Today Show and USA Today Announce Book Clubs Selections

On Thursday, July 31, NBC News' Today Show announced that the latest selection of its monthly "Today Book Club" is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (Doubleday). The title was a July/August 2003 Book Sense 76 pick. Dave Barry, who appeared on the popular morning show with Haddon, chose the book.

The Today Show describes Haddon's novel as the story of an autistic teenager, Christopher John Francis Boone, whose world falls apart when he finds his neighbor's dog impaled on a garden fork and is initially blamed for the killing. In nominating the title for the Book Sense 76, Luanne Kreutzer of St. Helens Book Shop in St. Helens, Oregon, said, "This novel takes you right into the world of a 15-year-old autistic savant boy who is obsessed with solving the mystery of who killed his neighbor's dog. In his search, he discovers much more about his family than he ever wanted to know. Very engaging and written in a true voice of innocence."

Also on Thursday, USA Today announced the selection of Lucia, Lucia, by Adriana Trigiani (Random House) as its next book club title.

As USA Today noted, the "star" of the novel, Lucia, is "the beautiful 25-year-old daughter of a prosperous Italian grocer in Greenwich Village. The postwar boom is ripe with opportunities for talented girls with ambition, and Lucia becomes an apprentice to an up-and-coming designer at chic B. Altman's department store on Fifth Avenue. Engaged to her childhood sweetheart, the steadfast Dante DeMartino, Lucia is torn when she meets a handsome stranger who promises a life of uptown luxury that career girls like her only read about in the society pages."

Trigiani will answers readers' questions on Thursday, August 7, at noon EDT/9:00 a.m. PDT. Readers will be able to pose questions at http://cgi1.usatoday.com/mchat/20030807001/tscript.html. For more on the USA Today Book Club, click here.