en-US Thu, 10 Apr 2025 09:56:21 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 9844 Prep, is an insightful, achingly funny coming-of-age story as well as a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition.

Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding school’s glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel.

As Lee soon learns, Ault is a cloistered world of jaded, attractive teenagers who spend summers on Nantucket and speak in their own clever shorthand. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, Lee becomes a shrewd observer of–and, ultimately, a participant in–their rituals and mores. As a scholarship student, she constantly feels like an outsider and is both drawn to and repelled by other loners. By the time she’s a senior, Lee has created a hard-won place for herself at Ault. But when her behavior takes a self-destructive and highly public turn, her carefully crafted identity within the community is shattered.

Ultimately, Lee’s experiences–complicated relationships with teachers; intense friendships with other girls; an all-consuming preoccupation with a classmate who is less than a boyfriend and more than a crush; conflicts with her parents, from whom Lee feels increasingly distant, coalesce into a singular portrait of the painful and thrilling adolescence universal to us all.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 420 Curtis Sittenfeld 081297235X Cecilia 0 to-read 3.44 2005
author: Curtis Sittenfeld
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2005
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]]> 213870083 A funny, fiercely intelligent, and moving collection exploring marriage, friendship, fame, and artistic ambition—including a story that revisits the main character from Curtis Sittenfeld’s iconic novel Prep—from the New York Times bestselling author of Eligible and Romantic Comedy

In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their long held beliefs are overturned.

In “The Patron Saints of Middle Age,�� a woman visits two friends she hasn’t seen since her divorce. In “A for Alone,�� a married artist embarks on a creative project intended to disprove the so-called Mike Pence Rule, which suggests that women and men can’t spend time alone together without lusting after each other. And in “Lost but Not Forgotten,�� Sittenfeld gives readers of her novel Prep a window into the world of her beloved character Lee Fiora, decades later, when Lee attends an alumni reunion at her boarding school.

Hilarious, thought-provoking, and full of tenderness for her characters, Sittenfeld’s stories peel back layer after layer of our inner lives, keeping us riveted to the page with her utterly distinctive voice.]]> 320 Curtis Sittenfeld 0593446739 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.95 2025
author: Curtis Sittenfeld
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 211025439
“In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.��

Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse.

Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm.

Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era—with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age’s excesses—and who seem to care little about what their children are up to—Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life.]]> 528 Adam Ross 0385351291 Cecilia 0 currently-reading 3.80 2025
author: Adam Ross
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/22
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]]> 208479496
CONTAINS “COMORBIDITIES,�� WINNER OF THE BBC SHORT STORY PRIZE

In my life, I had always been a good woman; controlling what it was that I wanted. But recently, I had started to notice my bad energy, and I began to follow it, wondering where it would take me . . .

A woman has an unexpected outburst at a corporate therapy session for working mothers. A couple find some long-overdue time to rekindle their relationship and make an ill-advised home movie. A pregnant film director plots revenge on the actress who betrayed her. An ex-wife deliberately causes conflict at her ex-husband’s wedding.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things��illuminates the lives of malicious, subversive, and untamed women. Exploring failed sisterhood, dubious parenting, and the dark side of modern love, this powerful and funny collection exposes how society wants women to behave, and shows what happens when they refuse.]]> 255 Naomi Wood 0063399741 Cecilia 2 2.82 2024
author: Naomi Wood
name: Cecilia
average rating: 2.82
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/22
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]]> 53565978
An enchanting collection containing the first three novels in New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn’s beloved Bridgerton series set in Regency England��The Duke and I, The Viscount Who Loved Me, and An Offer from a Gentleman—now a series created by Shondaland for Netflix


The Duke and I
When Daphne Bridgerton and Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings, agree to a fake courtship, they think they’ve found the perfect solution to their problems. Romantically associated with one of London’s most desirable catches, Daphne’s prospects among the ton will soar. For avowed bachelor Simon, an attachment to Daphne will deter would-be brides and their ambitious mamas. Their plan works like a charm—at first. But amid the glittering, gossipy, cut-throat world of London’s elite, there is only one certainty: love ignores every rule. . .

The Viscount Who Loved Me
London's most elusive bachelor, Anthony Bridgerton is determined to wed. But one obstacle stands in his way—his intended's older sister, Kate Sheffield, who is driving Anthony mad with her determination to stop the betrothal. Kate is quite sure that reformed rakes do not make the best husbands, and Anthony Bridgerton is the most wicked rogue of them all. She’s determined to protect her sister—even as she fears she may not be able to resist the reprehensible and oh so desirable rake herself . . .


An Offer from a Gentleman
Sophie Beckett never dreamed she'd be able to sneak into Lady Bridgerton's famed masquerade ball—or that she would be spinning in the arms of her "Prince Charming"—the debonair and devastatingly handsome Benedict Bridgerton. But when the clock strikes midnight, Sophie’s enchanting evening ends. Since that night Benedict has been able to think of nothing but the bewitching young woman, and he’s sworn to find and wed his mystery miss. Yet will another unexpectedly steal his heart—and his chance for a fairy tale love?]]> 1053 Julia Quinn 0063045117 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.29 2000
author: Julia Quinn
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 320 417 Gabriel García Márquez Cecilia 0 currently-reading 4.10 1967
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/07
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 5759 218 Chuck Palahniuk 0393327345 Cecilia 3 4.19 1996
author: Chuck Palahniuk
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/07
date added: 2025/03/07
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]]> 199796715
Margo braucht Geld. Seit sie ungewollt von ihrem Collegeprofessor, der sie jetzt mit dem Kind alleinlässt, schwanger wurde, mehr denn je. Wie Margo es auch dreht und wendet, kein Job scheint passend zu sein, oder könnte auch nur ansatzweise ihr Leben mit einem Baby finanzieren. Durch einen Zufall wird sie auf die Plattform OnlyFans aufmerksam, und Margo ist fasziniert von dieser Welt, in der Frauen mit sich und ihrem Körper experimentieren, und offenbar gut dabei verdienen. Also beginnt auch sie, Inhalte zu produzieren. Dabei erhält sie Unterstützung von ihrer Mitbewohnerin Suzie, einem großen Cosplay-Fan, und auch von ihrem Vater Jinx, einem Ex-Wrestlingprofi. Ehe sie sich versieht, ist Margo ein Online-Phänomen. Könnte dies die Antwort auf all ihre Probleme sein, oder hat der Internet-Ruhm einen zu hohen Preis?]]> 368 Rufi Thorpe 0063356600 Cecilia 0 currently-reading 3.93 2024
author: Rufi Thorpe
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/07
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]]> 301304 367 Pramoedya Ananta Toer 0140256350 Cecilia 0 4.14 1980
author: Pramoedya Ananta Toer
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/06
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]]> 29397486
Behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel, one hundred and eighteen cardinals from all over the globe will cast their votes in the world’s most secretive election.

