he is not attracted to any other woman, any other career. And yet … immediately on return from a seaside holiday in Spain, more like a migratory bird scenting the change of season than a man arriving at a difficult decision, while his wife is putting the children to bed, Thomas leaves his chilled wine unfinished and walks out. To leave or not to leave, that is the question.

GenevaBookClub: Winner of The Man Booker Prize, Nine men. Each of them at a different stage in life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving -- in the suburbs of Prague, in an overdeveloped Alpine village, beside a Belgian motorway, in a dingy Cyprus hotel -- to understand what it means to be alive, here and now. Tracing a dramatic arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, the ostensibly separate narratives of All That Man Is aggregate into a picture of a single shared existence, a picture that interrogates the state of modern manhood while bringing to life, unforgettably, the physical and emotional terrain of an increasingly globalized Europe.