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PPCA Book Club

Read with us!

PPCA’s Book Club gatherings are open to all who have read that month’s book. Typically we start out discussing the book, and inevitably someone relates a theme in the book to their own experiences or other readings, so the conversation takes an interesting turn. Our Book Club discusses books of broad interest set in parts of the world in which Peace Corps Volunteers have served, or books which were authored by Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs). We love author appearances! Since 2010, we have hosted over 40 different authors – in person, by phone, or via video.

Here are our next book discussions:

April 2026 Book Club Selection

Hernandez, Franca*: Venezia: The Shaman’s Quest (2025)

* RPCV Krygyzstan 2003-2004

Discussion: Monday, April 13, 2026, 7:00-8:30 pm. Hosted by Carole Beauclerk, 1500 SW Park Ave in Portland. Downtown street parking is free after 7:00 pm. Upon arrival, call Carole at 503-780-2722 to be let in through the gate, then walk into the building on the right and once inside make two lefts into the community room. Participating in person will be author Franca Hernandez. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84331387031?pwd=1RbnfRRnsOONQkaZkkiPHEFAeF0U8Q.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 843 3138 7031 and passcode 405537.

Synopsis: Escaped from pirates’ clutches, Lucilla, servant to the merchant Ximeno, and her friend Ademara, a runaway convent dweller, are reunited after a year’s separation when Lucilla accompanies Master Ximeno on his trade mission along the Illyrian Coast and, ultimately, to Constantinople. Set in early medieval Venice and Byzantium, the gateway between Europe and Asia, the nexus of two clashing civilizations, the sequel to Venezia: The Talisman, Venezia: The Shaman’s Quest finds Ademara and Lucilla caught once again in an intrigue driven by vile, duplicitous people lusting for power and wealth. In a gesture of bravery, Lucilla exchanges her freedom for Ademara’s. Then Ademara and her lover Bartolo journey east, seeking Bartolo’s mother, the Shaman, from whom he was separated by vicious marauders. Lucilla is taken by ship on the stunningly blue Adriatic Sea to the glorious Byzantine capital, Constantinople, where she is thrust into a challenging adventure of love, betrayal, and self-discovery.

Where to find it:
Vendors: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

May 2026 Book Club Selection

Gurnah, Abdulrazak*: Theft (2025)

* 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature

Discussion: Wednesday, May 13, 2026, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Peggy McClure, 5450 SW 18th Dr in Portland. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89632289284?pwd=GmYkBPUNo6qi85IrFfmttbBxjBgtMd.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 896 3228 9284 and passcode 398458.

Review: ©Publishers Weekly: Two Tanzanian men, abandoned as boys, forge their own paths in this incisive novel by Nobel Prize winner Gurnah (Afterlives). Karim’s Muslim parents divorce when he is a boy. His mother, Raya, feels no affection for him, and abandons him to her father after falling in love with a man named Haji Othman. Years later, Badar, a 10-year-old orphan boy, enters the Othman household as a domestic servant for Raya, who’s now married to Haji. As the novel unfolds, Badar is revealed to be Haji’s nephew, cast off by his wayward brother and hated by Baba, the household’s elderly and devout patriarch. Karim becomes aware of Badar’s plight during a visit home from university, when Badar is 15. Two years later, when Baba suspects Badar of stealing groceries on the family’s credit, he instructs Haji to banish the teenager. Badar goes to live with Karim, now a married low-level bureaucrat in Zanzibar, and both men rise through the ranks of their respective fields, with Badar’s hotel busboy job leading to an assistant manager position and Karim on track to become a government minister. By the novel’s end, their series of cosmopolitan encounters have driven one to abandon his Tanzanian identity and the other to reinvest in it. Written in lucid prose, Gurnah’s tale is at once culturally specific and emotionally universal, especially in depicting Badar’s heartache as a boy and the strangeness of his arrangement with the Othman household as seen from Karim’s point of view. Gurnah is at the top of his game.

June 2026 Book Club Selection

Blitzer, Jonathan: Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis (2024)

Discussion: Wednesday, June 10, 2026, 7:00-8:30 pm. Hosted by Lesly Sanocki, 2090 NW Overton Ct in Beaverton. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86402311834?pwd=D9eOuFvWRPKFn7n1xwq56qIqDc4e5J.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 864 0231 1834 and passcode 957563.