They are holy men. But they have ambition. And they have rivals.

Over the next seventy-two hours one of them will become the most powerful spiritual figure on earth.]]> 288 Robert Harris Cecilia 0 to-read 4.01 2016
author: Robert Harris
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/02
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]]> 211399769
Except, underneath the surface, not much has changed at all. He's still the boy seeking his father's approval; the young man playing late-night poker with his best friend, unreliable, infuriating Ben Mossam; the one still desperately in love with the enigmatic Lia.

Lia's life, on the other hand, has been transformed: now a single mum to two-year-old Joel, she doesn't have time for anyone - not even herself.

When the unthinkable happens, Joel finds himself at the centre of a strange constellation of men - Téo, Vic, Ben - none of whom is fully equipped to look after him, but whose strange, tentative attempts at love might just be enough to offer him a new place to call home.]]> 304 Tom Lamont 0593803248 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.77 2024
author: Tom Lamont
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/01
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]]> 211399748 An expansive and revelatory exploration of the multicultural, water-seeking, land-destroying settlers of Great Basin and Colorado Plateau throughout history, arguing that in order to know where America is going in the time of mass migration and climate change we must understand where the Southwest has beenAlbuquerque. Phoenix. El Paso. Las Vegas. Iconic American cities surrounded by desert and rust. Teeming metropolises that seem to exist independently of the seemingly inhospitable and arid landscape that surrounds them, belying the rich insight they offer into American stories of migration, industry, bloodshed, and rebirth.Charting a geographic path along the Great Basin and the Sonoran and Moajave deserts, acclaimed journalist Kyle Paoletta maps the past and future of these cities, and the many other settlements from rural town to urban sprawl that make up the region that has come to be called "the American Southwest." Weaving together the stories of immigrants and indigenous populations, American Oasis pulls back the layers of settlement, sediment, habit, and effect that successive empires have left on the region, from the Anasazi, Athapascan, Diné, Tewa, Apache, and Comanche, to the Spanish, Mexican, and, finally, American.As Paoletta's journey into the Southwest's history becomes inextricably linked to an exploration of its dependency on water, he begins to where, ultimately, will cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix find themselves once the Colorado River and its branches dry up? Richly reported and sweeping in its history, American Oasis is the story of what one iconic region's past can tell us about our shared environmental and culture future.]]> 352 Kyle Paoletta 0553387375 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.65 2025
author: Kyle Paoletta
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 214269394
Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice?

Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.]]> 277 Holly Brickley 0593799089 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.80 2025
author: Holly Brickley
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/21
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]]> 174147294
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother, Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals that he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family.

Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage—a masterful follow-up to his already-classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.]]> 315 Tommy Orange 0593318250 Cecilia 0 currently-reading 3.83 2024
author: Tommy Orange
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 6101138 This is an alternative cover edition for ISBN 9780007230181

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?]]> 653 Hilary Mantel Cecilia 0 to-read 3.90 2009
author: Hilary Mantel
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/21
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]]> 3711 White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.]]> 448 Zadie Smith 0375703861 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.80 2000
author: Zadie Smith
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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]]> 198902277 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250899576.

A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]> 384 Alison Espach Cecilia 0 to-read 4.11 2024
author: Alison Espach
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/20
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]]> 20576437

From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 370 Wallace Stegner Cecilia 3 4.24 1987
author: Wallace Stegner
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1987
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/19
date added: 2025/02/20
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]]> 213395540 A brilliant and gut-wrenching novel about a father and son from a “generous and lyric storyteller�� (San Francisco Chronicle).

Known for his tragicomic voice and unforgettable characters, John Dufresne tells the story of Olney, whose beloved son, Cully, collapses into addiction and vanishes into the chaotic netherworld of southern Florida. Aided by his terminally ill girlfriend and the colorful inhabitants of a local motel—including a doomsday prepper, an ex-nun, a pair of blind twins with an acute sense of smell, and a devoutly Catholic shelter worker—Olney sets out to save his son. Hilarious and devastating in equal measure, My Darling Boy is a hero’s quest for our time, a testament to families touched by the opioid crisis, and a remarkable achievement from one of our most talented authors.]]> 288 John Dufresne 1324035730 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.40 2025
author: John Dufresne
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> 3679 On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars-on both sides of the Atlantic-serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.]]> 445 Zadie Smith 0143037749 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.79 2005
author: Zadie Smith
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/05
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]]> 215198466 In his most exhilarating novel yet, Britain’s greatest storyteller transports you from the vibrant streets of sixties London to the sun-soaked cobbles of Cadiz and the frosty squares of Warsaw, as an accidental spy is drawn into the shadows of espionage and obsession.

Gabriel Dax is a young man haunted by the memories of a every night, when sleep finally comes, he dreams about his childhood home in flames. His days are spent on the move as an acclaimed travel writer, capturing the changing landscapes in the grip of the Cold War. When he’s offered the chance to interview a political figure, his ambition leads him unwittingly into a web of duplicities and betrayals.

