Thank you to all who voted! All votes have now been tallied. I'm excited to read Guatemala & support an author from a country with such a low literacy rate.
I hope that you'll be excited as I am to read this book, but I also want to note for all our new members that we want reading to be fun. We hope you to read the book & participate in the discussion. However, if this doesn't happen, that's ok. Mia & I will love you anyway. :)
So without further ado, the winning book chosen by our book club members for July is...
"'Right from the start I picked her for a thief, although that day she didn’t take anything. . . . I knew she’d be back,' the narrator/bookseller of Severina recalls in this novel’s opening pages. Imagine a dark-haired book thief as alluring as she is dangerous. Imagine the mesmerized bookseller secretly tracking the volumes she steals, hoping for insight into her character, her motives, her love life. In Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s hands, this tale of obsessive love is told with almost breathless precision and economy. The bookstore owner is soon entangled in Severina’s mystery: seductive and peripatetic, of uncertain nationality, she steals books to actually read them and to share with her purported grandfather, Señor Blanco.
In this unsettling exploration of the alienating and simultaneously liberating power of love, the bookseller’s monotonous existence is rocked by the enigmatic Severina. As in a dream, the disoriented man finds that the thin border between rational and irrational is no longer reliable. Severina confirms Rey Rosa’s privileged place in contemporary world literature."