Review: ©Publishers Weekly: Blitzer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, debuts with a masterful portrayal of the trauma experienced by asylum-seeking migrants from Central America and the U.S. government’s often inept policy interventions. Blitzer organizes his narrative around four Central Americans, including Juan Romagoza, a doctor tortured in El Salvador for his political leanings who later cared for migrants in the U.S.; Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga, who escaped violence in Honduras and was later separated from her children at the U.S. border; and Lucrecia Hernández Mack, a doctor and politician in Guatemala. Interwoven with descriptions of the struggles of these asylum seekers and activists is the tale of America’s chaotic immigration policy, beginning with the Reagan administration’s support of repressive anticommunist regimes in Central America (which led, according to Blitzer, to the gang violence, state repression, and unrelenting poverty that has triggered mass migration from the region). Blitzer has produced a model of long-form journalism that intertwines the personal and the political, describing how drug cartels and street gangs brought harm and death to prodemocracy activists and innocent bystanders, while those in power remained indifferent. This is a powerful indictment of U.S. immigration policy.

July 2026 Book Club Selection

Mushtaq, Benu, and Deepa Bhashti: Heart Lamp: Stories* (2025)

* 2025 International Booker Prize

Discussion: Wednesday, July 8, 2026, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Mike Waite, 7008 Kansas St in Vancouver WA. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86098713340?pwd=x68pjoX09Q36OiaFkUJeKEbjelroWq.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 860 9871 3340 and passcode 746951.

Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: Sterling collection of short stories by South Indian writer Mushtaq. The first book of short stories to win the International Booker Prize, Mushtaq’s collection is also the first prizewinner to have been translated from Kannada, an Indian language whose flavor comes through in Bhasthi’s fluent translation, as when, in the first story, a newlywed woman ponders how to introduce her husband: “If I use the term yajamana and call him owner, then I will have to be a servant, as if I am an animal or a dog.” An attorney, activist, and sometime journalist, Mushtaq often writes of Muslim women in unhappy relationships. In one story, a woman returns home, facing shame for leaving an unfaithful husband forced on her in an arranged marriage, and chides her relatives for their role in her unhappiness: “I begged you not to make me stop studying. None of you listened to me. Many of my classmates aren’t even married, and yet I have become an old woman.” With five children to support, she desperately seeks a way out, with surprising consequences. In another story, a woman, maddened by a houseful of boisterous children on summer vacation, decides that the only way to get some peace and quiet is to enforce bedrest on the older boys—and that means enrolling them in a mass circumcision that is euphemistically billed as a celebration for the Muslim prophet Ibrahim, “a collective exercise in which children look forward to an event but end up screaming loudly together.” Mushtaq’s characters are frequently at odds, and several have strange foibles, as with a religious teacher who becomes addicted to gobi manchuri, a cauliflower dish, which leads to some decidedly unsaintly behavior. The book is not without its flashes of sharp-edged, ironic humor, as when a woman seemingly caught in the throes of dementia is offered a Pepsi as “the drink of heaven,” but more often Mushtaq writes in near-documentary style of lives lived in constant struggle. A memorable introduction to a gifted writer from whom we should hope to hear more.

August 2026 Book Club Selection

Olsen, Jody*: A Million Miles: My Peace Corps Journey (2025)

* RPCV Tunisia 1966-1968, Director of the Peace Corps 2018-2021

Discussion: Wednesday, August 12, 2026, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Peggy McClure, 5450 SW 18th Dr in Portland. Participating in person will be author Jody Olsen. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87572493238?pwd=1cacc0qIYnPXnF6RaLF1A3ZzvN7W4U.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 875 7249 3238 and passcode 483075.