As Gabriel’s reluctant initiation takes hold, he is drawn deeper into the shadows. Falling under the spell of Faith Green, an enigmatic and ruthless MI6 handler, he becomes ‘her spy��, unable to resist her demands. But amid the peril, paranoia and passion consuming Gabriel’s new covert life, it will be the revelations closer to home that change the rest of his story.]]> 272 William Boyd 0802164870 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.88 2024
author: William Boyd
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> 209194395
Så säger Theodor Kallifatides i sin nya bok. Med sin fars efterlämnade livsberättelse i handen far han en tidig vårdag för att besöka sin mor i Athen. Det blir ett veckolångt möte där faderns historia varvas med samvaron med modern. Dråpliga, spännande och gripande scener från det förflutna och nuet griper in i varandra. Man skrattar och man gråter om vartannat. Familjens ursprung klarnar, hemligheter blottläggs, minnen förstärks och kärleken till en oförglömlig mor gestaltas på ett oförglömligt sätt. Men också moderns kärlek till maken och sönerna växer fram som en stor, stilla flod i hennes ådror.]]> 208 Theodor Kallifatides 1635423007 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.40 2007
author: Theodor Kallifatides
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> 29044 559 Donna Tartt 1400031702 Cecilia 3 4.17 1992
author: Donna Tartt
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1992
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/01/31
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]]> 4069 Man's Search for Meaning has become one of the most influential books in America; it continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living.]]> 165 Viktor E. Frankl 080701429X Cecilia 0 to-read 4.39 1946
author: Viktor E. Frankl
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1946
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> 41977
On their first day at University College, Dublin, the inseparable pair are thrown together with fellow students Nan Mahon, beautiful but selfish, and handsome Jack Foley. But trouble is brewing for Benny and Eve's new circle of friends, and before long, they find passion, tragedy - and the independence they yearned for.]]> 722 Maeve Binchy 0099498596 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.06 1980
author: Maeve Binchy
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/16
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]]> 6893663
David Pepin has been in love with his wife, Alice, since the moment they met in a university seminar on Alfred Hitchcock. After thirteen years of marriage, he still can’t imagine a remotely happy life without her—yet he obsessively contemplates her demise. Soon she is dead, and David is both deeply distraught and the prime suspect.

The detectives investigating Alice’s suspicious death have plenty of personal experience with conjugal enigmas: Ward Hastroll is happily married until his wife inexplicably becomes voluntarily and militantly bedridden; and Sam Sheppard is especially sensitive to the intricacies of marital guilt and innocence, having decades before been convicted and then exonerated of the brutal murder of his wife.

Still, these men are in the business of figuring things out, even as Pepin’s role in Alice’s death grows ever more confounding when they link him to a highly unusual hit man called Mobius. Like the Escher drawings that inspire the computer games David designs for a living, these complex, interlocking dramas are structurally and emotionally intense, subtle, and intriguing; they brilliantly explore the warring impulses of affection and hatred, and pose a host of arresting questions. Is it possible to know anyone fully, completely? Are murder and marriage two sides of the same coin, each endlessly recycling into the other? And what, in the end, is the truth about love?

Mesmerizing, exhilarating, and profoundly moving, Mr. Peanut is a police procedural of the soul, a poignant investigation of the relentlessly mysterious human heart—and a first novel of the highest order.]]> 335 Adam Ross 030727070X Cecilia 0 to-read 3.23 2010
author: Adam Ross
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/16
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]]> 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.35 2024
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61896550
If you think the English countryside is all green wellies, muddy Land Rovers, and grey-haired ladies in tweed, then you’ve never visited The Bottoms.

Welcome to the rose-strewn county of Oxfordshire, and the tony Cotswold villages of Little Bottom, Middle Bottom, Great Bottom, and Monkton Bottom, recently annexed by a glittering new breed of female: the Country Princess.

Following a ghastly row about a missing suite of diamonds, Tata Hawkins has flounced out of Monkton Bottom Manor with her daughter, Minty, and Executive Butler Ian Palmer in tow, decamping to The Old Coach House to teach her husband, Bryan, a lesson.

But things don’t go to plan. Bryan disappears to Venice with a bikini designer; Selby Fairfax, the glamorous American divorcée who has inherited the beautiful estate next door—Great Bottom Park—is refusing Tata’s overtures at friendship; Tata’s two best friends, Sophie Thompson and Fernanda Ovington-Williams, are distracted by their own problems; worst of all, Ian has nowhere to store his collection of vintage Gucci loafers.

Will Tata ever return to the comforts of the Manor? Will Sophie’s husband start appreciating her? Will Fernanda ever find a replacement Manny for her friendless son, Luca? Will Selby believe in love again? With the help of a pig farmer-ess moonlighting as a Personal Assistant, a male model moonlighting as a stable hand, a London barrister moonlighting as a gentleman farmer, and a hypochondriac American tech mogul lying in a hospital bed, is there any hope that Ian can restore harmony to The Bottoms?]]> 368 Plum Sykes 0062429086 Cecilia 2 3.43 2024
author: Plum Sykes
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/01/11
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]]> 203708995 400 Griffin Dunne 0593652827 Cecilia 3 4.01 2024
author: Griffin Dunne
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> 61176709
Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school. Robert Mallory, a new student, is bright, handsome, charismatic-- and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret's obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling pre-occupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them-- Bret in particular-- with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends-- or his own mind-- to make sense of the danger they appear to be in?

"A story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city"-- Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school. Robert Mallory, a new student, is bright, handsome, charismatic-- and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret's obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling pre-occupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them-- Bret in particular-- with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends-- or his own mind-- to make sense of the danger they appear to be in?

Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting and often darkly funny, The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret's life at 17: sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage.]]> Bret Easton Ellis Cecilia 4 3.99 2023
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/29
date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> 201826095 The story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart.

In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London. Hence, she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clémentine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood…Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, unaware that they once inhabited the same space. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we’ve known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who’ve lived in them and the stories that have been told there.]]> 388 Lauren Elkin 1529926459 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.71 2024
author: Lauren Elkin
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199798259
Sylvia Knight is losing hope that the person who killed her husband will ever face justice. Since the night of the hit-and-run, her world has been shrouded in hazy darkness—until she meets Theo St. John, the discoverer of a rare comet soon to be visible to the naked eye.

