en-US Tue, 31 Dec 2024 20:11:53 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 62951865
The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee’s father, who left for the War and never returned. Meanwhile, in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility—the mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.]]> 276 Jayne Anne Phillips 0451493338 Heather 0 3.56 2023
author: Jayne Anne Phillips
name: Heather
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> 56269278 309 Percival Everett 164445064X Heather 0 4.06 2021
author: Percival Everett
name: Heather
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
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]]> 200174240
The small, rundown village of Great Diddling is full of stories—author Berit Gardner can feel it. The way the villagers avoid outsiders, the furtive stares and whispers in the presence of newcomers� Berit can sense the edge of a story waiting to be unraveled, and she's just the person to do it. In fact, with a book deadline looming over her and no manuscript (not even the idea for a manuscript, truth be told), Berit doesn't just want this story. She needs it.

Then, while attending a village tea party, Berit becomes part of the action herself. An explosion in the library of the village's grand manor kills a local man, and the resulting investigation and influx of outsiders sends the quiet, rundown community into chaos. The residents of Great Diddling, each one more eccentric and interesting than any character Berit could have invented, rewrite their own narrative and transform the death of one of their own from a tragedy into a new beginning. Taking advantage of Great Diddling's new notoriety, the villagers band together to start a book and murder festival designed to bring desperately-needed tourists to their town. What they couldn't have predicted is how the new story they've begun to tell will change all their lives forever.]]> 392 Katarina Bivald 1728295769 Heather 0 currently-reading 3.60 2024
author: Katarina Bivald
name: Heather
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 204316858 A shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till that lays bare how forces from around the world converged on the Mississippi Delta in the long lead-up to the crime, and how the truth was erased for so long. Wright Thompson’s family farm in Mississippi is 23 miles from the site of one of the most notorious and consequential killings in American history, yet he had to leave the state for college before he learned the first thing about it. To this day, fundamental truths about the crime are widely unknown, including where it took place and how many people were involved. This is no the cover-up began at once, and it is ongoing.ĚýIn August 1955, two men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were charged with the torture and murder of the 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi.ĚýAfter their inevitable acquittal in a mockery of justice, they gave a false confession to a journalist, which was misleading about where the long night of hell took place and who was involved.ĚýIn fact, Wright Thompson reveals, at least nine people can be placed at the scene, which was inside the barn of one of the killers, on a plot of land within the six-square-mile grid whose official name is Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, fabled in the Delta of myth as the birthplace of the blues on nearby Dockery Plantation. Even in the context of the brutal caste regime of the time, the four-hour torture and murder of a boy barely in his teens for whistling at a young white woman was acutely depraved; Till’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to keep the casket open seared the crime indelibly into American consciousness. Wright Thompson has a deep understanding of this story—the world of the families of both Emmett Till and his killers, and all the forces that aligned to place them together on that spot on the map.ĚýAs he shows, the full horror of the crime was its inevitability, and how much about it we still need to understand. Ultimately this is a story about property, and money, and power.ĚýIt implicates all of us.ĚýIn The Barn, Thompson befriends the few people who have been engaged in the hard, fearful business of bringing the truth to light, people like Wheeler Parker, Emmett Till’s friend, who came down from Chicago with him that summer, and is the last person alive to know him well.ĚýWheeler Parker’s journey to put the killing floor of the barn on the map of Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, and the Delta, and America, is a journey we all need to go on if this country is to heal from its oldest, deepest wound.]]> 448 Wright Thompson 0593299825 Heather 0 4.37 2024
author: Wright Thompson
name: Heather
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/27
date added: 2024/11/27
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]]> 43834909 Two sisters travel the same streets, though their lives couldn't be more different. Then, one of them goes missing.

In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don't speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.

Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey's district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit--and her sister--before it's too late.

Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters' childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.]]> 482 Liz Moore 0525540679 Heather 0 4.02 2020
author: Liz Moore
name: Heather
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/02
date added: 2024/11/02
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]]> 113877384
Following the deaths of her husband and son, Helen Cartwright returns to the English village of her childhood after living abroad for six decades. Her only wish is to die quickly and without fuss.

Helen retreats into her home on Westminster Crescent, becoming a creature of routine and habit. Then, one cold autumn night, a chance encounter with an abandoned pet mouse on the street outside her house sets Helen on a surprising journey of friendship.

Sipsworth is a reminder that there can be second chances. No matter what we have planned for ourselves, sometimes the world has plans of its own. Simon Van Booy’s lyrical storytelling is a delight even as it will fill your heart.]]> 240 Simon Van Booy 1567927947 Heather 0 4.11 2024
author: Simon Van Booy
name: Heather
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/22
date added: 2024/10/22
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]]> 127306444
IĂ°unn is in yet another doctor's office. She knows her constant fatigue is a sign that something's not right, but practitioners dismiss her symptoms and blood tests haven't revealed any cause.

When she talks to friends and family about it, the refrain is the same � have you tried eating better? exercising more? establishing a nighttime routine? She tries to follow their advice, buying everything from vitamins to sleeping pills to a step-counting watch. Nothing helps.

Until one night Iðunn falls asleep with the watch on, and wakes up to find she’s walked over 40,000 steps in the night . . .

What is happening when she’s asleep? Why is she waking up with increasingly disturbing injuries? And why won’t anyone believe her?]]> 197 Hildur Knútsdóttir 1250322049 Heather 0 3.30 2021
author: Hildur KnĂştsdĂłttir
name: Heather
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/20
date added: 2024/10/20
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]]> 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore Heather 0 4.16 2024
author: Liz Moore
name: Heather
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/13
date added: 2024/10/13
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]]> 197036052
The police bring Judith, Suzie, and Becks in to investigate the murder as civilian advisors right from the start, so they have free rein to interview suspects and follow the evidence to their heart's content� which is perfect because Judith has no time for rules and standard procedure. But this case has the Marlow Murder Club stumped. Who would want to kill the affable mayor of Marlow? How did they even get the poison into his coffee? And is anyone else in danger? The Marlow Murder Club is about to face their most difficult case yet...]]> 272 Robert Thorogood 1728284473 Heather 0 3.78 2024
author: Robert Thorogood
name: Heather
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/08
date added: 2024/10/08
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]]> 198563717
Come to Paris, August 2021, when the City of Lights was still empty of tourists, and a thirst for long overdue pleasure gripped those who wandered its streets.

After New York City emptied out in March 2020, Glynnis MacNicol, aged 46, unmarried with no children, spent 16 months alone in her tiny Manhattan apartment. The isolation was punishing. A year without touch. Women are warned of invisibility as they age, but this was an extreme loneliness no one can prepare you for. When the opportunity to sublet a friend’s apartment in Paris arose, MacNicol jumped on it. Leaving felt like less of a risk than a necessity.

What follows is a decadent, unexpected journey into one woman’s pursuit of radical enjoyment.

The weeks in Paris are filled with friendship and food and sex. There is dancing on the Seine; a plethora of gooey cheese; midnight bike rides through empty Paris; handsome men; afternoons wandering through the empty Louvre; nighttime swimming in the ocean off a French island. And yes, plenty of nudity.

In the spirit of Deborah Levy and Annie Ernaux, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself is an intimate, insightful, powerful, and endlessly pleasurable memoir of an intensely lived experience whose meaning and insight expands far beyond the personal narrative. MacNicol is determined to document the beauty, excess, and triumph of a life that does not require permission.

The pursuit of enjoyment is a political act, both a right and a responsibility. Enjoying yourself—as you are—is not something the world tells you is possible, but it is.

Here’s the proof.]]> 288 Glynnis MacNicol 0593655753 Heather 0 3.39 2024
author: Glynnis MacNicol
name: Heather
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/25
date added: 2024/09/25
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]]> 200634908 A novel of family, secrets, ghosts, and homecoming set on the seaside cliffs of Maine, by the New York Times best-selling author of Friends and Strangers.

On a secluded bluff overlooking the ocean sits a Victorian house, lavender with gingerbread trim, a home that contains a century’s worth of secrets. By the time Jane Flanagan discovers the house as a teenager, it has long been abandoned. The place is an irresistible mystery to Jane. There are still clothes in the closets, marbles rolling across the floors, and dishes in the cupboards, even though no one has set foot there in decades. The house becomes a hideaway for Jane, a place to escape her volatile mother.

