Caroline's Proposed List

Longburn Jo Baker

There's dirty laundry and chilblains on the first page of Longbourn, sweat and blood on the second. Jo Baker, retelling Pride and Prejudice from the servants' perspective, has no interest in period prettiness. Details in Jane Austen's novel – money earned through trade, a flogged soldier – become subplots of slavery and violence. Mainly, though, there's housework: the endless, repetitive tasks necessary to the functioning of the Bennet household.

Of course, Longbourn is more than a catalogue of Regency cleaning tips. While Elizabeth and Darcy flirt upstairs, the servants are busy with their own romance. Sarah, the predictably bookish and feisty housemaid, has two suitors to choose from: Bingley's exotic ex-slave manservant and a mysterious footman.

Baker includes enough of the plot of Pride and Prejudice so that an Austen novice will not get lost, and an Austen lover has the satisfaction of matching the novels chapter for chapter. The parallels between the two are not subtle, but they illuminate both Austen's novel and the precarious and circumscribed lives of 19th-century servants. Baker favours excess over subtlety in her descriptions as well as her plotting, and sometimes Longbourn feels oversaturated. Yet there are lovely moments, where she inhabits the mind of a girl whose entire experience is domestic. Jane Bennet appears to Sarah "as sweet, soothing and undemanding as a baked milk-pudding"; travelling for the first time on top of a carriage, Sarah realises that speed is "the ability to compress the world into folds and slip through them like a needle".

One Summer: America 1927 Bill Bryson 

The summer of 1927 began with Charles Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Babe Ruth was closing in on the home run record. In Newark, New Jersey, Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly sat atop a flagpole for twelve days, and in Chicago, the gangster Al Capone was tightening his grip on bootlegging. The first true “talking picture,” Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, was filmed, forever changing the motion picture industry. 

        All this and much, much more transpired in the year Americans attempted and accomplished outsized things—and when the twentieth century truly became the American century. One Summertransforms it all into narrative nonfiction of the highest order.

Those Who Save Us Jenna Blume

For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy's sole evidence of the past is an old photograph: a family portrait showing Anna, Trudy, and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald.

Driven by the guilt of her heritage, Trudy, now a professor of German history, begins investigating the past and finally unearths the dramatic and heartbreaking truth of her mother's life.

Combining a passionate, doomed love story, a vivid evocation of life during the war, and a poignant mother/daughter drama, Those Who Save Us is a profound exploration of what we endure to survive and the legacy of shame. 

The Lowlands Jhumpa Lahirir

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • A Time Top Fiction Book • An NPR "Great Read" • A Chicago Tribune Best Book • A USA Today Best Book • A People magazine Top 10 Book • A Barnes and Noble Best New Book • A Good Reads Best Book • A Kirkus Best Fiction Book • A Slate Favorite Book • A Christian Science Monitor Best Fiction Book • An Apple Top 10 Book

National Book Award Finalist and shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker PrizeThe Lowland is an engrossing family saga steeped in history: the story of two very different brothers bound by tragedy, a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past, a country torn apart by revolution, and a love that endures long past death. Moving from the 1960s to the present, and from India to America and across generations, this dazzling novel is Jhumpa Lahiri at the height of her considerable powers.

In the Garden of Beasts Erik Lawson

The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.
    A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the “New Germany,” she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance—and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition.
    Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Göring and the expectedly charming--yet wholly sinister--Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.