With Mother's Day right around the corner Alexandra Fuller's memoir Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness would be a great pick for a Mother-Daughter book club or a Mother's Day themed book club meeting.

In this sequel to Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller returns to Africa and the story of her unforgettable family.

In Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Alexandra Fuller braids a multilayered narrative around the perfectly lit, Happy Valley-era Africa of her mother's childhood; the boiled cabbage grimness of her father's English childhood; and the darker, civil war- torn Africa of her own childhood. At its heart, this is the story of Fuller's mother, Nicola. Born on the Scottish Isle of Skye and raised in Kenya, Nicola holds dear the kinds of values most likely to get you hurt or killed in Africa: loyalty to blood, passion for land, and a holy belief in the restorative power of all animals. Fuller interviewed her mother at length and has captured her inimitable voice with remarkable precision. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is as funny, terrifying, exotic, and unselfconscious as Nicola herself.

We see Nicola and Tim Fuller in their lavender-colored honeymoon period, when east Africa lies before them with all the promise of its liquid equatorial light, even as the British empire in which they both believe wanes. But in short order, an accumulation of mishaps and tragedies bump up against history until the couple finds themselves in a world they hardly recognize. We follow the Fullers as they hopscotch the continent, running from war and unspeakable heartbreak, from Kenya to Rhodesia to Zambia, even returning to England briefly. But just when it seems that Nicola has been broken entirely by Africa, it is the African earth itself that revives her.

A story of survival and madness, love and war, loyalty and forgiveness, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is an intimate exploration of the author's family. In the end we find Nicola and Tim at a coffee table under their Tree of Forgetfulness on the banana and fish farm where they plan to spend their final days. In local custom, the Tree of Forgetfulness is where villagers meet to resolve disputes and it is here that the Fullers at last find an African kind of peace. Following the ghosts and dreams of memory, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is Alexandra Fuller at her very best.

Visit Alexandra Fuller's website and view pictures her family and of her return trip to Africa.

Please welcome Jennifer Miller, author of The Year of the Gadfly, to On the Bookcase! Jennifer tells us how her novel was inspired by the ancient tradition of Sortes Vergilianae.

I didn’t set out to write a ghost story, and yet somehow The Year of the Gadfly became one. The apparition of a famous dead journalist counsels my reporter-heroine. A secret chamber in the school basement is thought to be haunted. And a group of young artists use an Ouija board to conjure up the spirit of a dead boy. 

This last detail was inspired by a specific occurrence my junior year of high school, in which my Latin class decided to practice the ancient tradition of Sortes Vergilianae, or the “Lottery of Vergil.” According to legend, the Aeneid could be used to divine the future. It had worked for a handful of Roman emperors who’d predicted their rise to power in the book’s pages. Maybe, my classmates thought, the Aeneid could shed light on where we’d get into college or whom we’d end up taking to prom. My boyfriend Ben thought the game was silly. What could a book written over a thousand years before reveal about his future?

We didn’t know how the Sortes Vergilianae was meant to go, so we resorted to holding a kind of séance. We shut off the classroom lights, drew the shades, and sat knee-to-knee in a circle on the floor, holding hands. I was surprised that Ben, skeptic that he was, agreed to go first. He closed his eyes, opened the Aeneid to a random page, and pointed at the text. Then he opened his eyes and read. He’d chosen Book 6, set in Hades—the underworld. Specifically, Ben picked the passage about a boy who dies at the age of 19.

I don’t remember any of the other passages we chose that day. I only remember Ben’s, because only a few months later, he was killed in a car accident. In some strange and horrible way, the Sortes Vergilianae had worked. It fulfilled its promise of revealing Ben’s future. Not that Ben would have given credence to what was simply coincidence. Moreover, he’d have argued, the boy in the book died at 19. He was only 17. Still, I wondered if by turning the Sortes Vergilianae into a séance, we had called up a ghost—somehow pushed Ben toward the underworld before his time.