Twenty years later, now a Harvard archivist, she returns home to Maine following a terrible mistake that threatens both her career and her marriage. Jane is horrified to find the Victorian is now barely recognizable. The new owner, Genevieve, a summer person from Beacon Hill, has gutted it, transforming the house into a glossy white monstrosity straight out of a shelter magazine. Strangely, Genevieve is convinced that the house is haunted—perhaps the product of something troubling Genevieve herself has done. She hires Jane to research the history of the place and the women who lived there. The story Jane uncovers—of lovers lost at sea, romantic longing, shattering loss, artistic awakening, historical artifacts stolen and sold, and the long shadow of colonialism—is even older than Maine itself.

Enthralling, richly imagined, filled with psychic mediums and charlatans, spirits and past lives, mothers, marriage, and the legacy of alcoholism, this is a deeply moving novel about the land we inhabit, the women who came before us, and the ways in which none of us will ever truly leave this earth.]]> 384 J. Courtney Sullivan 059331915X Heather 0 3.51 2024
author: J. Courtney Sullivan
name: Heather
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/05
date added: 2024/09/05
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]]> 12398060 242 David Malouf 0307378934 Heather 0 4.07 2009
author: David Malouf
name: Heather
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/10
date added: 2024/08/10
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]]> 200555235 A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars out of us all, from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments.

“Painful and brilliant—I loved it.”—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and Either/Or

A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway.

When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joy and labor of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.

As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.

Combining the intensity of Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and the pithy wisdom of Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation, Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.]]> 272 Sarah Manguso 0593241258 Heather 0 to-read 3.67 2024
author: Sarah Manguso
name: Heather
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/02
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]]> 43890641 Hamnet is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child.

Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet.

Award-winning author Maggie O'Farrell's new novel breathes full-blooded life into the story of a loss usually consigned to literary footnotes, and provides an unforgettable vindication of Agnes, a woman intriguingly absent from history.

A New York Times Notable Book (2020), Best Book of 2020: Guardian, Financial Times, Literary Hub, and NPR.]]> 372 Maggie O'Farrell 1472223799 Heather 0 4.16 2020
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Heather
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/27
date added: 2024/07/27
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]]> 13623848 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780062060624.

Achilles, "the best of all the Greeks," son of the cruel sea goddess Thetis and the legendary king Peleus, is strong, swift, and beautiful, irresistible to all who meet him. Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled from his homeland after an act of shocking violence. Brought together by chance, they forge an inseparable bond, despite risking the gods' wrath.

They are trained by the centaur Chiron in the arts of war and medicine, but when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, all the heroes of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the cruel Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.]]> 408 Madeline Miller Heather 0 4.30 2011
author: Madeline Miller
name: Heather
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/07
date added: 2024/07/07
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]]> 62952130
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.

Lauren Groff’s new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how—and if—we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.]]> 272 Lauren Groff 0593418395 Heather 0 3.73 2016
author: Lauren Groff
name: Heather
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/02
date added: 2024/07/02
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]]> 53138095
The one person who ignites her temper more than any other is Cassian, the battle-scarred warrior whose position in Rhysand and Feyre's Night Court keeps him constantly in Nesta's orbit. But her temper isn't the only thing Cassian ignites. The fire between them is undeniable, and only burns hotter as they are forced into close quarters with each other.

Meanwhile, the treacherous human queens who returned to the Continent during the last war have forged a dangerous new alliance, threatening the fragile peace that has settled over the realms. And the key to halting them might very well rely on Cassian and Nesta facing their haunting pasts.

Against the sweeping backdrop of a world seared by war and plagued with uncertainty, Nesta and Cassian battle monsters from within and without as they search for acceptance-and healing-in each other's arms.]]> 757 Sarah J. Maas 168119628X Heather 0 4.44 2021
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Heather
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/20
date added: 2024/06/20
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]]> 50659471
Yet even the festive atmosphere can't keep the shadows of the past from looming. As Feyre navigates her first Winter Solstice as High Lady, her concern for those dearest to her deepens. They have more wounds than she anticipated-scars that will have a far-reaching impact on the future of their court.

Bridging the events of A Court of Wings and Ruin with the later books in the series, A Court of Frost and Starlight explores the far-reaching effects of a devastating war and the fierce love between friends.]]> 272 Sarah J. Maas 1635575621 Heather 0 3.69 2019
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Heather
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/08
date added: 2024/06/08
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]]> 50659472 The epic third novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas.

Feyre has returned to the Spring Court, determined to gather information on Tamlin's actions and learn what she can about the invading king threatening to bring her land to its knees. But to do so she must play a deadly game of deceit. One slip could bring doom not only for Feyre, but for everything-and everyone-she holds dear.

As war bears down upon them all, Feyre endeavors to take her place amongst the High Fae of the land, balancing her struggle to master her powers-both magical and political-and her love for her court and family. Amidst these struggles, Feyre and Rhysand must decide whom to trust amongst the cunning and lethal High Lords, and hunt for allies in unexpected places.

In this thrilling third book in the #1 New York Times bestselling series from Sarah J. Maas, the fate of Feyre's world is at stake as armies grapple for power over the one thing that could destroy it.]]> 699 Sarah J. Maas 1635575605 Heather 0 4.47 2017
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Heather
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/01
date added: 2024/06/01
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]]> 50659468
Feyre has undergone more trials than one human woman can carry in her heart. Though she's now been granted the powers and lifespan of the High Fae, she is haunted by her time Under the Mountain and the terrible deeds she performed to save the lives of Tamlin and his people.

As her marriage to Tamlin approaches, Feyre's hollowness and nightmares consume her. She finds herself split into two different one who upholds her bargain with Rhysand, High Lord of the feared Night Court, and one who lives out her life in the Spring Court with Tamlin. While Feyre navigates a dark web of politics, passion, and dazzling power, a greater evil looms. She might just be the key to stopping it, but only if she can harness her harrowing gifts, heal her fractured soul, and decide how she wishes to shape her future-and the future of a world in turmoil.

Bestselling author Sarah J. Maas's masterful storytelling brings this second book in her dazzling, sexy, action-packed series to new heights.]]> 626 Sarah J. Maas 1635575583 Heather 0 4.65 2016
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Heather
average rating: 4.65
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/25
date added: 2024/05/25
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]]> 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Heather 0 to-read 3.53 2024
author: Miranda July
name: Heather
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 50659467
At least, he’s not a beast all the time.

As she adapts to her new home, her feelings for the faerie, Tamlin, transform from icy hostility into a fiery passion that burns through every lie she’s been told about the beautiful, dangerous world of the Fae. But something is not right in the faerie lands. An ancient, wicked shadow is growing, and Feyre must find a way to stop it, or doom Tamlin—and his world—forever.

From bestselling author Sarah J. Maas comes a seductive, breathtaking book that blends romance, adventure, and faerie lore into an unforgettable read.]]> 419 Sarah J. Maas 1635575567 Heather 0 4.16 2015
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Heather
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/15
date added: 2024/05/15
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]]> 174156145
Cal Hooper took early retirement from Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace. He’s found it, more or he’s built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and he’s gradually turning Trey Reddy from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places. But then Trey’s long-absent father reappears, bringing along an English millionaire and a scheme to find gold in the townland, and suddenly everything the three of them have been building is under threat. Cal and Lena are both ready to do whatever it takes to protect Trey, but Trey doesn’t want protecting. What she wants is revenge.

A nuanced, atmospheric tale that explores what we’ll do for our loved ones, what we’ll do for revenge, and what we sacrifice when the two collide.]]> 467 Tana French 0593493435 Heather 0 3.96 2024
author: Tana French
name: Heather
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/02
date added: 2024/05/02
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]]> 59807966 Magic! Murder! Shipboard romance!

Maud Blyth has always longed for adventure. She expected plenty of it when she volunteered to serve as an old lady’s companion on an ocean liner, in order to help her beloved older brother unravel a magical conspiracy that began generations ago.

What she didn’t expect was for the old lady in question to turn up dead on the first day of the voyage. Now she has to deal with a dead body, a disrespectful parrot, and the lovely, dangerously outrageous Violet Debenham, who’s also returning home to England. Violet is everything that Maud has been trained to distrust yet can’t help but desire: a magician, an actress, and a magnet for scandal.

