This compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many of the great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An English boy in a simple town has dreams bigger than the outdoors and embarks at an early age into the sailor's life. The waters he travels reward him with the ability to explore the human spirit, while Joseph Conrad launches the story into both an exercise of his technical prowess and a delicately crafted picture of a character...

In Two Rivers, Vermont, Harper Montgomery is living a life overshadowed by grief and guilt. Since the death of his wife, Betsy, Harper has narrowed his world to working at the railroad and raising his daughter the best way he can. Then one fall day, a train derails, and Harper finds a survivor - a pregnant fifteen-year-old girl with mismatched eyes and skin the color of blackberries who needs a place to stay. Plagued by his role in a brutal crime...

Thomas Hardy's first masterpiece, The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a scene of such heartlessness and cruelty that it still shocks readers today. A poor workman named Michael Henchard, in a fit of drunken rage, sells his wife and baby daughter to a stranger at a country fair. Stricken with remorse, Henchard forswears alcohol and works hard to become a prosperous businessman and the respected mayor of Casterbridge. But he cannot erase his past....

Jim, the first mate aboard a small steamer named the Patna, travels from port to port in the Pacific Ocean. When the ship hits floating wreckage, Jim and the crew are forced to abandon it, leaving hundreds of ethnic travelers on board. However, Jim's reprehensible actions are soon discovered by the Court and he is compelled to face his guilt and redeem himself - a journey that leads him to a remote exotic location where he is revered as the Lord,...

"Margaret Murphy is a weaver of fantastic tales, growing up in a world where the truth is too much for one little girl to endure. Her first memory is of the day her friend Agnes died. No one blames Margaret. Not in so many words. Her mother insists to everyone who will listen that her daughter never even left the house that day. Left alone to make sense of tragedy, Margaret wills herself to forget these unbearable memories, replacing them with imagined...

After causing a hit-and-run accident which leaves a woman permanently brain damaged, a motorist sets out to marry her. Carter Clay obtains a job in the clinic where Katherine is being treated and proceeds to woo her. By the author of The Blue Hour.

"Two sisters come together and reevaluate their priorities when one sister receives a terminal diagnosis."-- Two sisters work to heal lingering childhood wounds and seek a new balance in work, family, marriage, and love when one receives a diagnosis that sets the clock ticking. Determined to save Sherri's life, Kristen drops everything to guide her sister on the harrowing cancer treatment journey. When she's unable to balance the strain of caring...

Lord Jim tells the story of a young, idealistic Englishman who is disgraced by a single act of cowardice while serving as an officer on the Patna, a merchant-ship sailing from an eastern port. His life is blighted; an isolated scandal assumes horrifying proportions. An older man, Marlow, befriends Jim, and helps to establish him in Patusan, a remote Malay settlement. There he achieves a kind of peace, but his courage is put to the test once more.

This Book Club in a Box is a book discussion kit which circulates for six weeks and contains everything you need to host your own book club.