Emma by Jan Austen

Of all Jane Austen's heroines, Emma Woodhouse is the most flawed, the most infuriating, and, in the end, the most endearing. The title character, Emma Woodhouse, is queen of her little community. She is lovely and wealthy. Se has no mother; her fussy, fragile father imposes no curbs on either her behavior or her self-satisfaction. Everyone else in the village is deferentially lower in social standing. Only Mr. Knightley, an old family friend, ever suggests she needs improvement.  Emma has a taste for matchmaking. When she meets pretty Harriet Smith, "the natural daughter of somebody," Emma takes her up as both a friend and a cause. Emma has a taste for matchmaking. Uninterested in marriage at the book's beginning, she happily engages herself to Mr. Knightly before its end. ~amazon review

“It is such a happiness when good people get together--and they always do." - Jane Austen, (London 1816)

Jane Austen (1775-1817) is considered by many scholars to be the first great woman novelist. Her novels revolve around people, not events or coincidences. Miss Austen sets her novels in the upper middle class English country which was her own environment.  Her novels have increased in stature over time. Her skills of writing, including a dry humor and a witty elegance of expression have attracted generations to her work.  Jane Austen began to write Emma in January of 1814 and finished it a little over a year later, in March of 1815. At the time of completion, Austen was thirty-nine years old. Emma was published at the end of 1815, with 2,000 copies being printed—563, more than a quarter, were still unsold after four years. She earned less than forty pounds from the book during her lifetime, though it earned more after her death. Austen died a year and a half after publication. ~review

Jane Austen Quotes

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal." -- letter of December 24, 1798

“I have read [Byron's] The Corsair, mended my petticoat, and have nothing else to do." -- letter of March 5, 1814

"I... do not think the worse of him for having a brain so very different from mine. …-- letter of March 23, 1817

Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult

A shocking murder shatters the picturesque calm of Pennsylvania's Amish country -- and tests the heart and soul of the lawyer who steps in to defend the young woman at the center of the storm....

authors website

About the Author

She was born and raised -happily-on Long Island...something that she believed at first was a detriment to a girl who wanted to be a writer. "I had such an uneventful childhood that when I was taking writing classes at college, I called home and asked my mother if maybe there might have been a little incest or domestic abuse on the side that she'd

 forgotten about," Picoult recalls. "It took me a while to realize that I already did have something to write about - that solid core of family, and the knotty tangle of relationships, which I keep coming back to in my books." She and Tim and their three children live in Hanover, New Hampshire with a dog, a rabbit, two Jersey calves, and the occasional Holstein.

Critical Praise

"A Witness-meets-Agnes of God courtroom thriller… both absorbing and affecting."—Entertainment Weekly

"Appealing, suspenseful… Reads like a cross between the Harrison Ford movie Witness and Scott Turow's novel Presumed Innocent, with a dose of television's The Practice thrown in to spice up the legal dilemmas."—Arizona Republic

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1965. He is the oldest of five children. His father worked for the Afghan foreign ministry and his mother was a teacher of Farsi and History at a large girls high school in Kabul. In 1976, Khaled’s family was relocated to Paris, France, where his father was assigned a diplomatic post in the Afghan embassy. The assignment would return the Hosseini family in 1980, but by then Afghanistan had already witnessed a bloody communist coup and the Soviet invasion. Khaled’s family, instead, asked for and was granted political asylum in the U.S. He has been in practice as an internist since 1996. He is married, has two children (a boy and a girl, Haris and Farah). The Kite Runner is his first novel. ~authors website

About Afghanistan 

Afghanistan is a mountainous landlocked country, about the size of Texas, located in Central Asia. Wedged between the former Soviet Union, Iran, Pakistan and China, it has been an area of tension for hundreds of years.  Afghanistan achieved a measure of national unity in 1747 and became a constitutional monarchy in 1931. In 1973 the monarchy was overthrown in a bloodless coup, and a republic was established. The republic failed to survive and in late December of 1979 thousands of Soviet troops air lifted into the country. The war against the Soviets lasted many years, before the cease-fire just a few years ago.

Interview with the Author

The Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith's widely acclaimed The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to "help people with problems in their lives.” 

A Look Inside Gaborone

The Republic of Botswana is situated in Southern Africa, nestled between South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Zambia.  Botswana is the largest exporter of gemstone diamonds in the world.

Gaborone, the capital, is by far the most important city in Botswana. 

Gaborone is a young city with nearly a quarter of a million inhabitants. It scarcely existed in the 19th century before Chief Gaborone moved his Batlokwa tribe into the area from the Magaliesburg Mountains in the early 1880s. He settled in the Tlokweng area on the Notwane river. 

In 1966 Gaborone became the capital of newly independent Botswana. Two decades later, in 1986, it was declared a city. Today, stimulated by the discovery of diamonds and the rising wealth of the nation, Gaborone has become one of the fastest growing cities in the world, while still preserving its offbeat rural charm. ~website