Bit by bit, the ravages of age are eroding Marina's grip on the everyday. An elderly Russian woman now living in America, she cannot hold on to fresh memories, such as the details of her grown children's lives and the approaching wedding of her grandchild.

Yet Marina's distant past is miraculously preserved. Vivid images of her youth in war-torn Leningrad arise unbidden, carrying her back to the terrible fall of 1941, when she was a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum and the German army's approach signaled the beginning of what would be a long, torturous siege on the city. As the people braved starvation, bitter cold, and a relentless German onslaught, Marina joined other staff members in removing the museum's priceless masterpieces for safekeeping, leaving the frames hanging empty on the walls to symbolize the artworks' eventual return. As the Luftwaffe's bombs pounded the proud, stricken city, Marina built a personal Hermitage in her mind, a refuge that would stay buried deep within her until she needed it once more.

Even at the age of six, lively, inquisitive Elizabeth Grace senses she's a child of privilege, a "lucky fish". Soothing her worries by raiding the sugar box, she scampers up into the sheltering arms of the lilac-blooming syringa tree growing behind the family's suburban Johannesburg home.

Lizzie's closest ally and greatest love is her Xhosa nanny, Salamina. Deeper and more elemental than any traditional friendship, their fierce devotion to each other is charged and complicated by domestic stresses and by the violence, injustice, and intoxicating beauty of their country.

In the social and racial upheavals of the 1960s, Lizzie's eyes open to the terror and inhumanity that paralyze all the nation’s cultures. Pass laws and stringent curfews have briefly created an orderly state, but an anxious one. Lizzie's home harbors its own set of rules, with hushed midnight gatherings, clandestine transactions, and the girl's special task of protecting Salamina's secret newborn child.

Claire Randall is leading a double life. She has a husband in one century, and a lover in another.

In 1945, Claire Randall, a former combat nurse, is back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon, when she innocently touches a boulder in one of the ancient stone circles that dot the British Isles.

Suddenly she is a Sassenach, an "outlander", in a Scotland torn by war and raiding border clans in the year of our Lord 1743. Claire's destiny is soon inextricably intertwined with Clan MacKenzie and the forbidden Castle Leoch. She is catapulted without warning into the intrigues of lairds and spies that may threaten her life and shatter her heart.

Those who participate this time will receive a copy of the book to keep. Thanks to Deb Jeffers for arranging this.

For more than half a century, its tarnished latch unlocked, the red leather diary lay silent inside an old steamer trunk strewn with vintage labels evoking the glamorous age of ocean liner travel... Inside, in brief, breathless dispatches written on gold-edged pages, the journal recorded five years in the life and times of a smart and headstrong New York teenager, a young woman who loved Baudelaire, Central Park, and men and women with equal abandon... Through a serendipitous chain of events, the diary was given the chance to tell its story.

Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood and old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her own role, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her own story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography.

Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, and against the objections of his parents and neighbors, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, resolves to investigate the murder of his neighbor's poodle. At the prompting of a school social worker, Christopher also sets out to write a book about his investigations.