As the comet begins to brighten, Sylvia wonders what the apparition might signify. She is soon drawn into the orbit of local mystic Joseph Evans, who believes the comet’s arrival is nothing short of a divine message. Finding herself caught between two conflicting perspectives of this celestial phenomenon, she struggles to define for herself where the reality lies. As the comet grows in the sky, her town slowly descends further and further into a fervor over its impending apex, and Sylvia’s quest to uncover her husband’s killer will push her and those around her to the furthest reaches of their very lives.

A novel about the search for meaning in a bewildering world, the loyalty of love, and the dangerous lengths people go to in pursuit of obsession, Bright Objects is a luminous, masterfully crafted literary thriller.]]> 352 Ruby Todd 1668053217 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.46 2024
author: Ruby Todd
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199743736 352 Moa Herngren 0063352397 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.74 2022
author: Moa Herngren
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/05
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]]> 199798557 A READ WITH JENNA TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB PICK | A Most Anticipated Book from Today, Real Simple, Time, Los Angeles Times, and BookPage

“The book we all need to revive our souls�� (Nicole Dennis-Benn): A sweeping family saga about the complicated bond between mothers and daughters, the disappearance of a father, and the long-hidden history of a declining New England mill town.

“A powerful novel about how our family history shapes us, Swift River broke my heart, and then offered me hope.�� —Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful

It’s the summer of 1987 in Swift River, and Diamond Newberry is learning how to drive. Ever since her Pop disappeared seven years ago, she and her mother hitchhike everywhere. But that’s not the only reason Diamond stands out: She’s teased relentlessly about her weight, and the fact that since Pop’s been gone, she is the only Black person in all of Swift River. This summer, Ma is determined to declare Pop legally dead so they can collect his life insurance money, get their house back from the bank, and finally move on.

But when Diamond receives a letter from a relative she’s never met, key elements of Pop’s life are uncovered. She is introduced to two generations of African American Newberry women, spanning the 20th century and revealing a much larger picture of prejudice and abandonment, of love and devotion. As pieces of their shared past become clearer, Diamond gains a sense of her place in the world and in her family. But how will what she’s learned of the past change her future?]]> 304 Essie J. Chambers 1668027917 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.47 2024
author: Essie J. Chambers
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/05
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]]> 198123575 “Be prepared to fully lose yourself in The Winner—a book I started and then simply couldn’t stop reading. Teddy Wayne has written a timely, topical novel that still somehow feels like a classic.”—Liz Moore, New York Times bestselling author of Long Bright River

Conor O’Toole has never been anywhere as casually glamorous as Cutters Neck, a gated community near Cape Cod. It’s a sweet deal for the summer: free lodging in a guest cottage in exchange for tennis lessons, luxuriously far from the cramped Yonkers apartment he shares with his diabetic mother.

In this oceanfront paradise, however, new clients prove hard to come by, and Conor has bills to pay. Then a sharp-tongued divorcée appears, offering him double his usual rate. Soon he realizes Catherine is expecting additional, off-the-court services for her money, and Conor tumbles into a secret erotic affair unlike anything he’s experienced before.

Despite his steamy flings with a woman twice his age, he simultaneously finds himself falling for the artsy, outspoken girl he met on the beach. Conor somehow finds a way to manage this tangled web—until he makes one final, irreversible mistake.

A dark, explosive literary thriller that brilliantly skewers the elite, Whiting Award winner Teddy Wayne’s unputdownable novel is cinematic, shocking, and a psychological masterpiece.]]> 320 Teddy Wayne 0063353598 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.11 2024
author: Teddy Wayne
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/05
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]]> 5126859 New York Times bestselling author Sarah Addison Allen invites you to a quirky little Southern town with more magic than a full Carolina moon. Here two very different women discover how to find their place in the world--no matter how out of place they feel.

Emily Benedict came to Mullaby, North Carolina, hoping to solve at least some of the riddles surrounding her mother’s life. Such as, why did Dulcie Shelby leave her hometown so suddenly? And why did she vow never to return? But the moment Emily enters the house where her mother grew up and meets the grandfather she never knew--a reclusive, real-life gentle giant--she realizes that mysteries aren’t solved in Mullaby, they’re a way of life: Here are rooms where the wallpaper changes to suit your mood. Unexplained lights skip across the yard at midnight. And a neighbor bakes hope in the form of cakes.

Everyone in Mullaby adores Julia Winterson’s cakes--which is a good thing, because Julia can’t seem to stop baking them. She offers them to satisfy the town’s sweet tooth but also in the hope of rekindling the love she fears might be lost forever. Flour, eggs, milk, and sugar . . . Baking is the only language the proud but vulnerable Julia has to communicate what is truly in her heart. But is it enough to call back to her those she’s hurt in the past?��

Can a hummingbird cake really bring back a lost love? Is there really a ghost dancing in Emily’s backyard? The answers are never what you expect. But in this town of lovable misfits, the unexpected fits right in.]]> 288 Sarah Addison Allen 0553807218 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.97 2010
author: Sarah Addison Allen
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/26
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]]> 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Cecilia 4 3.88 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/13
date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> 50357459 Perfect for fans of Elizabeth Acevedo and Rupi Kaur, this heartrending story told in prose, poetry, and illustration weaves together the stories of a mother and daughter’s lives.

In this stunning sophomore novel, acclaimed writer Jasmin Kaur explores trauma, fear, courage, community, and the healing power of love in its many forms.

Kiran flees her home in Punjab for a fresh start in Canada after a sexual assault leaves her pregnant. But overstaying her visa and living undocumented brings its own perils for both her and her daughter, Sahaara.