Surrounded by the open sea and a ship full of suspects, Maud and Violet must first drop the masks that they’ve both learned to wear before they can unmask a murderer and somehow get their hands on a magical object worth killing for—without ending up dead in the water themselves.]]> 388 Freya Marske 1250788919 Heather 0 3.86 2022
author: Freya Marske
name: Heather
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/19
date added: 2024/04/19
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]]> 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 Heather 0 4.14 2021
author: Claire Keegan
name: Heather
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/02
date added: 2024/04/02
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]]> 53217284
For fans of Georgette Heyer or Julia Quinn's Bridgerton, who'd like to welcome magic into their lives...

Young baronet Robin Blyth thought he was taking up a minor governmental post. However, he's actually been appointed parliamentary liaison to a secret magical society. If it weren’t for this administrative error, he’d never have discovered the incredible magic underlying his world.

Cursed by mysterious attackers and plagued by visions, Robin becomes determined to drag answers from his missing predecessor � but he’ll need the help of Edwin Courcey, his hostile magical-society counterpart. Unwillingly thrown together, Robin and Edwin will discover a plot that threatens every magician in the British Isles.]]> 377 Freya Marske 1250788897 Heather 0 3.94 2021
author: Freya Marske
name: Heather
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/02
date added: 2024/04/02
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]]> 177185875
1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night.

1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his ghosts with messages he cannot understand .

So begins a narrative that spans four generations of connections and consequencesĚýthatĚýignite and re-ignite as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.Ěý

Held is affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom, and compassion, a novel by a writer at the height of her powers.]]> 240 Anne Michaels 059353686X Heather 0 3.72 2023
author: Anne Michaels
name: Heather
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/14
date added: 2024/03/14
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]]> 63880836 Winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, Anne Berest’s The Postcard is a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, an enthralling investigation into family secrets, and poignant tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling.

January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz.

Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why. Aided by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist, and many others, she embarks on a journey to discover the fate of the Rabinovitch family: their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. What emerges is a moving saga that shatters long-held certainties about Anne’s family, her country, and herself.]]> 464 Anne Berest Heather 0 4.31 2021
author: Anne Berest
name: Heather
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/10
date added: 2024/03/10
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]]> 112975135 Consumed with grief, driven by vengeance, a man undertakes an unrelenting odyssey across the lawless post–Civil War frontier seeking redemption in this fearless novel from the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of News of the World.

Union soldier John Chenneville suffered a traumatic head wound in battle. His recovery took the better part of a year as he struggled to regain his senses and mobility. By the time he returned home, the Civil War was over, but tragedy awaited. John’s beloved sister and her family had been brutally murdered.

Their killer goes by many names. He fought for the North in the late unpleasantness, and wore a badge in the name of the law. But the man John knows as A. J. Dodd is little more than a rabid animal, slaughtering without reason or remorse, needing to be put down.

Traveling through the unforgiving landscape of a shattered nation in the midst of Reconstruction, John braves winter storms and confronts desperate people in pursuit of his quarry. Untethered, single-minded in purpose, he will not be deterred. Not by the U.S. Marshal who threatens to arrest him for murder should he succeed. And not by Victoria Reavis, the telegraphist aiding him in his death-driven quest, yet hoping he’ll choose to embrace a life with her instead.

And as he trails Dodd deep into Texas, John accepts that this final reckoning between them may cost him more than all he’s already lost…]]> 307 Paulette Jiles 0063252686 Heather 0 3.96 2023
author: Paulette Jiles
name: Heather
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/20
date added: 2024/02/20
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]]> 75494215 THE REAL ORIGIN OF OUR SPECIES: a myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved, offering a paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is, how it came to be, and how this evolution still shapes all our lives today.

How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution?
� Why do women live longer than men?
� Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s?
� Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet?
� Is sexism useful for evolution?
� And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when we hit menopause?

These questions are producing some truly exciting science—and in Eve, with boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Cat Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex: "We need a kind of user's manual for the female mammal. A no-nonsense, hard-hitting, seriously researched (but readable) account of what we are. How female bodies evolved, how they work, what it really means to biologically be a woman. Something that would rewrite the story of womanhood. This book is that story. We have to put the female body in the picture. If we don't, it's not just feminism that's compromised. Modern medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, even evolutionary biology all take a hit when we ignore the fact that half of us have breasts. So it's time we talk about breasts. Breasts, and blood, and fat, and vaginas, and wombs—all of it. How they came to be and how we live with them now, no matter how weird or hilarious the truth is."

Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it's an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Picking up where Sapiens left off, Eve will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens has become such a successful and dominant species.]]> 624 Cat Bohannon 0385350546 Heather 0 currently-reading 4.28 2023
author: Cat Bohannon
name: Heather
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/25
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 17380041 Ěý
If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she’d most likely be a sight more careful with them.
Ěý
In this irresistibly imagined belowstairs answer to Pride and Prejudice, the servants take center stage. Sarah, the orphaned housemaid, spends her days scrubbing the laundry, polishing the floors, and emptying the chamber pots for the Bennet household. But there is just as much romance, heartbreak, and intrigue downstairs at Longbourn as there is upstairs. When a mysterious new footman arrives, the orderly realm of the servants� hall threatens to be completely, perhaps irrevocably, upended.

Jo Baker dares to take us beyond the drawing rooms of Jane Austen’s classic—into the often overlooked domain of the stern housekeeper and the starry-eyed kitchen maid, into the gritty daily particulars faced by the lower classes in Regency England during the Napoleonic Wars—and, in doing so, creates a vivid, fascinating, fully realized world that is wholly her own.Ěý]]> 332 Jo Baker 0385351232 Heather 0 3.63 2013
author: Jo Baker
name: Heather
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/24
date added: 2024/01/24
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]]> 59948520 A haunting, virtuosic debut novel about two young men who fall in love during a time of war.

It's 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.

Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle--an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood--without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.

An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.]]> 382 Alice Winn 0593534565 Heather 0 4.51 2023
author: Alice Winn
name: Heather
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/10/11
date added: 2024/01/11
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]]> 65215270
The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When “Willie� Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert's, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one.

Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: Having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings-and the freedom to travel with Gerald. His career deflating, his health failing, Maugham arrives at Cassowary House in desperate need of a subject for his next book. Lesley, too, is enduring a marriage more duplicitous than it first appears. Maugham suspects an affair, and, learning of Lesley's past connection to the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, decides to probe deeper. But as their friendship grows and Lesley confides in him about life in the Straits, Maugham discovers a far more surprising tale than he imagined, one that involves not only war and scandal but the trial of an Englishwoman charged with murder. It is, to Maugham, a story worthy of fiction.

A mesmerizingly beautiful novel based on real events, The House of Doors traces the fault lines of race, gender, sexuality, and power under empire, and dives deep into the complicated nature of love and friendship in its shadow.]]> 306 Tan Twan Eng 1639731938 Heather 0 3.98 2023
author: Tan Twan Eng
name: Heather
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/11
date added: 2024/01/11
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]]> 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Heather 0 currently-reading 3.92 2023
author: Ann Patchett
name: Heather
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/26
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 102188677 Ěý
Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play, The Witch of Edmonton, she may finally be close to her big break. All she needs is time and space to bring her vision to life. When she stumbles across Hill House on aĚýweekend getaway upstate, she is immediately taken in by the ornate, if crumbling, gothic mansion, nearly hidden outside a remote village. It’s enormous, old, and ever-so eerie—the perfect place to develop and rehearse her play.
Ěý
Despite her own hesitations, Holly’s girlfriend, Nisa, agrees to join Holly in renting the house out for a month, and soon a troupe of actors, each with ghosts of their own, arrive. Yet as they settle in, the house’s peculiarities are made known: strange creatures stalk the grounds, Ěýdisturbing sounds echo throughout the halls, andĚýtime itself seems to shift. ĚýAll too soon, Holly and her friends find themselves at odds not just with one another, butĚýwith the house itself. It seems something has been waiting in Hill House all these years, and itĚýno longer intendsĚýtoĚýwalk alone . . .Ěý
Ěý]]> 326 Elizabeth Hand 0316527327 Heather 0 3.27 2023
author: Elizabeth Hand
name: Heather
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/18
date added: 2023/12/18
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]]> 48509903
Slowly regaining his health, Lacroix journeys north to the misty isles of Scotland with the intent of forgetting the horrors of the war. Unbeknownst to him, however, something else has followed him back from the war � something far more dangerous than a memory. …]]> 410 Andrew Miller 1609455436 Heather 0 3.87 2018
author: Andrew Miller
name: Heather
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/04
date added: 2023/12/04
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]]> 157981711 A manifesto on the gender politics of marriage (bad) and divorce (actually pretty good!) in America today, and an argument that the former needs a reboot

Studies show that nearly 70 percent of divorces are initiated by women—women who are tired, fed up, exhausted, and unhappy. Journalist Lyz Lenz is one such woman whose life fell apart after she reached a breaking point in her twelve-year marriage. In this exuberant and unapologetic book, Lenz flips the script on that narrative and preaches the good gospel of the power of divorce.

