Books Read by the Wellesley Book Group (1998-Present)

American Requiem, James Carroll

Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner

The Hours, Michael Cunningham

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

2000

Elegy for Iris, John Bayley

The Severed Head, Iris Murdoch

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman

Boyhood, J. M.Coetzee

Lost in Translation, Nichole Mones

Hometown, Tracy Kidder

Personal History, Katharine Graham

LBJ and the American Dream, Doris Kearns

While I Was Gone, Sue Miller

Falling Slowly, Anita Brookner

A Hope in the Unseen, Ron Suskind

2001

Waiting, Ha Jin

Ahab’s Wife, Sena Jeter Naslund

Daughter of Fortune, Isabel Allende

A Monk in the Garden, Robin Morantz Henig

Mendel’s Dwarf, Simon Mawer

In America, Susan Sontag

The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Wayne Johnson

 Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich

Straight Man, Richard Russo

The Black Book, Ohran Pamuk

The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty

 2002

What the Body Remembers, Shaunda Singh Baldwin

Last Orders, Graham Swift

The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Freidman

The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Bee Season, Myla Goldberg

Where is the Mango Princess, Cathy Crimmins

Possession, A.S. Byatt

Atonement, Ian McEwan

Desperate Characters, Paula Fox

 Borrowed Finery, Paula Fox

Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner

2003

The Lovely Bones, Ann Sebold

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

Savage Beauty, Nancy Milford

Felicia’s Journey, William Trevor

All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Marie Remarque

 The Pick-up, Nadine Gordimer

The Life of Pi, Yann Martel

Praying for Sheetrock, Melisss Fay Greene

The Emperor of Ocean Park, Stephen Carter

 Middlesex, Jeffry Eugenides

Carnival Evening, Linda Pastan

2004

The Little Friend, Donna Tartt

Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton

Founding Brothers, Joseph Ellis

 Disturbance of the Inner Ear, Joyce Hackett

Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

The Known World, Edward P. Jones

Family Matters, Rohinton Mistry

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Unless, Carol Shields

American Women, Gail Collin

The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini

2005

Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder

A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest Gaines

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Louise Erdrich

 The Opposite of Fate, Amy Tan

The Piano Tuner, David Mason

The Dew Breaker, Eldwidge Danticut

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, Alexander McCall Smith

The Samurai’s Garden, Gail Tsukiyama

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Wife, Meg Wolitzer

2006

Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared M. Diamond

 The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

 Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

Snow, Orhan Pamuk

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote

Runaway, Alice Munro

The Possessed, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid

The Heidi Chronicles, Wendy Wasserstein

 The Spiral Staircase, Karen Armstrong

I Feel Bad About My Neck, Nora Ephron

2007

Inheritance of Loss, Karin Desai

That Old Ace in the Hole, Annie Proulx

Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama

Aging Well, George Vaillant

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

The March, E.L. Doctorow

Namesake, Jumpa Lahiri

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

House of Mirth, Edith Wharton

Eat, Pray. Love, Elizabeth Gilbert

Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan

2008

The Gathering, Ann Enright

The Inner Circle, T.C. Boyle

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Laila Lalami

The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See

Intuition, Allegra Goodman

The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, Pietra Rivoli

 A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khalid Hosseini

Midnight’s Children, Salmon Rushdie

Loving Frank, Nancy Horan

The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

2009 (I may have missed one here?)

The Madonnas of Leningrad, Debra Dean

The Great Crash, 1929, John Kenneth Galbraith

 Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin

A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes

 People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks

Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery

Six Degrees, Mark Lynas

Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri

Stories of Edgar Allen Poe

2010

A Mercy, Toni Morrison

Too Close to the Falls, Catherine Gildiner

Dreams of My Russian Summers, Andrei Makine

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

The Lemon Tree, Sandy Tolon

Mark Twain short stories/essays

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski

Olive Kittredge, Elizabeth Stout

Small Room, May Sarton

2011

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Stacks, Rebecca Skloot

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson

American Pastoral, Philip Roth

Wolf Hall, Hillary Mantel

Heartbreak House, George Bernard Shaw

 Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver

Regeneration, Pat Barker

The Housekeeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa

Zeitoun, Dave Eggers

The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee

 The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy

The All of It, Jeannette Haien

2012

Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov

A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor

36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Rebecca Goldstein

The Paris Wife, Paula McLain

Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes

The Art of Fielding, Chad Marbach

Ghostbread, Sonja Livingston

State of Wonder, Ann Patchett

It’s Even Worse Than it Looks, Thomas Man and Norman Ornstein

Cleopatra: A Life, Stacy Stiff

Grandfather Stories, Samuel Hopkins Adams

2013

The Old Devils, Kingsley Amis

Into the Beautiful North, Luis Alberto Urea

The Singapore Grip, J.G. Farrell

Destiny of a Republic, Candace Millard

The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

Old Filth, Jane Gardam

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo

The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson

Caleb’s Crossing, Geraldine Brooks

Necessary Errors, Caleb Crane

The Testament of Mary, Colm Toibin

2014

Life After Life, Kate Atkinson

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Alice Monro

 Five Days at Memorial, Sheri Fink

Portrait of a Lady, Henry James

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, Anya von Bremzen

The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey

My Beloved World, Sonia Sotomayor

The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

The Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline

The Bell Ringers, Henry Porter [

Selection of articles from The New Yorker

2015

The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way, Amanda Ripley

 Lawrence In Arabia, Scott Anderson

All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

Being Mortal, Atul Gawande

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Roz Chast

Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, Amara Lakhous

The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown

Dead Wake, Erik Larsen

My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante

The Medusa and the Snail, Lewis Thomas

Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald

Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher

2016

Between the World and Me, Ta Nehisi Coates

The Garden of Evening Mists, Tan Twan Eng

The Stranger, Albert Camus

The Meursault Investigation, Kamel Daoud

Can You Forgive Her? Anthony Trollope

H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald

Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh

My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout

Euphoria, Lily King

The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen

Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance

Songs by Bob Dylan

2017

Jane Austen:  A Life, Claire Tomalin

Persuasion, Jane Austen

The Sellout, Paul Beatty

Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

Eviction: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond

The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessey, Rachel Joyce

The American War, Omar El Akkad

Moonglow:  A Novel, Michael Chabon

The Girls of Atomic City:  The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II,   by Denise Kiernan

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

Favorite Poems, All members

2018

In the Dark Room, Susan Faludi

A Gentleman in Moscow, Arlo Towles

Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders

The Dark Flood Rises, Margaret Drabble

Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann

Hero of the Empire, Candace Millard

Belgravia, Julian Fellowes

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid

Howard’s End, E.M. Forster

Educated:  A Memoir, Tara Westover

The Ninth Hour, Alice McDermott