Review: “In her candid and inspiring memoir, A Million Miles: My Peace Corps Journey, Jody Olsen faithfully tells her story and in so doing reveals authentic moments of pain, loss, and achievement. While her brilliant tenure as Peace Corps Director represents the culmination of her impressive professional career, she draws on lessons learned from being born into a prominent political family, abandoned by her mother, her own Peace Corps service, motherhood and career. Readers will prize her honesty and read this memoir with admiration for the author’s life of consequence and her gift for storytelling and lessons learned. Olsen’s memoir adds a literary contribution to the many ways she has advanced the Peace Corps with her passion for peace building and cross-cultural understanding.”—Mark D. Gearan, President, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and former Peace Corps Director, 1995-1999

Where to find it:
Libraries: Ft Vancouver | Multnomah Co
Vendors: Powell’s | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

September 2026 Book Club Selection

Oza, Janika: A History of Burning (2023)

Discussion: Monday, September 14, 2026, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Don and Kathy Evans, 9930 NW Justus Ln in Portland. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87422627387?pwd=Z3sfu5Kf1Tb0ZMtHINO7QKP7bVClJ5.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 874 2262 7387 and passcode 855736.

Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: Four generations of an Indian family struggle with displacement in this debut novel. Artfully juggling the perspectives of 10 characters over the span of nearly a century, Oza follows the members of an ordinary family from India to Africa to Canada as they struggle to maintain their cultural traditions and solidarity amid an often hostile environment and changing social norms. Pirbhai, the patriarch, is lured to Africa as a 13-year-old in 1898, where he’s pressed into indentured servitude laying track for the British railway to Lake Victoria. His fateful decision to obey an order to set fire to a village the British wanted gone provides the novel’s title and looms over his descendants as a sort of original sin. After he moves from Kenya to Uganda, his family slowly climbs the economic ladder into the middle class until the moment in 1972 when the dictator Idi Amin orders the expulsion of all Asians. When Arun, an anti-government activist, disappears following his arrest, his wife, Latika, Pirbhai’s granddaughter, allied with her husband in the struggle against the repressive regime, chooses to remain behind rather than joining her parents, siblings, and her own infant son on their journey to Toronto and the beginning of a new life in yet another alien land. The family’s fears about her fate give birth to a secret that will reverberate in their lives decades later. Oza subtly observes the shift from practices like arranged marriages to unions that are the product of romantic attachments and trusts her readers to acclimate themselves. In intimate domestic scenes and scenes of societies in turmoil, she displays a sure-handed ability to write at both small and large scale and to portray with deep sympathy the universal human desire to find “a little place to simply exist, freely, and with dignity.” An ambitious family drama skillfully explores the bonds of kinship and the yearning for peace and security.

October 2026 Book Club Selection

Onyebuchi, Tochi: Harmattan Season (2025)

Discussion: Wednesday, October 21, 2026, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Ann and Roger Crockett, 1922 NE 12th Ave in Portland. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82122052258?pwd=5Kb6jj0Et8T7BourKFLDfqdQ7Lhcmg.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 821 2205 2258 and passcode 566749.

Review: ©Publishers Weekly: The melancholy antihero of this searing indictment of colonialism from World Fantasy Award winner Onyebuchi (Goliath) walks the mean streets of an unnamed West African city that’s trembling on the verge of an election between a charismatic indigenous rebel leader and a corrupt puppet of the French occupation. As the annual Harmattan dust storms gather strength, a girl bleeding from an abdominal wound stumbles into the squalid flat of clientless private investigator Boubacar, a half-French, half-native “chercher” (finder of lost persons) who fought for the French in a past war. Their encounter is brief before the girl mysteriously disappears without a trace, sending Boubacar on an odyssey of political and personal discoveries, and forcing him to face his actions in the war. The Harmattan winds both hurt and help along the way. Blending elements of classic noir fiction (including a Chandleresque narrative voice) and fantastic acts of terroristic martyrdom, Onyebuchi crafts an equally heady and page-turning narrative. This is an unforgettable portrait of a place and a person trapped between two worlds and two cultures.

November 2026 Book Club Selection

Albertus, Michael: Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (2025)

Discussion: Tuesday, November 10, 2026, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Paul and Susie Robillard, 5405 NW Deerfield Way in Portland. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89631948538?pwd=vqhgoFTqJVzsTyrwGkIxafHnZIs52n.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 896 3194 8538 and passcode 923357.