The end of a marriage is often seen as the failure of the individual—most often the woman. We've all seen how media portray divorced women: sad, lonely, drowning their sorrows in a bottle of wine, desperate for a new man. It’s as though they did something wrong, so they’ve been cast out from society. Lenz sees divorce as a practical and powerful solution for women to take back the power they are owed, while examining why we call divorce a failure when it's heterosexual marriage that has been flawed all along. How can women succeed in marriage when most relationships are based on inequality?

This book weaves reportage with sociological research, literature with popular culture, and personal stories of coming together and breaking up to create a kaleidoscopic and poignant portrait of American marriage today. Lenz argues that the mechanisms of American power, justice, love, and gender equality remain deeply flawed, and that marriage, like any other cultural institution, is due for a reckoning. Unlike any other book about divorce, this raucous manifesto for acceptance, solidarity, and collective female refusal takes readers on a riveting ride—all while pointing us toward something a little freer.]]> 288 Lyz Lenz 0593241126 Heather 0 to-read 3.92 2024
author: Lyz Lenz
name: Heather
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/19
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]]> 40594396
Meanwhile, in Prague, fear grips the city as a phantom serial killer emerges in the dark alleys. Police investigator Lukas Smolak, desperate to locate the culprit (dubbed Leather Apron in the newspapers), realizes that the killer is imitating the most notorious serial killer from a century earlier--London's Jack the Ripper. Smolak turns to the doctors at Hrad Orlu for their expertise with the psychotic criminal mind, though he worries that Leather Apron might have some connection to the six inmates in the asylum.

Steeped in the folklore of Eastern Europe, and set in the shadow of Nazi darkness erupting just beyond the Czech border, this stylishly written, tightly coiled, richly imagined novel is propulsively entertaining, and impossible to put down.]]> 414 Craig Russell 0385544367 Heather 0 4.01 2019
author: Craig Russell
name: Heather
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/08
date added: 2023/11/08
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]]> 62226126
An old friend in the antiques business has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing.

As the gang springs into action they encounter art forgers, online fraudsters and drug dealers, as well as heartache close to home.

With the body count rising, the package still missing and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out? And who will be the last devil to die?]]> 421 Richard Osman 0241512441 Heather 0 4.44 2023
author: Richard Osman
name: Heather
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/10/30
date added: 2023/10/30
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]]> 61884832 A Black sheriff. A serial killer. A small town ready to combust.

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, Charon has had only two murders. After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface.

Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. Those festering secrets are now out in the open and ready to tear the town apart.

As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also has to contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history.

Powerful and unforgettable, All the Sinners Bleed confirms S. A. Cosby as “one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction� (The Washington Post).]]> 338 S.A. Cosby 1250831911 Heather 0 4.19 2023
author: S.A. Cosby
name: Heather
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/09/30
date added: 2023/09/30
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]]> 57366942
But during the soiree, there’s a crash from inside the house, and when the Marlow Murder Club rush to investigate, they are shocked to find the groom-to-be crushed to death in his study.

The study was locked from the inside, so the police don’t consider the death suspicious. But Judith disagrees. As far as she's concerned, Peter was murdered! And it’s up to the Marlow Murder Club to find the killer before he or she strikes again…]]> 366 Robert Thorogood 0008238316 Heather 0 3.88 2023
author: Robert Thorogood
name: Heather
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/09/19
date added: 2023/09/19
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]]> 62793677 A riveting 1920s Hollywood thriller about the making of the most terrifying silent film everĚýmade, and a deadly search for the single copy rumored still to exist, from the internationally acclaimed author of The Devil Aspect.

1927: Mary Rourke—a Hollywood studio fixer—is called urgently to the palatial home of Norma Carlton, one of the most recognizable stars in American silent film. Norma has been working on the secret film everyone is openly talking about... a terrifying horror picture called The Devil’s Playground that is rumored to have unleashed a curse on everyone involved in the production. Mary finds Norma’s cold, dead body, and she wonders for just a moment if these dark rumors could be true.ĚýĚý

1967: Paul Conway, a journalist and self-professed film aficionado, is on the trail of a tantalizing rumor. He has heard that a single copy of The Devil’s Playground —a Holy Grail for film buffs—may exist. He knows his Hollywood history and he knows the film endured myriad tragedies and ended up lost to time.ĚýĚý

The Devil's Playground is Craig Russell’s tour de force, a richly researched and constructed thriller that weaves through the Golden Age of Hollywood and reveals a blossoming industry built on secrets, invented identities, and a desperate pursuit of image. As Mary Rourke charges headlong through the egos, distractions, and traps that threaten to take her down with the doomed production, she discovers a truth far more sinister than she—or we—could have imagined.]]> 368 Craig Russell 0385549016 Heather 0 3.79 2023
author: Craig Russell
name: Heather
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/09/10
date added: 2023/09/10
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]]> 41150487
As President Claremont kicks off her reelection bid, Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret relationship with Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations. What is worth the sacrifice? How do you do all the good you can do? And, most importantly, how will history remember you?]]> 448 Casey McQuiston 1250316774 Heather 0 currently-reading 4.06 2019
author: Casey McQuiston
name: Heather
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/28
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 62039227 At Camp Mirror Lake, terror is the name of the game . . . but can you survive the night?

This heart-pounding slasher by New York Times bestselling author Kalynn Bayron is perfect for fans of Fear Street.

Charity Curtis has the summer job of her dreams, playing the “final girl� at Camp Mirror Lake. Guests pay to be scared in this full-contact terror game, as Charity and her summer crew recreate scenes from a classic slasher film, Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. The more realistic the fear, the better for business.

But the last weekend of the season, Charity's co-workers begin disappearing. And when one ends up dead, Charity's role as the final girl suddenly becomes all too real. If Charity and her girlfriend Bezi hope to survive the night, they'll need figure out what this killer is after. Is there is more to the story of Mirror Lake and its dangerous past than Charity ever suspected?]]> 230 Kalynn Bayron 1547611545 Heather 0 3.56 2023
author: Kalynn Bayron
name: Heather
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/26
date added: 2023/08/26
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]]> 63249718 New York Times bestselling author of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau and Mexican Gothic comes a fabulous meld of Mexican horror movies and Nazi occultism: a dark thriller about the curse that haunts a legendary lost film--and awakens one woman's hidden powers.

Montserrat has always been overlooked. She’s a talented sound editor, but she’s left out of the boys� club running the film industry in �90s Mexico City. And she’s all but invisible to her best friend, Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, though she’s been in love with him since childhood.

Then Tristán discovers his new neighbor is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, and the legendary auteur claims he can change their lives—even if his tale of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into highly volatile silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. The magic film was never finished, which is why, Urueta swears, his career vanished overnight. He is cursed.

Now the director wants Montserrat and Tristán to help him shoot the missing scene and lift the curse . . . but Montserrat soon notices a dark presence following her, and Tristán begins seeing the ghost of his ex-girlfriend.

As they work together to unravel the mystery of the film and the obscure occultist who once roamed their city, Montserrat and Tristán may find that sorcerers and magic are not only the stuff of movies.]]> 323 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 0593355369 Heather 0 3.56 2023
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: Heather
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/18
date added: 2023/08/18
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]]> 7841666
One night, Clara finds herself driven to commit a shocking—and disturbingly satisfying—act of violence, and her parents are forced to explain their history of shadows and lies. A police investigation is launched that uncovers a richness of vampire history heretofore unknown to the general public. And when the malevolent and alluring Uncle Will, a practicing vampire, arrives to throw the police off Clara’s trail, he winds up throwing the whole house into temptation and turmoil and unleashing a host of dark secrets that threaten the Radleys� marriage.

