"Verbena" is the quintessential book club selection: A book you feel the need to thrust in a friend's hands the minute you turn the last page. And, yes, it's a book many women will love and find pieces of themselves in. >more

Kathleen Finneran listened to a recording of Aaron Copeland compositions over and over during the decade that it took her to write the fictionalized account of her brother's death and its effect on her family. >more

This month's "Good Read" selection of the book club is reader's choice: "Moloka'i" or "Ka'a'awa," both by the late O.A. "Ozzie" Bushnell. >more

Joelle Fraser didn't set out to tell the story of her life as an object lesson, or as a means of preaching forgiveness. But these have been among the happy side effects of "The Territory of Men," Fraser's memoir of her childhood and young adulthood on the West Coast and in Hawai'i. >more

Just before her novel, "Middle Son," was published in 1996, Deborah Iida had a moment of dread in the dead of night. What would local people think of a plantation-era novel about Japanese Americans written by a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman who grew up in Cincinnati, even if that woman has lived on Maui for 25 years and married into a Japanese-American family? >more

Glen David Gold, author of "Carter Beats the Devil," said he wanted to write a novel unlike most other literary works about magicians, one that was focused more on the man than the magic — and that placed sleight of hand in its proper perspective. >more

Ann Patchett's fourth novel, "Bel Canto" was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is about a group of hostages and terrorists, immured for several months in a South American mansion in which time more or less stands still. It is, as others have said, the kind of book you want to thrust into other people's hands as soon as you finish it. >more

Drum roll, please. Our fifth Honolulu Advertiser Book Club selection is "Peace Like a River," by Leif Enger. With this book, we make another leap in subject matter and style. This is a sort of cowboy story that will appeal to people who'd never pick up a copy of Zane Gray. >more

Our fourth Advertiser Book Club selection is by an author whom Hawai'i booksellers and librarians tell us already is beloved here: Californian Gail Tsukiyama. The book we have selected is an older one of hers (from June 1996) and one that stands alone in subject matter that touches on some themes common in Hawai'i. It's called "The Samurai's Garden." >more

Had it not been for her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Tony Horwitz, Geraldine Brooks might not have discovered the threads of her first novel, a fictionalized story of a village that voluntarily quarantined itself rather than allow the bubonic plague to spread beyond its borders. >more

Kathleen Tyau is almost the stereotypical Northwesterner now. She and her husband Ive on 52 acres of evergreen forest outside Portland, Ore. But as a novelist, Tyau is still an Islander. At the center of her story in "Makai" is a woman many in Hawai'i will recognize: Alice Lum, a second-generation Chinese American, a dutiful but spirited wife, a long-suffering mother who is loved but also taken for granted. >more

When Sara Backer accepted a teaching position in Japan 11 years ago, she had no idea she would be the first woman and the first American ever to teach at the university in Shizuoka, a coastal city about 100 miles southwest of Tokyo. She didn't know that, although every Japanese child studies English, few venture to speak it. >more