Review: ©Library Journal: A prolific progressive social commentator and author, Albertus (political science, Univ. of Chicago; Property Without Rights) argues that land is the fundamental source of economic, social, and political power. Over the past two centuries, what Albertus describes as the Great Reshuffle has dramatically changed ownership patterns of land worldwide. His interest is how land reform can affect economic growth, racism, gender disparities, equity for Indigenous peoples, and the environment. His scholarly research and on-the-ground examination of land use and land reform over the past 15 years (mainly in non-industrialized countries) leads Albertus to argue that redistributing acreage to the tillers of land, with accompanying clear titles and generous government assistance, can combat racism, correct gender disparities, and stimulate economic growth in a bottom-up process. He also makes the case that top-down philanthropic and governmental efforts to conserve land can help heal the environment, as it has in Chile and Spain.

December 2026 Book Club Selection

Garricks, Chimeka: A Broken People’s Playlist: Stories (from Songs) (2020/2023)

Discussion: Monday, December 7, 2026, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Rosemary Furfey, 7033 SW 33rd Ave in Portland. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89337792803?pwd=Ev9bups9IqO4nJMbygwaI7w4kg5Foy.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 893 3779 2803 and passcode 090323.

Review: ©Booklist: A dozen interlinked, music-oriented stories set in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where Garricks was raised, form an ode to feel-good moments (falling in love, finding second chances, reveling in gratitude) and grating dissonances (cheating spouses, living with regret, longing for forgiveness, grieving for a loved one). Readers will feel both bewildered by and invested in the interconnected and fractured lives of friends, lovers, and family members who long for peace and redemption. In Music, an aspiring DJ vows never to follow his womanizing father’s footsteps, but later in Desperado, heartbreaking details emerge as to why he was unable to keep his promise. In Hurt, a pampered son stages his own funeral as his older brother, also seen in Love’s Divine, tries to make up for his shortcomings. In the City presents a young man with a promising future caught in the crosshairs of police brutality. River highlights the violence in confraternities (secret student groups) in Nigerian universities. Friends ponder the meaning of true love, “when you’ve unloved the unlovely, the imperfect,” in Beautiful War. Each songlike story feels like a breakout hit encapsulating the brokenness and the beauty in life’s soundtrack.

Where to find it:
Libraries: Clackamas Co | Multnomah Co | Washington Co
Vendors: Powell’s | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

January 2027 Book Club Selection

Reva, Maria: Endling (2025)

Discussion: Wednesday, January 6, 2027, 6:30-8:00 pm. Hosted by Andrea Pepitone, 1509 SW Carson St in Portland. Feel free to bring snacks to share. Zoom is an option for those who can’t make it; click on https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88556124522?pwd=HB3pTIDWUyQSqaSBXI624waEYXUfqi.1 or go to zoom.us, enter meeting ID 885 5612 4522 and passcode 703823.

Review: ©Publishers Weekly: In Reva’s astonishing metafictional tale (after Good Citizens Need Not Fear), a Ukrainian Canadian writer named Maria Reva attempts to write a novel about Ukraine’s mail-order bride industry on the eve of the Russian invasion. The novel’s first part consists of Reva’s novel in progress featuring Yeva, a snail conservationist working to save a species on the brink of extinction by traveling around the country in her RV turned lab to find specimens for breeding. To pay for her equipment, she joins guided romance tours and goes on dates with Western men looking for a pliable Ukrainian bride. Meanwhile, sisters Nastia and Sol strive to take the bridal industry down. After Nastia borrows Yeva’s RV with a plan to kidnap 12 of the bachelors, Russia invades and Reva’s manuscript grinds to a halt. Reva emerges as a character in the second part, reeling from the bombings and worrying about her grandfather, who still resides in occupied Kherson, as she watches the news from Vancouver. She disappoints her agent with the news that she’s quit the novel (“I was writing about a so-called invasion of Western bachelors to Ukraine, and then an actual invasion happened…. To continue now seems unforgivable”). Reva then writes a grant proposal to travel in Ukraine for research on a “postnovel” about her birth country in flux. When she returns in the final section to her three revolutionary anti-brides, their adventure brilliantly dovetails with Reva’s literary experiment and wartime reckoning. This inspired and urgent novel is bound to make a major splash.