The Radleys is a moving, thrilling, and radiant domestic novel that explores with daring the lengths a parent will go to protect a child, what it costs you to deny your identity, the undeniable appeal of sin, and the everlasting, iridescent bonds of family love. Read it and ask what we grow into when we grow up, and what we gain—and lose—when we deny our appetites.]]> 366 Matt Haig 1439194017 Heather 0 3.52 2010
author: Matt Haig
name: Heather
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/05
date added: 2023/08/05
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]]> 8008928
When they refuse to back down, the cartel escalates its threat, kidnapping Ophelia, the boys' playmate and confidante. O's abduction sets off a dizzying array of ingenious negotiations and gripping plot twists that will captivate readers eager to learn the costs of freedom and the price of one amazing high.]]> 302 Don Winslow 1439183368 Heather 0 to-read 3.84 2010
author: Don Winslow
name: Heather
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62703226 At seventeen, Lenora Hope
Hung her sister with a rope

Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, the Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope’s End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred.

Stabbed her father with a knife
Took her mother’s happy life

It’s now 1983, and home-health aide Kit McDeere arrives at a decaying Hope’s End to care for Lenora after her previous nurse fled in the middle of the night. In her seventies and confined to a wheelchair, Lenora was rendered mute by a series of strokes and can only communicate with Kit by tapping out sentences on an old typewriter. One night, Lenora uses it to make a tantalizing offer�I want to tell you everything.

“It wasn’t me,� Lenora said
But she’s the only one not dead

As Kit helps Lenora write about the events leading to the Hope family massacre, it becomes clear there’s more to the tale than people know. But when new details about her predecessor’s departure come to light, Kit starts to suspect Lenora might not be telling the complete truth—and that the seemingly harmless woman in her care could be far more dangerous than she first thought.]]> 383 Riley Sager 0593183223 Heather 0 4.12 2023
author: Riley Sager
name: Heather
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/20
date added: 2023/07/20
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]]> 50576230
Judith Potts is seventy-seven years old and blissfully happy. She lives on her own in a faded mansion just outside Marlow, there’s no man in her life to tell her what to do or how much whisky to drink, and to keep herself busy she sets crosswords for The Times newspaper.

One evening, while out swimming in the Thames, Judith witnesses a brutal murder. The local police don’t believe her story, so she decides to investigate for herself, and is soon joined in her quest by Suzie, a salt-of-the-earth dog-walker, and Becks, the prim and proper wife of the local Vicar.

Together, they are the Marlow Murder Club.

When another body turns up, they realise they have a real-life serial killer on their hands. And the puzzle they set out to solve has become a trap from which they might never escape…]]> 340 Robert Thorogood 0008238243 Heather 0 3.73 2021
author: Robert Thorogood
name: Heather
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/13
date added: 2023/07/13
shelves:
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]]> 59109077 A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history

Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack.

New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.

Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse--one studying the stallion's bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.

Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.]]> 401 Geraldine Brooks 0399562966 Heather 0 4.17 2022
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Heather
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/06
date added: 2023/07/06
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]]> 61714633 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.]]> 331 David Grann 0385534264 Heather 0 4.14 2023
author: David Grann
name: Heather
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/27
date added: 2023/06/27
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]]> 22551730
On May 1, 1915, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were anxious. Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone, and for months, its U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era's great transatlantic "Greyhounds" and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack. He knew, moreover, that his ship - the fastest then in service - could outrun any threat.

Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger's U-boat, but told no one. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small - hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and more--all converged to produce one of the great disasters of history.

It is a story that many of us think we know but don't, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour, mystery, and real-life suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope Riddle to President Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love. Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster that helped place America on the road to war.]]> 430 Erik Larson 0307408868 Heather 0 to-read 4.10 2015
author: Erik Larson
name: Heather
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2015
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]]> 55196813
Since Gran died a few months ago, twenty-five-year-old Molly has been navigating life's complexities all by herself. No matter—she throws herself with gusto into her work as a hotel maid. Her unique character, along with her obsessive love of cleaning and proper etiquette, make her an ideal fit for the job. She delights in donning her crisp uniform each morning, stocking her cart with miniature soaps and bottles, and returning guest rooms at the Regency Grand Hotel to a state of perfection.

But Molly's orderly life is upended the day she enters the suite of the infamous and wealthy Charles Black, only to find it in a state of disarray and Mr. Black himself dead in his bed. Before she knows what's happening, Molly's unusual demeanor has the police targeting her as their lead suspect. She quickly finds herself caught in a web of deception, one she has no idea how to untangle. Fortunately for Molly, friends she never knew she had unite with her in a search for clues to what really happened to Mr. Black—but will they be able to find the real killer before it's too late?

A Clue-like, locked-room mystery and a heartwarming journey of the spirit, The Maid explores what it means to be the same as everyone else and yet entirely different—and reveals that all mysteries can be solved through connection to the human heart.]]> 304 Nita Prose 0593356152 Heather 0 3.71 2022
author: Nita Prose
name: Heather
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/14
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]]> 60784372 480 Jacqueline Holland 1250856760 Heather 0 3.77 2023
author: Jacqueline Holland
name: Heather
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/03
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]]> 60417483 Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a shattering novel about a young woman caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion.

Amid daily reports of violence, Cushla lives a quiet life with her mother in a small town near Belfast. By day she teaches at a parochial school; at night she fills in at her family's pub. There she meets Michael Agnew, a barrister who's made a name for himself defending IRA members. Against her better judgment - Michael is not only Protestant but older, and married - Cushla lets herself get drawn in by him and his sophisticated world, and an affair ignites. Then the father of a student is savagely beaten, setting in motion a chain reaction that will threaten everything, and everyone, Cushla most wants to protect.

As tender as it is unflinching, Trespasses is a heart-pounding, heart-rending drama of thwarted love and irreconcilable loyalties, in a place what you come from seems to count more than what you do, or whom you cherish. ]]> 304 Louise Kennedy 0593540891 Heather 0 3.92 2022
author: Louise Kennedy
name: Heather
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/05/11
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]]> 59900070 New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them.

But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.]]> 208 Hua Hsu 0385547773 Heather 0 4.01 2022
author: Hua Hsu
name: Heather
average rating: 4.01
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]]> 58957615
Then a new foe pays Elizabeth a visit. Her mission? Kill or be killed. Suddenly the cold case has become red hot.

While Elizabeth wrestles with her conscience (and a gun), Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim chase down the clues with help from old friends and new. But can the gang solve the mystery and save Elizabeth before the murderer strikes again?

From an upmarket spa to a prison cell complete with espresso machine to a luxury penthouse high in the sky, this third adventure of the Thursday Murder Club is full of the cleverness, intrigue, and irresistible charm that readers have come to expect from Richard Osman's bestselling series.]]> 413 Richard Osman 0241512425 Heather 0 4.32 2022
author: Richard Osman
name: Heather
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/03/30
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]]> 61272707 A true story about the ways loss can transform us into the people we want to become.
“What Looks Like Bravery is a gorgeous, tender, and beautiful book. I'm in tears with the happy-sad truth and beauty of it. Laurel is a magnificent writer.� —Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of Wild
Laurel Braitman spent her childhood learning from her dad how to out-fish grown men, keep bees, and fix carburetors. Diagnosed young with terminal cancer, he raced against the clock to leave her the skills she’d need to survive without him. This was one legacy. Another was relentless perfectionism and the belief that bravery meant never acknowledging your own fear.
By her mid-thirties Laurel is a ship about to splinter on the rocks, having learned the hard way that no achievement can protect her from pain or remove the guilt and regret her dad’s death leaves her with. So, she determines to explore her troubled internal wilderness by way of some big exterior ones—Northern New Mexico, Western Alaska, her Tinder App. She finds help from a wise birder in the Bering Sea, a few dozen grieving kids, and a succession of smart teachers who convince her that you cannot be brave if you’re not scared. Along the way, she faces a wildfire that threatens everyone and everything she cares about and is forced by life to say another wrenching goodbye long before she wants to. This time she may not be ready, but she’s prepared. Joy in the wake of loss, she learns, isn’t possible despite the hardest things that happen to us, but because of the meaning we forge from them.]]> 288 Laurel Braitman 1501158503 Heather 0 to-read 4.40
author: Laurel Braitman
name: Heather
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]]> 59575939 A grand tour through the hidden realms of animal senses that will transform the way you perceive the world --from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of I Contain Multitudes.

