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After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby.

DIGGING TO AMERICA by Anne Tyler In "Digging to America," two families meet in the summer of 1997 at a Baltimore airport lounge as each awaits the arrival of a baby girl from Korea. ...Improbably, the two families strike up a lasting friendship. What force could fuse two such mismatched clans? At first, with the introduction of a joint annual "Arrival Party" conceived by the Donaldsons, it seems nothing more than the desire to help their daughters fit in. But it soon becomes clear that the babies aren't the only ones whose foothold needs securing. These little girls will give new direction — and new purpose — to their parents and grandparents too.

The Book Club meeting on July 21 will be dedicated to choosing the books to be read in subsequent months.

Colm Tóibín's sixth novel, Brooklyn, is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself. Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the hard years following World War Two. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America -- to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland" -- she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind. Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, who loves the Dodgers and his big Italian family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.

April selection is "The Heart of the Matter." Click on the title above for more information.

Unlikely alliances are a staple of fiction, and the unlikelier the better, from Huck and Jim floating down the Mississippi to Frodo and Gollum creeping toward Mordor — because the real drama lies in watching how dissimilar characters turn out to be brothers (or sisters) under the skin. Sue Monk Kidd followed this principle in her best-selling first novel, “The Secret Life of Bees,” in which a 14-year-old white girl and her family’s black servant join in fleeing abuse in the South Carolina of the civil rights era. Kidd’s latest novel, “The Invention of Wings,” also set largely in South Carolina, involves another unusual duo, in this case a slave and a daughter of the family that owns her. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage The author Sue Monk Kidd at her home on Marco Island, Fla. The South figures prominently in her work. Sue Monk Kidd Tackles Race in ‘The Invention of Wings’JAN. 6, 2014 Sue Monk Kidd By the Book: Sue Monk Kidd: By the BookJAN. 9, 2014 The story begins in Charleston in 1803 on the day 11-year-old Sarah Grimké is given Hetty, or “Handful,” roughly her same age, as a birthday present. A born abolitionist whose earliest memory is of witnessing a slave being whipped (a trauma that’s responsible for the stammer that still afflicts her), Sarah immediately tries to “return” Handful. When this attempt fails, she writes an official “certificate of manumission,” which is promptly torn in two. Although Handful has to serve as Sarah’s personal maidservant, the girls share confidences and even an illicit picnic on the roof. Sarah also teaches Handful to read and write, an infraction that results in harsh penalties for both.

The Antagonist is a novel about the power of stories, whether stories we tell ourselves in order to explain the apparently inexplicable or stories we tell others in order to explain ourselves, the world, and our role within it. It is a beautifully constructed, precisely written, and engaging piece situated in the space where the two circles in the Venn diagram of narrative and truth intersect—and occasionally blur. And though truth and narrative do blur, one can see why Lynn Coady’s book was a finalist for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize in Canada.

Picture a middle-class American family, four generations, living in the suburbs. ... Give or take a few details, this extended/blended/fouled-up family could be any of ours. That makes it cliché territory, risky for an ambitious novelist. It’s also quintessential Anne Tyler, as well as quintessential American comedy. Tyler has a knack for turning sitcom situations into something far deeper and more moving. Her great gift is playing against the American dream, the dark side of which is the falsehood at its heart: that given hard work and good intentions, any family can attain the Norman Rockwell ideal of happiness — ordinary, homegrown happiness.

The novel takes us to Shanghai in the late 1930s, with English detective Christopher Banks bent on solving the mystery that has plagued him all his life: the disappearance of his parents when he was eight. By his own account, he is now a celebrated gentleman sleuth, the toast of London society. But as we learn, he is also a solitary figure, his career built on an obsession. Believing his parents may still be held captive, he longs to put right as an adult what he was powerless to change as a child, when he played at being Sherlock Holmes — before both his parents vanished and he was sent to England to be raised by an aunt.