I know ghosts do not exist in the real world. But I think it was inevitable that after Ben’s death, ghosts would come to populate the world of my imagination. The presence of these spiritual forces in Gadfly—both the walking, talking ghosts and the haunting specter of the past—is my attempt to account for, or at least understand, what happened that day in the Latin classroom. I’d like to see the world through Ben’s skeptical eye, and yet I’m struck daily with the truth of Vergil’s Lottery. How it defined Ben’s future, and mine, in so many inescapable ways.

Jennifer Miller, the author of Inheriting the Holy Land: An American’s Search for Hope in the Middle East, holds a BA from Brown University, an MS in Journalism from Columbia, and an MFA in fiction writing at Columbia. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Marie Claire, Men's Health, the Christian Science Monitor, Salon.com, and others. She is a native of Washington, DC and currently lives in Brooklyn with all the other writers.

Reading Group Choices attended the Virginia Festival of the Book on March 24th. I, Laura Vianna, was a panel member for the Book Club workshop. I was able to inform the audience of a few tips that Reading Group Choices has gathered over the years from book clubs. A few included:

-Book Club Awards
-Book Group Website
-Charity Involvement
-Food by the Book
-Author Chats
-Field Trips
-Diversify group membership

At the end of the workshop, the audience was able to share what their book clubs do for fun as well as ask the panel questions and seek advice.

Reading Group Choices also gave away five boxes of books to five lucky winners for their book clubs. Maybe we will be at an event near you!

Please welcome the author of The Language of Flowers, Vanessa Diffenbaugh, to On the Bookcase! She has made a "Dictionary of Flowers" that in relationship to her novel, that will make for a great book club resource.

When I began The Language of Flowers, I owned only one flower dictionary: The Floral Offering: A Token of Affection and Esteem; Comprising the Language and Poetry of Flowers, written in 1859 by Henrietta Dumont. It was an ancient, crumbling hardcover, with dry flowers pressed between the pages. Scraps of poetry, collected by previous owners and stored between the yellowed pages, slipped to the floor as I scanned the book for meanings.

Three chapters into Victoria’s story, I myself made the discovery of the yellow rose. In the table of contents at the beginning of Ms. Dumont’s beautiful book, the yellow rose appears as jealousy. Hundreds of pages later, in the very same book, the yellow rose appears again: this time as infidelity.

Reading through the book more carefully, I found no explanation for the discrepancy, so I went in search of additional dictionaries, hoping to determine the “correct” definition of the yellow rose. Instead, I found that the problem was not specific to the yellow rose; nearly every flower had multiple meanings, listed in hundreds of books, in dozens of languages, and on countless websites.

The dictionary shown here was created in the manner in which Victoria compiled the contents of her boxes. Lining up dictionaries on my dining room table—The Flower Vase by Miss S. C. Edgarton, Language of Flowers by Kate Greenaway, The Language and Sentiment of Flowers by James D. McCabe, and Flora’s Lexicon by Catharine H. Waterman—I scanned the meanings, selecting the definition that best fit the science of each flower, just as Victoria would have done. Other times, when Icould find no scientific reason for a definition, I chose the meaning that occurred most often or, occasionally, simply the one I liked best.

My goal was to create a usable, relevant dictionary for modern readers. I deleted plants from the Victorian dictionaries that are no longer common, and added flowers that were rarely used in the 1800s but are more popular today. I kept most food-related plants, as Victoria would have, and deleted most nonflowering trees and shrubs because, as Victoria says, there is nothing wistful about the passing of sticks or long strips of bark.

I am grateful for the assistance of Stephen Zedros of Brattle Square Florist in Cambridge and Lachezar Nikolov at Harvard University. This dictionary would not exist without their vast knowledge and generous support.

Read Victoria's Dictionary of Flowers.

To write The Language of Flowers, Vanessa Diffenbaugh found inspiration in her own experience as a foster mother. After studying creative writing and education at Stanford University, Vanessa taught art and writing to youth in low-income communities. She and her husband, PK, have three children and live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is her first novel.