The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension--the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.

We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth's magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and humans that wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile's scaly face is as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries which lie unsolved.

In An Immense World, author and acclaimed science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. Because in order to understand our world we don't need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.]]> 464 Ed Yong Heather 0 to-read 4.46 2022
author: Ed Yong
name: Heather
average rating: 4.46
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]]> 61089492
Benjamin Honey- American, Bantu, Igbo- born enslaved- freed or fled at fifteen- aspiring orchardist, arrived on the island with his Irish wife, Patience, and discovered they could make a life together there. More than a century later, the Honeys' descendants remain, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours. Then comes the intrusion of 'civilization': officials determine to 'cleanse' the island, and a missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities' institutions or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah's Ark.

Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding's This Other Eden explores the hopes and dreams and resilience of those seen not to fit a world brutally intolerant of difference.]]> 224 Paul Harding 132403629X Heather 0 to-read 3.73 2023
author: Paul Harding
name: Heather
average rating: 3.73
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]]> 58210933 An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly boundless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz's TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.]]> 402 Hernan Diaz 0593420314 Heather 0 to-read 3.77 2022
author: Hernan Diaz
name: Heather
average rating: 3.77
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]]> 60021216 In theĚýfollow-up to the best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning Less, the awkward and lovable Arthur Less returns in an unforgettable road trip across America.

“Go get lost somewhere, it always does you good.�

For Arthur Less, life is going surprisingly well: he is a moderately accomplished novelist in a steady relationship with his partner, Freddy Pelu. But nothing lasts: the death of an old lover and a sudden financial crisis has Less running away from his problems yet again as he accepts a series of literary gigs that send him on a zigzagging adventure across the US.

Less roves across the “Mild Mild West,”ĚýthroughĚýthe South and to his mid-Atlantic birthplace, with an ever-changing posse of writerly characters and his trusty duo â€� a human-like black pug, Dolly, and a rusty camper van nicknamed Rosina. He grows a handlebar mustache, ditches his signature gray suit, and disguises himself in the bolero-and-cowboy-hatĚýcostume of a true “Unitedstatesianâ€�... with varying levels of success, as he continues to be mistaken for either a Dutchman, the wrong writer, or, worst of all, a “bad gay.â€�

We cannot, however, escape ourselves—even across deserts,Ěýbayous,Ěýand coastlines.ĚýFrom his estranged father and strained relationship with Freddy, to the reckoning he experiences in confronting his privilege, Arthur Less must eventually face his personal demons. With all of the irrepressible wit and musicality that made Less a bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning, must-read breakout book,ĚýLess IsĚýLostĚýis a profound and joyous novel about the enigma of life in America, the riddle of love, and the stories we tell along the way.]]> 272 Andrew Sean Greer 0316498904 Heather 0 3.64 2022
author: Andrew Sean Greer
name: Heather
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2022
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]]> 44280984 Whoever looked at an elderly lady and saw the young heroine she once was?

England, 1840. For the two decades following the death of her beloved sister, Jane, Cassandra Austen has lived alone, spending her days visiting friends and relations and quietly, purposefully working to preserve her sister’s reputation. Now in her sixties and increasingly frail, Cassandra goes to stay with the Fowles of Kintbury, family of her long-dead fiancé, in search of a trove of Jane’s letters. Dodging her hostess and a meddlesome housemaid, Cassandra eventually hunts down the letters and confronts the secrets they hold, secrets not only about Jane but about Cassandra herself. Will Cassandra bare the most private details of her life to the world, or commit her sister’s legacy to the flames?

Moving back and forth between the vicarage and Cassandra’s vibrant memories of her years with Jane, interwoven with Jane’s brilliantly reimagined lost letters, Miss Austen is the untold story of the most important person in Jane’s life. With extraordinary empathy, emotional complexity, and wit, Gill Hornby finally gives Cassandra her due, bringing to life a woman as captivating as any Austen heroine.]]> 288 Gill Hornby 1250252202 Heather 0 3.71 2020
author: Gill Hornby
name: Heather
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> 55457493
Elizabeth has received a letter from an old colleague, a man with whom she has a long history. He's made a big mistake, and he needs her help. His story involves stolen diamonds, a violent mobster, and a very real threat to his life.

As bodies start piling up, Elizabeth enlists Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron in the hunt for a ruthless murderer. And if they find the diamonds too? Well, wouldn't that be a bonus?

But this time they are up against an enemy who wouldn't bat an eyelid at knocking off four septuagenarians. Can The Thursday Murder Club find the killer (and the diamonds) before the killer finds them?]]> 422 Richard Osman Heather 0 4.36 2021
author: Richard Osman
name: Heather
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> 56769525 Angela’s Ashes, Fintan O’Toole, one of the Anglophone world’s most consummate stylists, continues the narrative of modern Ireland into our own time. O’Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government—in despair, because all the young people were leaving—opened the country to foreign investment. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity.


Weaving his own experiences into this account of Irish social, cultural, and economic change, O’Toole shows how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a Catholic “backwater� to an almost totally open society. A sympathetic-yet-exacting observer, O’Toole shrewdly weighs more than sixty years of globalization, delving into the violence of the Troubles and depicting, in biting detail, the astonishing collapse of the once-supreme Irish Catholic Church. The result is a stunning work of memoir and national history that reveals how the two modes are inextricable for all of us.]]> 616 Fintan O'Toole 1631496530 Heather 0 to-read 4.31 2021
author: Fintan O'Toole
name: Heather
average rating: 4.31
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]]> 46000520
But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.

Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it's too late?

Alternate cover edition can be found here .]]> 382 Richard Osman Heather 0 3.87 2020
author: Richard Osman
name: Heather
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> 57007380 Featuring his famous literary detective Atticus Pund and Susan Ryeland, hero of the worldwide bestseller Magpie Murders, a brilliantly complex literary thriller with echoes of Agatha Christie from New York Times bestselling author Anthony Horowitz.

Retired publisher Susan Ryeland is living the good life. She is running a small hotel on a Greek island with her long-term boyfriend Andreas. It should be everything she's always wanted. But is it? She's exhausted with the responsibilities of making everything work on an island where nothing ever does, and truth be told she's beginning to miss London.

And then the Trehearnes come to stay. The strange and mysterious story they tell, about an unfortunate murder that took place on the same day and in the same hotel in which their daughter was married—a picturesque inn on the Suffolk coast named Farlingaye Halle—fascinates Susan and piques her editor’s instincts.Ěý

One of her former writers, the late Alan Conway, author of the fictional Magpie Murders, knew the murder victim—an advertising executive named Frank Parris—and once visited Farlingaye Hall. Conway based the third book in his detective series, Atticus Pund Takes the Case, on that very crime.Ěý

The Trehearne’s, daughter, Cecily, read Conway’s mystery and believed the book proves that the man convicted of Parris’s murder—a Romanian immigrant who was the hotel’s handyman—is innocent. When the Trehearnes reveal that Cecily is now missing, Susan knows that she must return to England and find out what really happened.

Brilliantly clever, relentlessly suspenseful, full of twists that will keep readers guessing with each revelation and clue, Moonflower Murders is a deviously dark take on vintage English crime fiction from one of its greatest masterminds, Anthony Horowitz.ĚýĚý]]> 608 Anthony Horowitz 0062955462 Heather 0 4.02 2020
author: Anthony Horowitz
name: Heather
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2020
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]]> 16307
That night, Hercule Poirot is called in to find the 'evil presence.' But first he must establish whether he is looking for a murderer or a double-murderer!]]> 336 Agatha Christie 0007120680 Heather 0 3.56 1969
author: Agatha Christie
name: Heather
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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]]> 2459785
Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a 12-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox (his partner and closest friend) find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery. Now, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past.

A gorgeously written novel that marks the debut of an astonishing new voice in psychological suspense.]]> 448 Tana French Heather 0 3.82 2007
author: Tana French
name: Heather
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 2022/10/23
date added: 2022/10/23
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]]> 32075854
When Susan receives Alan's latest manuscript, in which Atticus Pünd investigates a murder at Pye Hall, an English manor house, she has no reason to think it will be any different from the others. There will be dead bodies, a cast of intriguing suspects, and plenty of red herrings and clues. But the more Susan reads, the more she realizes that there's another story hidden in the pages of the manuscript—one of ambition, jealousy, and greed—and that soon it will lead to murder.

