"The Help" Kathryn Stockett

Book club read for August.

Enter a vanished world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962.

Where black maids raise white children, but aren't trusted not to steal the silver ...

There's Aibileen, raising her seventeeth white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son's tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue; and white Miss Skeeter, home from college, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappeared.

Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny. No one would believe they'd be friends; fewer still would tolerate it. But as each woman finds the courage to cross boundaries, they come to depend and rely upon one another. Each is in a search of a truth. And together they have an extraordinary story to tell ...

"Perfume" by Patrick Suskind

Book club read for May

In eighteeth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most

gifted and abominable personages in an era that

knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.

His name was Jean-Baptise Grenouille, and if his name has been forgotten

today, it is certainly not because Grenouille fell short

of those more famoius blackguards when it came to arrogance,

misanthropy, immorality, or, more succinctly, wickedness,

but because his gifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a domain

that leaves no traces in history:

to the fleeting realm of scent...