A Fine Balance
By Rohinton Mistry
A Lesson Before Dying
By Ernest J. Gaines
A Map of the World
By Jane Hamilton
A Million Little Pieces
By James Frey
A Virtuous Woman
By Kaye Gibbons
Anna Karenina
By Leo Tolstoy
As I Lay Dying
By William Faulkner
Back Roads
By Tawni O’Dell
Black and Blue
By Anna Quindlen
Breath, Eyes, Memory
By Edwidge Danticat
Cane River
By Lalita Tademy
Cry, the Beloved Country
By Alan Paton
Daughter of Fortune
By Isabel Allende
Drowning Ruth
By Christina Schwarz
East of Eden
By John Steinbeck
Ellen Foster
By Kaye Gibbons
Fall on Your Knees
By Ann-Marie MacDonald
Gap Creek: The Story Of A Marriage
By Robert Morgan
Here on Earth
By Alice Hoffman
House of Sand and Fog
By Andre Dubus III
I Know This Much Is True
By Wally Lamb
Icy Sparks
By Gwyn Hyman Rubio
Jewel
By Bret Lott
Light in August
By William Faulkner
Midwives
By Chris Bohjalian
Mother of Pearl
By Melinda Haynes
Night
By Elie Wiesel
One Hundred Years of Solitude
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Open House
By Elizabeth Berg
Paradise
By Toni Morrison
River, Cross My Heart
By Breena Clarke
She’s Come Undone
By Wally Lamb
Song of Solomon
By Toni Morrison
Songs In Ordinary Time
By Mary McGarry Morris
Sula
By Toni Morrison
Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail
By Malika Oufkir
Stones from the River
By Ursula Hegi
Tara Road
By Maeve Binchy
The Best Way to Play
By Bill Cosby
The Bluest Eye
By Toni Morrison
The Book of Ruth
By Jane Hamilton
The Corrections
By Jonathan Franzen
The Deep End of the Ocean
By Jacquelyn Mitchard
The Good Earth
By Pearl S. Buck
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
By Carson McCullers
The Heart of a Woman
By Maya Angelou
The Known World
By Edward P. Jones
The Meanest Thing to Say
By Bill Cosby
The Pilot’s Wife
By Anita Shreve
The Poisonwood Bible
By Barbara Kingsolver
The Rapture of Canaan
By Sheri Reynolds
The Reader
By Bernhard Schlink
The Sound and the Fury
By William Faulkner
The Treasure Hunt
By Bill Cosby
Vinegar Hill
By A. Manette Ansay
We Were the Mulvaneys
By Joyce Carol Oates
What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day
By Pearl Cleage
Where the Heart Is
By Billie Letts
While I Was Gone
By Sue Miller
White Oleander
By Janet Fitch
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By Elizabeth Berg
Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club Selection: 2000
The narrator of Elizabeth Berg's Open House calls divorce "a series of internal earthquakes ... one after the other."
She ought to know. Samantha is abandoned by her husband in the opening pages of this three-handkerchief special, and
the resultant tremors keep her off-balance for most of the novel. There are practical problems aplenty, of course,
including a shortage of money and an 11-year-old son to raise. But Sam's sense of emotional bereavement is far worse,
despite the fact that her husband had been giving her the conjugal cold shoulder for years:
I miss David so much, yes I do, I miss the presence of another person in my bed at night, even if he doesn't touch me;
the reliability of someone else being there in the morning, even if they only shave and stare straight ahead into the
mirror while you lean against the bathroom doorjamb with your cup of coffee, chatting hopefully.
The loneliness in her "as constant and as irrefutable" as circulating blood, Sam begins to rebuild her life. She finds
herself a job and takes in a couple of boarders to help meet her mortgage payments. (One of them, a depressed student
named Lavender Blue, informs her that "life was nothing but one major disappointment after the other"--the sort of homily
that Sam is understandably reluctant to hear these days.) She also starts dating, with disastrous results. Yet this
comically kvetching heroine does manage to find love in the ruins, and by the time Open House winds down, it's hard not
to believe that she's much better off. Throughout, Berg alternates her snappy and sappy registers like a real pro. And
the conclusion, which most readers will be able to spot a mile off, seems just right--the light at the end of the
post-matrimonial tunnel.
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