Sahaara would do anything to protect her mother. When she learns the truth about Kiran’s past, she feels compelled to seek justice—even if it means challenging a powerful and dangerous man.

if i tell you the truth

that i’ve dug

from the hardened depths

of this shrapnel-filled dirt

with these aching, bloody hands

would you believe me?

would you still love me?]]> 464 Jasmin Kaur 0062912666 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.42 2021
author: Jasmin Kaur
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 56816904
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written]]> 387 Louise Erdrich 006267112X Cecilia 0 to-read 3.92 2021
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/03
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]]> 60769830 How Far the Light Reaches is a book that invites us to envision wilder, grander, and more abundant possibilities for the way we live.]]> 263 Sabrina Imbler 0316540536 Cecilia 3 4.10 2022
author: Sabrina Imbler
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/31
date added: 2024/10/31
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]]> 207294976 He was the troubled face of rock ‘n�� roll…until he suddenly disappeared without a trace.

Jane Pyre was once half of the famous rock ‘n�� roll duo, the Lightning Bottles. Years later, she’s perhaps the most hated—and least understood—woman in music. She was never as popular with fans as her bandmate (and soulmate), Elijah Hart—even if Jane was the one who wrote the songs that catapulted the Lightning Bottles to instant, dizzying fame, first in the Seattle grunge scene, then around the world.

But ever since Elijah disappeared five years earlier and the band’s meteoric rise to fame came crashing down, the public hatred of Jane has taken on new levels, and all she wants to do is retreat. What she doesn’t anticipate is the bombshell that awaits her at her new home in the German countryside: the sullen teenaged girl next door—a Lightning Bottles superfan—who claims to have proof that not only is Elijah alive, he’s also been leaving secret messages for Jane. And they need to find him right away.

A cross-continent road trip about two misunderstood outsiders brought together by their shared love of music, The Lightning Bottles is “both a page-turning mystery and a love letter to the grunge era�� (LitHub) that captures a searing portrait of the cost of fame.]]> 304 Marissa Stapley 1668015765 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.95 2024
author: Marissa Stapley
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/03
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]]> 32735369 Tell Me Lies is about that one person who still haunts you—the other one. The wrong one. The one you couldn’t let go of. The one you’ll never forget.

Lucy Albright is far from her Long Island upbringing when she arrives on the campus of her small California college, and happy to be hundreds of miles from her mother, whom she’s never forgiven for an act of betrayal in her early teen years. Quickly grasping at her fresh start, Lucy embraces college life and all it has to offer—new friends, wild parties, stimulating classes. And then she meets Stephen DeMarco. Charming. Attractive. Complicated. Devastating.

Confident and cocksure, Stephen sees something in Lucy that no one else has, and she’s quickly seduced by this vision of herself, and the sense of possibility that his attention brings her. Meanwhile, Stephen is determined to forget an incident buried in his past that, if exposed, could ruin him, and his single-minded drive for success extends to winning, and keeping, Lucy’s heart.

Alternating between Lucy’s and Stephen’s voices, Tell Me Lies follows their connection through college and post-college life in New York City. Deep down, Lucy knows she has to acknowledge the truth about Stephen. But before she can free herself from this addicting entanglement, she must confront and heal her relationship with her mother—or risk losing herself in a delusion about what it truly means to love.

With the psychological insight and biting wit of Luckiest Girl Alive, and the yearning ambitions and desires of Sweetbitter, this keenly intelligent and staggeringly resonant novel chronicles the exhilaration and dilemmas of young adulthood, and the difficulty of letting go, even when you know you should.]]> 352 Carola Lovering Cecilia 2 3.46 2018
author: Carola Lovering
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/01
date added: 2024/10/02
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]]> 6280118
So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that?

And every year that follows?
--back cover]]> 435 David Nicholls 0340896965 Cecilia 3 3.86 2009
author: David Nicholls
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/02
date added: 2024/10/02
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]]> 31932935 A backstage look at the making of Nora Ephron's revered trilogy--When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle--which brought romantic comedies back to the fore, and an intimate portrait of the beloved writer/director who inspired a generation of Hollywood women, from Mindy Kaling to Lena Dunham.

In I'll Have What She's Having entertainment journalist Erin Carlson tells the story of the real Nora Ephron and how she reinvented the romcom through her trio of instant classics. With a cast of famous faces including Rob Reiner, Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, and Billy Crystal, Carlson takes readers on a rollicking, revelatory trip to Ephron's New York City, where reality took a backseat to romance and Ephron--who always knew what she wanted and how she wanted it--ruled the set with an attention to detail that made her actors feel safe but sometimes exasperated crew members.

Along the way, Carlson examines how Ephron explored in the cinema answers to the questions that plagued her own romantic life and how she regained faith in love after one broken engagement and two failed marriages. Carlson also explores countless other questions Ephron's fans have wondered What sparked Reiner to snap out of his bachelor blues during the making of When Harry Met Sally? Why was Ryan, a gifted comedian trapped in the body of a fairytale princess, not the first choice for the role? After she and Hanks each separatel balked at playing Mail's Kathleen Kelly and Sleepless' Sam Baldwin, what changed their minds? And perhaps most What was Dave Chappelle doing ... in a turtleneck? An intimate portrait of a one of America's most iconic filmmakers and a look behind the scenes of her crowning achievements, I'll Have What She's Having is a vivid account of the days and nights when Ephron, along with assorted cynical collaborators, learned to show her heart on the screen.
]]> 332 Erin Carlson 0316353906 Cecilia 3 3.66 2017
author: Erin Carlson
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2018/12/30
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves:
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]]> 199897897 Harkening to Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None, this high-tension and ingenious thriller follows five couples trapped on a storm-swept island as a killer stalks among them.

Lyla is in a bit of a rut. Her post-doctoral research has fizzled out, she’s pretty sure they won’t extend her contract, and things with her boyfriend, Nico, an aspiring actor, aren’t going great. When the opportunity arises for Nico to join the cast of a new reality TV show, The Perfect Couple, she decides to try out with him. A whirlwind audition process later, Lyla find herself whisked off to a tropical paradise with Nico, boating through the Indian Ocean towards Ever After Island, where the two of them will compete against four other couples—Bayer and Angel, Dan and Santana, Joel and Romi, and Conor and Zana—in order to win a cash prize.

