Book Club Pix - Beach Reads

Contributed by Mary Anne Ellis, Southern History Department, Birmingham Public Library
Book Jacket Map of Bones

by James Rollins

A midnight celebration of the mass at Cologne cathedral ends in horror and death when a band of masked men enter to kill most of the worshippers and steal a holy relic: the bones of the Three Wise Men. But Grayson Pierce, an agent of Sigma Force, is on the case. Together with his partner, Rachel Verona, Pierce races the clock to recover the bones from a secret society whose plans for the relic are nothing short of world-shaking ... literally.

  The Beach

by Alex Garland

It’s one thing to long for paradise and quite another to find it. Richard, the narrator of the novel, is a discontented wanderer who has made his way to Thailand and thinks he has found the escape he has been looking for when he discovers a map left behind by a neighbor who has committed suicide. With his friends Etienne and Francoise, Richard joins a commune on a carefully hidden island and believes he has found his tropical paradise, but it is not long before Richard finds his Eden turning into a nightmare.
Book Jacket Gift from the Sea

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

This book was originally published in 1955. Now, fifty years later, readers are rediscovering this collection of Lindbergh’s meditations on life and her place in it as a woman and a citizen of the world. Written in a family vacation home at the beach, the chapters in Gift are based on various types of shells Lindbergh found along the seashore. Some of her concerns have a surprisingly modern ring to them, such as the search for peace and simplicity in a complicated world and the necessity for private hours in which to renew the spirit.

  White Shark

by Peter Benchley

The late Peter Benchley frightened a whole generation of readers out of the water with his novel Jaws. However, readers of White Shark will quickly decide that life is none too safe out of the water, either, as characters are menaced by a creation even more sinister than a force of nature: a monster that is the result of man tampering with nature. This "white shark" is the brainchild of a Nazi experimenter and is definitely not confined to the ocean. Once it decides to come ashore, there is no place to hide. (This novel also appears under the alternative title of Creature.)