Tuesday, April 2 at 7:30 pm
Laurie R. King
Justice Hall (Bantam)

Always an evening of intrigue, style, and intellectual pleasures, join us for a night in honor of Laurie R. King and her latest addicting mystery. The game's afoot, and Mary Russell and her partner-in-crime Sherlock Holmes team up to solve a mystery that is rooted in the very heart of England. "The great marvel of King's series is that she's managed to preserve the integrity of Holmes' character and yet somehow conjure up a woman astute, edgy, and compelling enough to be the partner of his mind as well as his heart," praises The Washington Post Book World.

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Thursday, April 4 at 7:30 pm
Ronald Wright
Henderson's Spear (Holt)

The author of A Scientific Romance, a New York Times Notable Book, and award winning nonfiction on the Americas and the Maya (Stolen Continents, Time Among the Maya), Ronald White has crafted an epic steeped in a master's knowledge of history, mystery, and romance. Liv, a Canadian filmmaker, is writing from a Tahitian jail, piecing together her troubled past and her family's buried history. Slowly, Liv unravels the sorted stories about her unknown daughter; her father missing since the Korean War, and an ancestor who sailed to these same waters on an extraordinary voyage with Queen Victoria's grandsons, Prince George and his elder brother, Prince Eddy, who would die young and disgraced. Through these unforgettable characters, a mesmerizing story, and a deep understanding of landscape and culture of the South Seas, Henderson's Spear explores the patterns of history and the accidents of love.

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Monday, April 8 at 7:30 pm
Sara Backer
American Fuji (Berkeley)

As the first American and the first woman to serve as visiting professor of English at Japan's Shizuoka University, Sara Backer uses her colorful experiences as a "gaijan" (foreigner) and her affection for the mysteries and charms of Japan to shape American Fuji. Intertwining the cross-cultural mishaps of two Americans in modern day Japan, this quirky and clever novel explores the society of their home abroad and its insistence on communicating through what is not being said. With characters like Mr. Eguchi, head of the Gone With the Wind fantasy funeral business and whose English is based solely on Beatles' lyrics, readers will revel in this lively debut about our innocence abroad.

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Tuesday, April 9 at 7:30 pm
Marnie Mueller
My Mother's Island (Curbstone Press)

Publishers Weekly writes that "Mueller has crafted an exceptional book about the spirituality of death and dying that gets inside the reality of losing a parent with an intimacy and depth that no self-help book treatise can hope to match." Burdened with painful secrets kept suppressed for forty years, Sarah Ellis travels to Puerto Rico to tend to her widowed mother who is dying of cancer. With stunning poetic clarity and acute psychology, Mueller explores the conflicts between a mother and her only child and the coming to terms with death, the past, and the need for people. Wally Lamb, author of She's Come Undone, says this novel is "loving, angry, remorseful, and profoundly revealing of our lives as adult children. Marnie Mueller's honest and unsentimental novel helped me fathom the meaning of my own mother's recent death."

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Wednesday, April 10 at 7:30 pm
Robert M. Sapolsky
A Primate's Memoir (Touchstone)

An exhilarating account of Sapolsky's twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, this "wild and wondrous account" (Kirkus Reviews) interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti - for man and beast alike. Over two decades, Sapolsky survives culinary atrocities, gunpoint encounters, and a surreal kidnapping, while witnessing the encroachment of the tourist mentality on unspoiled Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes evermore enamored of his subjects - unique and compelling in their own right, "a cast of characters as memorably colorful as any that Dickens ever created," according to Newsday.

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Monday, Apirl 15 at 7:30 pm
Randall Sullivan
Labyrinth (Atlantic Monthly)

What do the deaths of two prominent rap artists have to do with the Los Angeles Police Department scandal that began in the late 1990's? Better still, what do Death Row Records, two murderous street gangs, and the LAPD have in common? According to journalist Randall Sullivan, all are deeply entangled and woven together by the thirst for power and greed. In his new book, Sullivan investigates how a cadre of black police officers allegedly traded their loyalty to the LAPD for allegiance with the Bloods gang, Death Row Records, and the company's infamous CEO Suge Knight. He examines the links between the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, and how the murders may have been a driving force behind the police scandal. He also divulges how high-ranking LAPD officials covered up a number of crimes to protect officers within the department. The results of Mr. Sullivan's investigation are both shocking and timely. Indeed, it was his piece in Rolling Stone that allowed the FBI to get involved and bring the scandal to light. Join us for a thoughtful discussion on police misconduct.

