Bin Okuma, a celebrated visual artist, has recently and quite suddenly lost his wife, Lena. He and his son, Greg, are left to deal with the shock. But Greg has returned to his studies on the East Coast, and Bin finds himself alone and pulled into memories he has avoided for much of his life. In 1942, after Pearl Harbor, his Japanese Canadian family was displaced from the West Coast. Now, he sets out to drive across the country: to complete the last works needed for an upcoming exhibition; to revisit the places that have shaped him; to find his biological father, who has been lost to him. It has been years since his father made a fateful decision that almost destroyed the family. Now, Bin must ask himself whether he really wants to find him. With the persuasive voice of his wife in his head, and the echo of their great love in his heart, he embarks on an unforgettable journey that encompasses art and music, love and hope.

A story of great loss, a story of redemption, a story of abiding love, Requiem is a beautifully written and evocative novel about a family torn apart by the past and a man's present search for solace.

April - Twelve Steps for a Compassionate Life - Karen Armstrong

In this important and thought-provoking work, Karen Armstrong-one of the most original thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world-provides an impassioned and practical guide to helping us make the world a more compassionate place.

The twelve steps she suggests begin with "Learn About Compassion," and close with "Love Your Enemies." In between, she takes up self-love, mindfulness, suffering, sympathetic joy, the limits of our knowledge of others, and "concern for everybody." She shares concrete methods to help us cultivate and expand our capacity for compassion, and provides a reading list to encourage us to "hear one another's narratives." Armstrong teaches us that becoming a compassionate human being is a lifelong project and a journey filled with rewards.

May - Secret Daughter - Shilpi S. Gowda

Somer's life is everything she imagined it would be - she's newly married and has started her career as a physician in San Francisco - until she makes the devastating discovery she never will be able to have children.

The same year in India, a poor mother makes the heartbreaking choice to save her newborn daughter's life by giving her away. It is a decision that will haunt Kavita for the rest of her life, and cause a ripple effect that travels across the world and back again.

Asha, adopted out of a Mumbai orphanage, is the child that binds the destinies of these two women. We follow both families, invisibly connected until Asha's journey of self-discovery leads her back to India.

Compulsively readable and deeply touching, SECRET DAUGHTER is a story of the unforeseen ways in which our choices and families affect our lives, and the indelible power of love in all its many forms.

June - The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

Already a successful novelist in 1920 when she completed The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton anticipated best-selling status for her new novel. The Age of Innocence, set in late nineteenth-century New York society, did indeed become a best-seller and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Wharton was the first woman to receive this high literary honor. The novel is both nostalgic and satirical in its depiction of old New York, with its often-stifling conventions and manners and its insistence on propriety. Wharton had written about old New York before in The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country, but in The Age of Innocence she is less caustic in her criticism of its culture. Having worked diligently in relief efforts during World War I Wharton recalled her formative years in New York society as a time of stability, even though that stability was the product of strict adherence to accepted rules of conduct.

Because of similarities between Wharton's style and that of her friend Henry James The Age of Innocence is frequently compared to James' writing, especially his novel A Portrait of a Lady. Serious students are often encouraged to read the two titles in order to compare James's point of view to Wharton's distinctly feminine sensibility.

The Age of Innocence is regarded as a skilled portrait of the struggle between the individual and the community. It is also a work that explores the dangers and liberties of change as a society moves from a familiar, traditional culture to one that is less formal and affords its members greater freedom. The novel's staying power is generally attributed to its presentation of such universal concerns as women's changing roles, the importance of family in a civilized society, and the universal conflict between passion and duty.

July - Infidel - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Somali-born author Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of the most controversial women on earth. For years, she has been forced to live in hiding; her life has been threatened numerous times; an anti-Koran script that she wrote provoked the assassination of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh; and a dispute over her citizenship indirectly brought down the Dutch government. This memoir about her family's travails living under strict fundamentalist Islamic precepts tracks the evolution of a world-changing radical feminist.

"Infidel" is the eagerly awaited story of the coming of age of this elegant, distinguished -- and sometimes reviled -- political superstar and champion of free speech. With a gimlet eye and measured, often ironic, voice, Hirsi Ali recounts the evolution of her beliefs, her ironclad will, and her extraordinary resolve to fight injustice done in the name of religion. Raised in a strict Muslim family and extended clan, Hirsi Ali survived civil war, female mutilation, brutal beatings, adolescence as a devout believer during the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and life in four troubled, unstable countries largely ruled by despots. In her early twenties, she escaped from a forced marriage and sought asylum in the Netherlands, where she earned a college degree in political science, tried to help her tragically depressed sister adjust to the West, and fought for the rights of Muslim immigrant women and the reform of Islam as a member of Parliament. Even though she is under constant threat -- demonized by reactionary Islamists and politicians, disowned by her father, and expelled from her family and clan -- she refuses to be silenced.