Masterful, clever, and ruthlessly suspenseful, Magpie Murders is a deviously dark take on vintage crime fiction.]]> 477 Anthony Horowitz 0062645226 Heather 0 3.93 2016
author: Anthony Horowitz
name: Heather
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> 11447921
A #1 New York Times bestseller, this “absolute masterpiece� (Richard Russo) is the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 and resurfaces fifty years later in Hollywood. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to the back lots of contemporary Hollywood, this is a dazzling, yet deeply human roller coaster of a novel.

The acclaimed author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet. Hailed by critics and loved by readers of literary and historical fiction, Beautiful Ruins is gloriously inventive and constantly surprising—a story of flawed yet fascinating people navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.]]> 337 Jess Walter 0061928127 Heather 0 3.67 2012
author: Jess Walter
name: Heather
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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]]> 41865
First, Edward was a vampire.

Second, there was a part of him - and I didn't know how dominant that part might be - that thirsted for my blood.

And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

Deeply seductive and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight is a love story with bite.]]> 498 Stephenie Meyer 0316015849 Heather 0 3.66 2005
author: Stephenie Meyer
name: Heather
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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]]> 107821
Louis Charles (“Lucy�) Lynch has spent all his sixty years in upstate Thomaston, New York, married to the same woman, Sarah, for forty of them, their son now a grown man. Like his late, beloved father, Lucy is an optimist, though he’s had plenty of reasons not to be—chief among them his mother, still indomitably alive. Yet it was her shrewdness, combined with that Lynch optimism, that had propelled them years ago to the right side of the tracks and created an “empire� of convenience stores about to be passed on to the next generation.

Lucy and Sarah are also preparing for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Italy, where his oldest friend, a renowned painter, has exiled himself far from anything they’d known in childhood. In fact, the exact nature of their friendship is one of the many mysteries Lucy hopes to untangle in the “history� he’s writing of his hometown and family. And with his story interspersed with that of Noonan, the native son who’d fled so long ago, the destinies building up around both of them (and Sarah, too) are relentless, constantly surprising, and utterly revealing.

Bridge of Sighs is classic Russo, coursing with small-town rhythms and the claims of family, yet it is brilliantly enlarged by an expatriate whose motivations and experiences—often contrary, sometimes not—prove every bit as mesmerizing as they resonate through these richly different lives. Here is a town, as well as a world, defined by magnificent and nearly devastating contradictions.]]> 528 Richard Russo 0375414959 Heather 0 3.79 2007
author: Richard Russo
name: Heather
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2007
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]]> 187020
Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it’s Janine, Miles� soon-to-be ex-wife, who’s taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps it’s the imperious Francine Whiting, who owns everything in town–and seems to believe that “everything� includes Miles himself. In Empire Falls Richard Russo delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace]]> 483 Richard Russo 0375726403 Heather 0 3.93 2001
author: Richard Russo
name: Heather
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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]]> 414298 391 Richard Russo 0375701907 Heather 0 4.01 1997
author: Richard Russo
name: Heather
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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]]> 659388
Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father's footsteps. With its sly and uproarious humor and a heart that embraces humanity's follies as well as its triumphs, Nobody's Fool is storytelling at its most generous.]]> 549 Richard Russo 0679753338 Heather 0 4.10 1993
author: Richard Russo
name: Heather
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1993
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]]> 6149 Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.]]> 325 Toni Morrison Heather 0 3.96 1987
author: Toni Morrison
name: Heather
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1987
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]]> 10920 Cold Mountain is a novel about a soldier’s perilous journey back to his beloved near the Civil War's end. At once a love story & a harrowing account of one man’s long walk home, Cold Mountain introduces a new talent in American literature.

Based on local history & family stories passed down by Frazier’s great-great-grandfather, Cold Mountain is the tale of a wounded Confederate soldier, Inman, who walks away from the ravages of the war & back home to his prewar sweetheart, Ada. His odyssey thru the devastated landscape of the soon-to-be-defeated South interweaves with Ada’s struggle to revive her father’s farm, with the help of an intrepid young drifter named Ruby. As their long-separated lives begin to converge at the close of the war, Inman & Ada confront the vastly transformed world they’ve been delivered.

Frazier reveals insight into human relations with the land & the dangers of solitude. He also shares with the great 19th century novelists a keen observation of a society undergoing change. Cold Mountain recreates a world gone by that speaks to our time.]]> 449 Charles Frazier 0802142842 Heather 0 3.89 1997
author: Charles Frazier
name: Heather
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1997
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]]> 33896 422 Charles Frazier 0375509321 Heather 0 3.70 2006
author: Charles Frazier
name: Heather
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2006
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]]> 30043 "A River Runs Through It" that he is "haunted by waters," so have readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century. Originally published in 1976, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories now celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, marked by this new edition that includes a foreword by Annie Proulx.

Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a young man he worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The two novellas and short story in this collection are based on his own experiences—the experiences of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty. The beauty he found was in reality, and so he leaves a careful record of what it was like to work in the woods when it was still a world of horse and hand and foot, without power saws, "cats," or four-wheel drives. Populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, and set in the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains of western Montana, the stories concern themselves with the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.]]> 217 Norman Maclean 0226500667 Heather 0 4.18 1976
author: Norman Maclean
name: Heather
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1976
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]]> 30044 "blowup" -- an explosive, 2,000-degree firestorm 300 feet deep and 200 feet tall -- a deadly explosion of flame and wind rarely encountered and little understood at the time.Ěý Only seconds ahead of the approaching firestorm, the foreman, R. Wagner Dodge, throws himself into the ashes of an "escape fire " - and survives as most of his confused men run, their last moments obscured by smoke. The parents of the dead cry murder, charging that the foreman's fire killed their boys.Ěý Exactly what happened in Mann Gulch that day has been obscured by years of grief and controversy. Now a master storyteller finally gives the Mann Gulch fire its due as tragedy.
ĚýĚýĚýĚý These first deaths among the Forest Service's elite firefighters prompted widespread examination of federal fire policy, of the field of fire science, and of the frailty of young men. For Maclean, who witnessed the fire from the ground in August of 1949,Ěý and even then he knew he would one day become a part of its story.Ěý It is a story of Montana, of the ways of wildfires, firefighters, and fire scientists, and especially of a crew, young and proud, who "hadn't learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy." This tale is also Maclean's own, the story of a writer obsessed by a strange and human horror, unable to let the truth die with these young men, searching for the last - and lasting - word. A canvas on which to tell many stories, including the story of his research into the story itself. And finally Nature's violence colliding with human fallibility.
ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean returned to the scene with two of the survivors and pursues the mysteries that Mann Gulch has kept hidden since 1949.Ěý From the words of witnesses, the evidence of history, and the research of fire scientists, Maclean at last assembles the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy; in his last work that consumed 14 years of his life, and earned a 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award.
ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý The excruciating detail of this book makes for a sobering reading experience. Maclean -- a former University of Chicago English professor and avid fisherman -- also wrote A River Runs Through It and Other Stories , which is set along the Missouri River, one gulch downstream from Mann Gulch.

ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý "A magnificent drama of writing, a tragedy that pays tribute to the dead and offers rescue to the living.... Maclean's search for the truth, which becomes an exploration of his own mortality, is more compelling even than his journey into the heart of the fire. His description of the conflagration terrifies, but it is his battle with words, his effort to turn the story of the 13 men into tragedy that makes this book a classic."Ěý
ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý —Ě� from New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, Best Books of 1992

The Men who Perished in the Mann Gulch Fire:
Robert J. Bennett�
Eldon E. Diettert�
James O. Harrison

William J. Heilman�
Phillip R. McVey�
David R. Navon�
Leonard L. Piper�
Stanley J. Reba�
Marvin L. Sherman�
Joseph B. Sylvia

Henry J. Thol, Jr.