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Tuesday, April 16 at 7:30 pm
Michael Frayn
Spies (Holt)

Michael Frayn is a literary genius, one whose books we love to read and whose plays we love to watch. Author of the hilarious best-selling novel Headlong, Noises Off and Copenhagen are among his best known plays. His wit and intense plotting are second to none, and we are truly honored to welcome him to Santa Cruz County. His new novel, Spies, is a haunting tale about secrecy, imagination, and a child's game turned deadly earnest. The sudden trace of a troubling, familiar scent compels Stephen Wheatley back to a dimly remembered yet disturbing childhood summer in wartime London. As he pieces together the scattered images, we are transported to a quiet suburban street, where two boys, Keith and Stephen, are engaged in their own version of the war effort: spying on their neighbors, recording their movements, ferreting out their secrets. When Keith utters six words, however, the espionage game takes a sinister and unintended turn, and catastrophe ensues.

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Wednesday, Apirl 17 at 6:30 pm
Book Club Meeting
Vertigo (New Directions)

On the middle Wednesday of every month, Capitola Book Cafe's Richard Lange hosts a book club meeting. Please join us this month for a discussion of W. G. Sebald's Vertigo. Sebald -- the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness -- takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts -- Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."

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Thursday, Apirl 18 at 7:30 pm
Gayle Brandeis
Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women who Write (Harper San Francisco)

Drawing on the metaphor of the growing cycle and the fruitfulness of women's bodies, award-winning author and poet Gayle Brandeis presents the perfect blend of meditations and writing exercises to inspire women to tap into their creative center. Each section of this delightful guide begins and ends with a "Fruitflesh Meditation" - an exercise centered on a particular fruit that will challenge and provoke you to bring your body into the act of writing, adding a winsome, satisfying dimension to the creative process. A BookSense 76 preferred book, Fruitflesh "makes you want to take a big bite out of life and gives you the inspiration and tools to start doing just that through writing," says Oriah Mountain Dreamer.

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Thursday, April 18 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Writing Group

Every third Thursday of the month, join Book Café's Wendy Mayer as she leads our writer's group. Due to the limited amount of time, the group will focus on short exercises rather than group critique.

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Friday, April 19 at 7:30 pm
Dr. Daniel Amen
Healing the Hardware of the Soul (Free Press)

The best-selling author of Change Your Brain, Change Your Life and Healing ADD now puts his proven program to work on the problems that stand in the way of inner growth and spiritual healing. As one of the world's leading experts on brain imagining and the relationship between brain function and behavior, Dr. Amen, in a straightforward and easy-to-follow style, demonstrates how to achieve and maintain a healthy brain-soul connection. Understanding the "hardware" of our bodies can allow the "software programs" of our everyday lives - child rearing, education, marriage, etc. - to run optimally, providing a deeper knowledge of our most intimate selves and help us explain human triumphs and failures.

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Monday, April 22 at 7:30 pm
Catherine Ryan Hyde
Walter's Purple Heart: A Novel (Simon & Schuster)

Some authors capture the reader's imagination. Catherine Ryan Hyde reaches beyond the imagination to touch and inspire the reader's spirit in a way few writers can. Her acclaimed bestseller Pay It Forward won the hearts of critics and public alike with the simple yet powerful story of a child's belief in the goodness of humanity and the exponential impact of an act of kindness. With Walter's Purple Heart, Catherine Ryan Hyde combines elements of a ghost story, reincarnation drama, and mystery novel. It is the stunningly original story of a soldier killed in World War II who reaches through time to touch the lives of the people he loved most, especially the girl he left behind. Uniquely romantic and spiritual, it amuses and engages while posing provocative questions about life, death, love and forgiveness, and shedding light on the simple value of living.

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Tuesday, April 23 at 7:30 pm
Atul Gawande
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science (Holt)

In gripping accounts of true cases, New Yorker writer Atul Gawande performs exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is - complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human. He offers unflinching views from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous and limited, yet high-stakes decisions must be made. Dramatic stories explains how deadly mistakes are made, why good surgeons go bad, and what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable - a woman whose nausea never relents or an architect whose incapacitating back pain has no physical cause. At once tough-minded and humane, Complications is new kind of medical writing, nuanced and lucid, unafraid to confront uncertainties at the heart of modern medicine, yet alive to the possibility of wisdom in this extraordinary endeavor.