Ultimately a celebration of triumph over adversity, Hirsi Ali's story tells how a bright little girl evolved out of dutiful obedience to become an outspoken, pioneering freedom fighter. As Western governments struggle to balance democratic ideals with religious pressures, no story could be timelier or more significant.

September - The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde (or another from the Thursday Next series)

Thursday Next is the main protagonist in a series of comic fantasy, alternate history novels by the British author Jasper Fforde. She was first introduced in Fforde's first published novel, The Eyre Affair, released on July 19, 2001 by Hodder & Stoughton. As of 2011, the series comprises six books, in two series. The first series is made up of the novels The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels and One of Our Thursdays Is Missing.

Great Britain circa 1985: time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. Baconians are trying to convince the world that Francis Bacon really wrote Shakespeare, there are riots between the Surrealists and Impressionists, and thousands of men are named John Milton, an homage to the real Milton and a very confusing situation for the police. Amidst all this, Acheron Hades, Third Most Wanted Man In the World, steals the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit and kills a minor character, who then disappears from every volume of the novel ever printed! But that's just a prelude…

Hades' real target is the beloved Jane Eyre, and it's not long before he plucks her from the pages of Bronte's novel. Enter Thursday Next. She's the Special Operative's renowned literary detective, and she drives a Porsche. With the help of her uncle Mycroft's Prose Portal, Thursday enters the novel to rescue Jane Eyre from this heinous act of literary homicide. It's tricky business, all these interlopers running about Thornfield, and deceptions run rampant as their paths cross with Jane, Rochester, and Miss Fairfax. Can Thursday save Jane Eyre and Bronte's masterpiece? And what of the Crimean War? Will it ever end? And what about those annoying black holes that pop up now and again, sucking things into time-space voids…

Suspenseful and outlandish, absorbing and fun, The Eyre Affair is a caper unlike any other and an introduction to the imagination of a most distinctive writer and his singular fictional universe.

October - By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept - Elizabeth Smart

Quite simply, Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is requisite reading for lovers. While its form may be open to debate--is it fictionalized autobiography, poetic prose, a novel, a prose elegy, a psalm?--its function is shockingly clear. Few books are as dangerously honest about the invasion that is passionate love.

Browsing in a bookshop, Elizabeth Smart chanced upon a book of poems that would change her life. Falling in love first with the poetry of George Barker, Smart eventually sought out the poet himself and paid to relocate and house the impecunious poet and his wife. That's right, and his wife. Both hostess and mistress, Smart had four children with Barker during the affair that prompted this searing, exquisite examination of desire and identity.

Amazingly, By Grand is as passionate on the page as the events that inspired it. Aching and unapologetic, By Grand is the diary of an affair, not a marriage, and its tug of war between terror and desire is constant. Smart is simultaneously character, author, and lover, confessing guilt one moment while sparing nothing of her bliss the next: "Under the waterfall he surprised me bathing and gave me what I could no more refuse than the earth can refuse the rain." Emboldened by its honesty and intensity, By Grand wrests its unique place in the literature of love with pitch-perfect language that ranges from the sweeping to the needle precise. Toppling over into love, Smart knows, "Fear will be a terrible fox at my vitals under my tunic of behaviour." --Darryl Whetter

November - The Modern Christian Mystic - Albert J. LaChance

In this new work, Albert LaChance presents a complete reframing of Christianity as an experiential rather than dogmatic approach to the presence of Christ. It emphasizes the idea of Christ as the source and sustainer of the cosmos, the Earth, the life community, and global culture. As such, it takes a "unitive" approach, with Christianity understood as being in mystical union with global culture, and with the ecological realities of the Earth. In the author's view, Christianity thus joins hands with Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism in a unitive oneness with all that is.

Consisting of twenty-eight short chapters, The Modern Christian Mystic focuses on the presence of God permeating and organizing the beginning of existence, in the form of consciousness giving birth to energy, and then the material reality of the universe. The author argues that just as St. Augustine introduced the "pagan" Plato to Christianity, and a millennium later St. Thomas Aquinas revitalized his faith with the "pagan" philosophy of Aristotle, so in the modern age the "non-theism" of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism holds the key to a revivified mystical practice. The Modern Christian Mystic posits a nurturing new world based on commonality rather than conflict in the world of spirit.

December - Room - Emma Donoghue

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It's where he was born and where he and his Ma eat and play and learn. At night, Ma puts him safely to sleep in the wardrobe, in case Old Nick comes.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it's the prison where Old Nick has kept her for seven years, since she was nineteen. Through ingenuity and determination, Ma has created a life for herself and her son, but she knows it's not enough for either of them. Jack's curiosity is building alongside Ma's desperation -- and Room can't contain either of them for much longer...

Told entirely in the inventive, often funny voice of Jack, Room is a celebration of the resilient bond between parent and child, and a brilliantly executed novel about a journey from one world to another.