The International Book Club features books by international authors that will take you to worlds and cultures around the globe.

The Book Club is open to all ICU members. Guests are welcome to attend one meeting before being asked to join the ICU.

The Book Club gathers from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. on Mondays on the dates noted below. Meetings are at Coffee Underground at 1 East Coffee Street (at the intersection of Main and Coffee Streets, below Ristorante Bergamo) in Greenville. Light meals, snacks and beverages may be purchased during meetings.

For more information, please contact International Book Club Coordinator Caroline Warthen at (864) 235-5140 or carolinedw@charter.net.

Print a Book Club Schedule

BOOK CLUB SCHEDULE FOR 2010-2011

September 20, 2010 –The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano (Mexico)
Hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, full of inside jokes about Latin American literati that you don't have to understand to enjoy, The Savage Detectivesis a companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico.

November 1, 2010 – Infidel by AyanHisri (Somalia/Netherlands)
Readers with an eye on European politics will recognize Ali as the Somali-born member of the Dutch parliament who faced death threats after collaborating on a film about domestic violence against Muslim women with controversial director Theo van Gogh (who was himself assassinated).

December 6, 2010 – Playing The Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation by John Carlin (South Africa)
This wonderful book describes Mandela's methodical, improbable and brilliant campaign to reconcile resentful blacks and fearful whites around a sporting event, a game of rugby.“

January 3, 2011 – Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud (Morocco)
Two little girls are taken by their mother to Morocco on a 1960s pilgrimage of self-discovery. For Mum, it is not just an escape from the grinding conventions of English life but a quest for personal fulfilment; her children, however, seek something more solid and stable amidst the shifting desert sands.

February 21, 2011 – Michaelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling by Ross King (Italy)
King re-creates Michelangelo's day-to-day world: the assistants who worked directly on the Sistine Chapel, the continuing rivalry with Raphael and the figures who had much to do with his world if not his art (daVinci, Savonarola, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Martin Luther, Erasmus), including the steely Julius II.

March 21, 2011 – The Man in the Shark Skin Suit by Lucette Lagnado (Egypt)
This memoir of an Egyptian Jewish family’s gradual ruin is told without melodrama by its youngest survivor, now a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Lagnado’sstory hinges on her father, "the Captain," who cut a dashing figure in mid-century Cairo, consorting with British officers and Egyptian royalty at French cafés while his family, neglected, stayed home.

April 24, 2011 – The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan (Israel)
In 1967, BashirKhairi, a 25 year old Palestinian, journeyed to Israel with the goal of seeing the beloved old stone house with the lemon tree behind it that he and his family had fled 19 years earlier.To his surprise, when he found the house he was greeted by Dalia EshkenaziLandau, a 19 year old Israeli college student, whose family fled Europe for Israel following the Holocaust.

June 6, 2011 – The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (India)
This stunning novel is set in mid-1980s India, on the cusp of the Nepalese movement for an independent state. Desai deftly shuttles between first and third worlds, illuminating the pain of exile, the ambiguities of post-colonialism and the blinding desire for a "better life," when one person's wealth means another's poverty.


SUPPORT THE ICU BY PURCHASING YOUR BOOKS THROUGH BETTERWORLD.COM!

Click here be connected to Betterworld.com, which funds literacy efforts through its sales of new and used books, and offers carbon-neutral shipping: free in the USA, $2.97 shipping worldwide. A percentage of all purchases made through our website will be donated to the ICU.

-Top-

An easy and secure way
to make payments or donations
to the ICU via the Internet.