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Suggestions: September 2007 Book of the Month

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Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

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Synopsis: The novel, which Bellow intended to be a short story, is a roman à clef about Bellow's friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz. It explores the changing relationship of art and power in a materialist America. This theme is addressed through the contrasting careers of two writers, Von Humboldt Fleisher (to some degree a version of Schwartz) and his protege Charlie Citrine (to some degree a version of Bellow himself). Von Humboldt Fleisher yearns to lift American society up through art, but dies a failure. In contrast, Charlie Citrine harbors no such ambition, becomes wealthy through his writing, and is in many ways compromised.

Noteworthy: Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and contributed to Bellow's winning the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year.
 
William Boyd........Restless

Winner of the Costa Novel Award 2006.......a Richard & Judy Bookclub book.

What happens to your life when everything you thought you knew about your mother turns out to be an elaborate lie? During the long, hot summer of 1976, Ruth Gilmartin discovers that her very English mother Sally is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigré and one-time spy.

In 1939 Eva is a beautiful twenty-eight year old living in Paris. As war breaks out, she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious, patrician Englishman. Under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one. Even those she loves most.

Since then Eva has carefully rebuilt her life — but once a spy, always a spy. And now she must complete one last assignment. This time, though, Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter’s help.
 
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