Newton R. Thompson

Silas R. Thompson

Survivors of the Fire:
R. Wagner Dodge, foreman�
Walter B. Rumsey

Robert W. Sallee]]> 301 Norman Maclean 0226500624 Heather 0 4.03 1992
author: Norman Maclean
name: Heather
average rating: 4.03
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]]> 2657
Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, "To Kill A Mockingbird" takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.]]> 323 Harper Lee 0060935464 Heather 0 4.25 1960
author: Harper Lee
name: Heather
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1960
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]]> 136251
In this final, seventh installment of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling unveils in spectacular fashion the answers to the many questions that have been so eagerly awaited.]]> 759 J.K. Rowling Heather 0 4.61 2007
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Heather
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2007
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]]> 3 309 J.K. Rowling 0439554934 Heather 0 4.47 1997
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Heather
average rating: 4.47
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]]> 6 734 J.K. Rowling 0439139597 Heather 0 4.56 2000
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Heather
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2000
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]]> 5 435 J.K. Rowling 043965548X Heather 0 4.57 1999
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Heather
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1999
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]]> 2
Harry has had enough. He is beginning to think he must do something, anything, to change his situation, when the summer holidays come to an end in a very dramatic fashion. What Harry is about to discover in his new year at Hogwarts will turn his world upside down...]]> 912 J.K. Rowling Heather 0 4.50 2003
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Heather
average rating: 4.50
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]]> 15881
And strike it does. For in Harry’s second year at Hogwarts, fresh torments and horrors arise, including an outrageously stuck-up new professor and a spirit who haunts the girls� bathroom. But then the real trouble begins � someone is turning Hogwarts students to stone. Could it be Draco Malfoy, a more poisonous rival than ever? Could it possibly be Hagrid, whose mysterious past is finally told? Or could it be the one everyone at Hogwarts most suspects� Harry Potter himself!]]> 352 J.K. Rowling Heather 0 4.42 1998
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Heather
average rating: 4.42
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]]> 968 The da Vinci Code, The da Vinci Code, The da Vinci Code, and The da Vinci Code

While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. While working to solve the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci -- clues visible for all to see -- yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.

Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and learns the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion -- an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci, among others.

In a breathless race through Paris, London, and beyond, Langdon and Neveu match wits with a faceless powerbroker who seems to anticipate their every move. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle in time, the Priory's ancient secret -- and an explosive historical truth -- will be lost forever.

The Da Vinci Code heralds the arrival of a new breed of lightning-paced, intelligent thriller utterly unpredictable right up to its stunning conclusion.]]> 489 Dan Brown Heather 0 3.92 2003
author: Dan Brown
name: Heather
average rating: 3.92
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]]> 77203 371 Khaled Hosseini 159463193X Heather 0 4.34 2003
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: Heather
average rating: 4.34
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]]> 37435 The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.]]> 302 Sue Monk Kidd 0142001740 Heather 0 4.10 2001
author: Sue Monk Kidd
name: Heather
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2001
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]]> 1618 226 Mark Haddon 1400032717 Heather 0 3.89 2003
author: Mark Haddon
name: Heather
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2003
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]]> 370493
So begins a story of unforgettable perception, beautifully written and illustrated by the gifted and versatile Shel Silverstein.

Every day the boy would come to the tree to eat her apples, swing from her branches, or slide down her trunk...and the tree was happy. But as the boy grew older he began to want more from the tree, and the tree gave and gave and gave.

This is a tender story, touched with sadness, aglow with consolation. Shel Silverstein has created a moving parable for readers of all ages that offers an affecting interpretation of the gift of giving and a serene acceptance of another's capacity to love in return.]]> 64 Shel Silverstein 0060256656 Heather 0 4.38 1964
author: Shel Silverstein
name: Heather
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1964
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]]> 4214 460 Yann Martel 0770430074 Heather 0 3.94 2001
author: Yann Martel
name: Heather
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2001
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]]> 5176 304 Sue Miller 0345443284 Heather 0 3.69 1999
author: Sue Miller
name: Heather
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1999
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]]> 227941
With a fast-paced plot that never quits and a surprise ending no reader will see coming, Jemima J is the chronicle of one woman's quest to become the woman she's always wanted to be, learning along the way a host of lessons about attraction, addiction, the meaning of true love, and, ultimately, who she really is.]]> 373 Jane Green 0767905180 Heather 0 3.69 1998
author: Jane Green
name: Heather
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1998
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]]> 31101
Mr. Maybe is the tale of her heartfelt but hilarious deliberation, irresistibly chronicled by bestselling author Jane Green. On one hand, Nick makes up for his low bank-account balance by his performance in the sack, or in the bathtub, as the case may be. But life with him means little more than nightly trips to the bar, a dark and grungy apartment, and plenty of dull political tirades to boot. But those blue eyes, and that tender heart...

On the other hand, there's Ed, whose luxurious house and gargantuan bank account are quite tempting to the starving Libby. But his unsavory mustache and bumbling ways make Libby wonder if the platinum AMEX and unlimited "retail therapy" are worth it. He may have fallen in love with her at first sight, but nothing seems to solve his lackluster performance in the sack � even speed reading The Joy of Sex. When the diamond shopping commences, Libby is forced to realize that the time for "maybe" is up.

Taking romantic comedy to a hip, sparkling new level, Mr. Maybe is a classic tale of what happens to one girl when her heart and her head aren't looking for the same thing. With a laugh and minute and a heroine whose struggles in the dating jungle will remind you of your own, Mr. Maybe is a story that all will leave you smitten.]]> 368 Jane Green 0767905202 Heather 0 3.48 1999
author: Jane Green
name: Heather
average rating: 3.48
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]]> 960
A devastating new weapon of destruction.
When world-renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to a Swiss research facility to analyze a mysterious symbol -- seared into the chest of a murdered physicist -- he discovers evidence of the unimaginable: the resurgence of an ancient secret brotherhood known as the Illuminati...the most powerful underground organization ever to walk the earth. The Illuminati has now surfaced to carry out the final phase of its legendary vendetta against its most hated enemy -- the Catholic Church.

Langdon's worst fears are confirmed on the eve of the Vatican's holy conclave, when a messenger of the Illuminati announces they have hidden an unstoppable time bomb at the very heart of Vatican City. With the countdown under way, Langdon jets to Rome to join forces with Vittoria Vetra, a beautiful and mysterious Italian scientist, to assist the Vatican in a desperate bid for survival.
Embarking on a frantic hunt through sealed crypts, dangerous catacombs, deserted cathedrals, and even the most secretive vault on earth, Langdon and Vetra follow a 400-year-old trail of ancient symbols that snakes across Rome toward the long-forgotten Illuminati lair...a clandestine location that contains the only hope for Vatican salvation.

An explosive international thriller, Angels & Demons careens from enlightening epiphanies to dark truths as the battle between science and religion turns to war.]]> 736 Dan Brown 1416524797 Heather 0 3.95 2000
author: Dan Brown
name: Heather
average rating: 3.95
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]]> 5360 Thus begins the new novel from John Grisham, a story inspired by his own childhood in rural Arkansas. The narrator is a farm boy named Luke Chandler, age seven, who lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that's never been painted. The Chandlers farm eighty acres that they rent, not own, and when the cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it.

For six weeks they pick cotton, battling the heat, the rain, the fatigue, and sometimes each other. As the weeks pass Luke sees and hears things no seven-year-old could possibly be prepared for, and he finds himself keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives of the Chandlers forever.

©2000, 2001 Belfry Holdings, Inc. (P)2001 Random House, Inc. Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing, a Division of Random House, Inc.]]> 384 John Grisham 0385337930 Heather 0 3.74 2001
author: John Grisham
name: Heather
average rating: 3.74
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]]> 325148
In 1911 two wealthy British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, arrived at a sanitorium in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to undergo the revolutionary “fasting treatment� of Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard. It was supposed to be a holiday for the two sisters, but within a month of arriving at what the locals called Starvation Heights, the women underwent brutal treatments and were emaciated shadows of their former selves.

Claire and Dora were not the first victims of Linda Hazzard, a quack doctor of extraordinary evil and greed. But as their jewelry disappeared and forged bank drafts began transferring their wealth to Hazzard’s accounts, the sisters came to learn that Hazzard would stop at nothing short of murder to achieve her ambitions.]]> 436 Gregg Olsen 1400097460 Heather 0 3.62 1997
author: Gregg Olsen
name: Heather
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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]]>