But not long after they arrive on the deserted island, things start to go wrong. After the first challenge leaves everyone rattled and angry, an overnight storm takes matters from bad to worse. Cut off from the mainland by miles of ocean, deprived of their phones, and unable to contact the crew that brought them there, the group must band together for survival. As tensions run high and fresh water runs low, Lyla finds that this game show is all too real—and the stakes are life or death.

A fast-paced, spellbinding thriller rife with intrigue and characters that feel so true to life, this novel proves yet again that Ruth Ware is the queen of psychological suspense.]]> 416 Ruth Ware Cecilia 3 3.88 2024
author: Ruth Ware
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/07
date added: 2024/09/25
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]]> 53715823 A stunning and honest debut poetry collection about the beauty and hardships in being a mother, a wife, and a woman.��

“When life throws you a bag of sorrow, hold out your hands/Little by little, mountains are climbed.�� So ends Kate Baer’s remarkable poem “Things My Girlfriends Teach Me.�� In “Nothing Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels�� she challenges her reader to consider their grandmother’s cake, the taste of the sea, the cool swill of freedom. In her poem “Deliverance�� about her daughter’s birth she writes “What is the word for when the light leaves the body?/What is the word for when it/at last, returns?��

Through poems that are as unforgettably beautiful as they are accessible, Kate proves herself to truly be an exemplary voice in modern poetry. As easy to post on Instagram as they are to print out and frame, Kate’s words make women feel seen in their own bodies, in their own marriages, and in their own lives. Her poems are those you share with your mother, your daughter, your sister, and your friends.]]> 120 Kate Baer 0063008432 Cecilia 4 4.02 2020
author: Kate Baer
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/02
date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> 60409981 The second full length poetry collection from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of What Kind of Woman.

Kate Baer shot into the literary stratosphere with the publication of her debut poetry collection, What Kind of Woman, which became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller.

Kate's second full-length book of traditional poetry, And Yet, dives deeper into the themes that are the hallmarks of her writing: motherhood, friendship, love, and loss. Taken together, these poems demonstrate the remarkable evolution of a writer and an artist working at the height of her craft, pushing herself and her poetry in a beautiful and impressive way.

Intimate, evocative, and bold, Kate's beguiling poetry firmly positions her in the company of Dorianne Laux, Mary Oliver, Maggie Nelson, and other great female poets of our time.]]> 112 Kate Baer 0063115557 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.97 2022
author: Kate Baer
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> 57007429
“I'm sure you could benefit from jumping on a treadmill��

“Women WANT a male leader...It’s honest to god the basic human playbook��

These are some of the thousands of online messages Kate Baer has received. Like countless other writers—particularly women—with internet profiles, as Kate’s online presence grew, so did the darker messages crowding her inbox. These missives from strangers have ranged from “advice�� and opinions to outright harassment.

At first these messages resulted in an immediate delete and block. Until, on a whim, Baer decided to transform the cruelty into art, using it to create fresh and intriguing poems. These pieces, along with ones made from notes of gratitude and love, as well as from the words of public figures, have become some of her most beloved work. Baer offers us a lesson in empowerment, showing how we too can turn bitterness into beauty.]]> 96 Kate Baer 0063137992 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.28 2021
author: Kate Baer
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> 112204 THE ONLY ONE-VOLUME EDITION CONTAINING ALL 1,775 OF EMILY DICKINSON’S POEMS

Only eleven of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published prior to her death in 1886; the startling originality of her work doomed it to obscurity in her lifetime. Early posthumously published collections-some of them featuring liberally “edited�� versions of the poems-did not fully and accurately represent Dickinson’s bold experiments in prosody, her tragic vision, and the range of her intellectual and emotional explorations. Not until the 1955 publication of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, a three-volume critical edition compiled by Thomas H. Johnson, were readers able for the first time to assess, understand, and appreciate the whole of Dickinson’s extraordinary poetic genius.

This book, a distillation of the three-volume Complete Poems, brings together the original texts of all 1,775 poems that Emily Dickinson wrote.]]> 716 Emily Dickinson Cecilia 0 to-read 4.28 1890
author: Emily Dickinson
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1890
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> 23705600 Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.]]> 112 Ross Gay 0822963310 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.25 2015
author: Ross Gay
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> 2078076 384 Sylvia Plath Cecilia 0 to-read 4.45 1981
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> 43453732 Perfect for fans of Rupi Kaur and Elizabeth Acevedo, Jasmin Kaur’s stunning debut novel is a collection of poetry, illustrations, and prose.

scream
so that one day
a hundred years from now
another sister will not have to
dry her tears wondering
where in history
she lost her voice

The six sections of the book explore what it��means to be a��young woman living in a world that doesn’t always hear her and tell the story of Kiran as she flees a history of trauma and raises her daughter, Sahaara, while living undocumented in North America.

Delving into current cultural conversations including sexual assault,��mental health, feminism, and immigration, this narrative of resilience, healing, empowerment, and love will galvanize readers to fight for what is right in their world.]]> 256 Jasmin Kaur 0062912615 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.92 2019
author: Jasmin Kaur
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 42785088
A beautifully raw and poignant collection of poetry and prose, Pillow Thoughts III continues the series from poet Courtney Peppernell . Fix yourself a warm drink and settle into Peppernell's words as she pens a tribute to her readers who are bravely continuing their journey from hurt to healing.��]]> 224 Courtney Peppernell 1449497055 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.99 2019
author: Courtney Peppernell
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 38507175
Courtney Peppernell understands that healing is a process, and Pillow Thoughts II --second in the Pillow Thoughts series--eloquently captures the time and experience that one goes through on their journey to peace through restoration.��

A collection of inspirational and comforting poems for anyone who is mending from a broken heart.]]> 224 Courtney Peppernell 1449495087 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.04 2018
author: Courtney Peppernell
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 32468495
It is divided into sections to read when you feel you need them most.