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Wednesday, April 24 at 7:30 pm
Dan Bessie
Alvah Bessie's Spanish Civil War Notebooks (University of Kentucky)

Blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Alvah Bessie, praised by both Time and The Nation as one of the finest chroniclers of the Spanish Civil War, was a foot solider in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. During his training and service in 1938, he kept detailed notebooks that described everything from his battlefield experiences, his work on the battalion newspaper, and morale among the troops to his meeting with Ernest Hemingway. Not simply a combat record, Bessie's notebooks also diagram loyalist and fascist positions and record the soldier's favorite songs, their opinions of their officers, and the feelings about the politics and the conduct of the war.

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Thursday, April 25 at 7:30 pm
Janna Levin
How the Universe Got its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space (Princeton)

Is the universe infinite or just really big? Does nature abhor infinity? In startling and beautiful prose, Janna Levin's diary of unsent letters to her mother describes what we know about the shape and extent of the universe. She grants the uninitiated access to the astounding findings of contemporary theoretical physics and makes tangible the contours of space and time---those very real curves along which apples fall and planets orbit. As she recounts our increasingly awarding attempt to know the universe, Levin tells her personal story as a scientist isolated by her growing knowledge. This book, a physicist's diary, is a remarkable effort to reach across the distance of that knowledge and share it with others.

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Thursday, April 25 at 7:00 pm
World Affairs Book Club

Last month the Book Cafe's Graham Parsons began a new book club focusing on global current history. As always, we welcome people of all backgrounds and affiliations to come participate. This month we will be discussing Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict by Norman G. Finkelstein (Verso). Call Jenn Ramage at 831-462-6297 or email Graham Parsons at parsons402@yahoo.com for details.

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Saturday, April 27 at 7:30 pm
Tariq Ali
The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (Verso)

Tariq Ali, editor of the New Left Review, provides a detailed, thoughtful analysis of the history that preceded the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In masterful prose, he explains both the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the new forms of equally entrenched Western colonialism, looking at each with religious and historical detail. He challenges assumptions about both the West and Islam, arguing instead that Eastern civilization has played an important role in Western modernity. Ultimately, The Clash of Fundamentalisms argues that what we have experienced now is the return of History in horrific form, with religious symbols playing a part on both sides, and it is time we all start paying real attention.

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Sunday, April 28 at 3:30 pm **
Michael Connelly
City of Bones (Little Brown)

Welcome the national best-selling writer of intrigue and action, Michael Connelly! The author of A Darkness More Than Night, Void Moon, The Black Echo and numerous other successes is back with another masterpiece that will leave readers breathless and hungry for more. When the bones of a twelve-year old boy are found in Hollywood Hills, LAPD Detective Harry Bosch is drawn into a case that brings up dark memories from his own haunted past. Personal and professional trouble blindsides this hero who has been thrilling readers for a decade, leaving him on the brink of an unimaginable decision.
** Please Note Time **

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Monday, April 29 at 7:30 pm
Richard Flanagan
Gould's Book of Fish: a Novel in Twelve Fish (Grove)

Internationally acclaimed Australian author of Death of River Guide, Richard Flanagan has crafted a book as rich in character, tension, and history as it is physically spectacular in color, illustration, and style. In nineteenth century Australia, there is the true story of William Buelow Gould who was a sentenced to life in prison in what is now Tasmania. A talented art forger, Gould was enlisted by the prison doctor to help get him into Royal Society by painting a book of fish. These paintings are scientific yet puzzling, and inspired Flanagan to write a story worthy of their enigmatic beauty. Gould falls dangerously in love with a black mistress too late to learn love is never safe, and he tries to record his life in prison too late to learn that prisoners do not write their own history. Destined to be a collector's item, Flanagan's masterpiece will be printed with four-color plates of Gould's fish at the beginning of each chapter, and the text will be printed in six colors, each one intrinsic to the narrative and the emotions of their creator. This is a darkly funny, original book about love - love between a white convict and a black woman, love of the mysteries in history, and the love of books and how such love can be conveyed to others.

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Tuesday, April 30 at 7:30 pm
Ian Frazier
The Fish's Eye: Essays about Angling and the Outdoors (FSG)

In The Fish's Eye, Ian Frazier explores his lifelong passion for fishing, fish, and the aquatic world, and his essays contain sharply focused observations of the American outdoors, a place filled with human alterations and detritus that somehow remain defiantly unruined. He sees the angler's environment all around him - in New York's Grand Central Terminal, in the cement-lined pond of a city park, in a shimmering bonefish flat in the Florida keys, and in the trout streams of the Rocky Mountains. The Fish's Eye brings together twenty years of heartfelt, funny, and vivid essays on a timeless pursuit where many mysteries, human and natural, coincide. On Ian Frazier, The Washington Post Book World writes, "Each paragraph has something gorgeous in it and each page shines with the telltale jubilance and celebration of a labor of love."