Make a cup of tea and let yourself feel.]]> 259 Courtney Peppernell Cecilia 0 to-read 3.83 2017
author: Courtney Peppernell
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> 55829991 I am The Rage is a poetry collection that explores racial injustice from the raw, unfiltered viewpoint of a Black woman in America. Dr. Martina McGowan is a retired MD, a mother, grandmother, and a poet. Her poetry provides insights that no think piece on racism can; putting readers in the uncomfortable position of feeling, reflecting, and facing what it means to be a Black American.

This entire collection was created during 2020, many shortly after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, to name but a few.]]> 112 Martina McGowan 1728245079 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.32 2021
author: Martina McGowan
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58819868 210 Melody Godfred 1524874825 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.12
author: Melody Godfred
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.12
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/02
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review:

]]> 53317417 Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Harryette Mullen

By turns aggressively reckless and fiercely protective, always guided by faith and ancestry, Threa Almontaser’s incendiary debut asks how mistranslation can be a form of self-knowledge and survival. A love letter to the country and people of Yemen, a portrait of young Muslim womanhood in New York after 9/11, and an extraordinarily composed examination of what it means to carry in the body the echoes of what came before, Almontaser’s polyvocal collection sneaks artifacts to and from worlds, repurposing language and adapting to the space between cultures. Half-crunk and hungry, speakers move with the force of what cannot be contained by the limits of the American imagination, and instead invest in troublemaking and trickery, navigate imperial violence across multiple accents and anthems, and apply gang signs in henna, utilizing any means necessary to form a semblance of home. In doing so, The Wild Fox of Yemen fearlessly rides the tension between carnality and tenderness in the unruly human spirit.]]> 96 Threa Almontaser 164445050X Cecilia 0 to-read 4.22 2021
author: Threa Almontaser
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62921348
Hollis Shaw’s life seems picture-perfect. She’s the creator of the popular food blog Hungry with Hollis and is married to Matthew, a dreamy heart surgeon. But after she and Matthew get into a heated argument one snowy morning, he leaves for the airport and is killed in a car accident. The cracks in Hollis’s perfect life—her strained marriage and her complicated relationship with her daughter, Caroline—grow deeper.

So when Hollis hears about something called a “Five-Star Weekend”—one woman organizes a trip for her best friend from each phase of her life: her teenage years, her twenties, her thirties, and midlife—she decides to host her own Five-Star Weekend on Nantucket. But the weekend doesn’t turn out to be a joyful Hallmark movie.

The husband of Hollis’s childhood friend Tatum arranges for Hollis’s first love, Jack Finigan, to spend time with them, stirring up old feelings. Meanwhile, Tatum is forced to play nice with abrasive and elitist Dru-Ann, Hollis’s best friend from UNC Chapel Hill. Dru-Ann’s career as a prominent Chicago sports agent is on the line after her comments about a client’s mental health issues are misconstrued online. Brooke, Hollis’s friend from their thirties, has just discovered that her husband is having an inappropriate relationship with a woman at work. Again! And then there’s Gigi, a stranger to everyone (including Hollis) who reached out to Hollis through her blog. Gigi embodies an unusual grace and, as it hap- pens, has many secrets.

The Five-Star Weekend is a surprising and captivating story about friendship, love, and self-discovery set on Nantucket. It will be a weekend like no other.]]> 400 Elin Hilderbrand 0316259381 Cecilia 2 4.25 2023
author: Elin Hilderbrand
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/30
date added: 2024/08/30
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]]> 123412177
But after the heated divorce of her closest friend and cousin Stephanie Bryce, Lea finds herself taking Stephanie and her college-aged daughter to the Loire Valley in France for the summer. As they tag along for Lea’s latest work assignment, despite their best intentions, they threaten to complicate the tightrope act of launching the hotel on time. And when Lea unexpectedly falls for the much-younger son of her boss, she quickly learns the beauty and danger of losing control.

As affairs bloom in the idyllic chateau, wars of inheritance play out between the family, and betrayals threaten even the most solid relationships. Lea realizes that it's not just a broken heart she's risking, but her entire, meticulously-constructed life blowing up in her face.]]> 329 Chelsea Fagan 1662938632 Cecilia 3 Solid 3.5 stars 3.53 2023
author: Chelsea Fagan
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/16
date added: 2024/08/12
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Solid 3.5 stars
]]> 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 Cecilia 5 3.92 2023
author: Paul Murray
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/11
date added: 2024/08/11
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I highly recommend this book.
]]> 44074800 Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias meet Dracula in this Southern-flavored supernatural thriller set in the '90s about a women's book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious and handsome stranger who turns out to be a blood-sucking fiend.

Patricia Campbell had always planned for a big life, but after giving up her career as a nurse to marry an ambitious doctor and become a mother, Patricia's life has never felt smaller. The days are long, her kids are ungrateful, her husband is distant, and her to-do list is never really done. The one thing she has to look forward to is her book club, a group of Charleston mothers united only by their love for true-crime and suspenseful fiction. In these meetings, they're more likely to discuss the FBI's recent siege of Waco as much as the ups and downs of marriage and motherhood.

But when an artistic and sensitive stranger moves into the neighborhood, the book club's meetings turn into speculation about the newcomer. Patricia is initially attracted to him, but when some local children go missing, she starts to suspect the newcomer is involved. She begins her own investigation, assuming that he's a Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy. What she uncovers is far more terrifying, and soon she--and her book club--are the only people standing between the monster they've invited into their homes and their unsuspecting community.]]> 410 Grady Hendrix Cecilia 0 to-read 3.78 2020
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 1058564
But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina’s family.]]> 140 Elena Ferrante 1933372427 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.70 2006
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199797861 In Kat Tang’s exciting and resonant debut, a “Rental Stranger”—a companion hired under various guises—walks the line between personal and professional in surprising new ways.

Would you hire someone to be the best man at your wedding? Your stand-in brother? Your husband?

In an age where online ratings are all-powerful, Five-Star Stranger follows the adventures of a top-rated man on the Rental Stranger app—a place where users can hire a pretend fiancé, a wingman, or an extra mourner for a funeral. Referred to only as Stranger, the narrator navigates New York City under the guise of characters he plays, always maintaining a professional distance from his clients.

But, when a nosy patron threatens to upend his long-term role as father to a young girl, Stranger begins to reckon with his attachment to his pretend daughter, her mother, and his own fraught past. Now, he must confront the boundaries he has drawn and explore the legacy of abandonment that shaped his life.

Five-Star Stranger is a strikingly vivid novel about the commodification of relationships in a gig economy, isolation in a hyperconnected world, and the risk of asking for what we want from those who cannot give. This is the story of a man who finds out who he is by being anyone but himself.]]> 240 Kat Tang 1668050145 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.19 2024
author: Kat Tang
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.19
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/06
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]]> 203931803 A powerful memoir that reckons with mental health as well as the insidious ways men impact the lives of women.

In early 2021, popular artist Anna Marie Tendler checked herself into a psychiatric hospital following a year of crippling anxiety, depression and self-harm. Over two weeks, she underwent myriad psychological tests, participated in numerous therapy sessions, connected with fellow patients and experienced profound breakthroughs, such as when a doctor noted, “There is a you inside that feels invisible to those looking at you from the outside.��

In Men Have Called Her Crazy, Tendler recounts her hospital experience as well as pivotal moments in her life that preceded and followed. As the title suggests, many of these moments are impacted by men: unrequited love in high school; the twenty-eight-year-old she lost her virginity to when she was sixteen; the frustrations and absurdities of dating in her mid-thirties; and her decision to freeze her eggs as all her friends were starting families.

This stunning literary self-portrait examines the unreasonable expectations and pressures women face in the 21st century. Yet overwhelming and despairing as that can feel, Tendler ultimately offers a message hope. Early in her stay in the hospital, she says, “My wish for myself is that one day I’ll reach a place where I can face hardship without trying to destroy myself.�� By the end of the book, she fulfills that wish.]]> 304 Anna Marie Tendler 1668032341 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.42 2024
author: Anna Marie Tendler
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/23
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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 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.67 2024
author: Sarah Manguso
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/23
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]]> 200867676 From the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize nominee whose short stories received instant acclaim (“Sparingly told, evoked with lacerating intimacy . . . Extraordinary�� —Esquire), a debut novel about a young woman's coming of age, in parallel with a renegade male friend who challenges her beliefs and the course of her life

At sixteen, Eva meets Jamie by chance. She lives in middle-class South Brooklyn; he comes from the super-rich of upper Manhattan. She’s observant, cautious, and eager to seem normal; he’s curious, bold, and full of mysteries. She keeps a keen intelligence under wraps; his eccentric brilliance is all but impossible to repress. While Eva welcomes Jamie into her family’s embrace, he avoids going home; with little in common, these two questers are drawn together in a deep friendship. As Eva goes off to an elite college and falls in and out of love, Jamie drops out of school and joins the Occupy Wall Street movement. Eva, so often trapped by self-doubt, is both awed and repelled by the strength of Jamie's convictions. Carried forcefully along by Sestanovich’s highly observant, butterfly-pinning prose, these two characters, pulled into separate spheres, circle the same how to define their values and find their purpose, how to create a sense of self while discovering what they owe to society and the cause of justice. The geometry of their platonic love leads us on a surprising journey of intimacy across time—exposing the alchemy of connection, of the relationships that can define who we are and can even change us, and the possible futures we might not have imagined for ourselves.]]> 320 Clare Sestanovich 0593318110 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.08
author: Clare Sestanovich
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.08
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]]> 150778780
“I never thought I’d see you here,�� Sarah says. Then she adds, “But I never thought I’d see you anywhere.�� Sarah and Warren’s college love story ended in a single moment.

Decades later, when a chance meeting brings them together, a passion ignites―threatening the foundations of the lives they’ve built apart. Since they parted in college, each has married, raised a family, and made a career. When they meet again, Sarah is divorced and living outside New York, while Warren is still married and living in Boston.

Seeing Warren sparks an awakening in Sarah, who feels emotionally alive for the first time in decades. Still, she hesitates to reclaim a chance at love after her painful divorce and years of framing her life around her children and her work. Warren has no such reservations: he wants to leave his marriage but can’t predict how his wife and daughter will react.

As their affair intensifies, Sarah and Warren must confront the moral responsibilities of their love for their families and each other. Leaving charts a passage through loyalty and desire as it builds to a shattering conclusion.

In her boldest and most powerful work to date, Roxana Robinson demonstrates her “trademark gifts as an intelligent, sensitive analyst of family life�� (Wendy Smith, Chicago Tribune ) in an engrossing exploration of the vows we make to one another, the tensile relationships between parents and their children, and what we owe to others and ourselves.]]> 344 Roxana Robinson 1324065389 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.68 2024
author: Roxana Robinson
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/06
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]]> 141310682 ‘The best case I've read for putting an upper limit on the accumulation of wealth�� Richard WilkinsonNo-one deserves to be a millionaire. Not even you. We all notice when the poor get when there are more rough sleepers and food bank queues start to grow. But if the rich become richer, there is nothing much to see in public and, for most of us, daily life doesn't change. Or at least, not immediately.In this astonishing, eye-opening intervention, world-leading philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns exposes the true extent of our wealth problem, which has spent the past fifty years silently spiralling out of control. In moral, political, economic, social, environmental and psychological terms, she shows, extreme wealth is not only unjustifiable but harmful to us all - the rich included.In place of our current system, Robeyns offers a breathtakingly clear limitarianism. The answer to so many of the problems posed by neoliberal capitalism - and the opportunity for a vastly better world - lies in placing a hard limit on the wealth that any one person can accumulate. Because nobody deserves to be a millionaire. Not even you.]]> 336 Ingrid Robeyns 0241578191 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.04 2023
author: Ingrid Robeyns
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 128657343 From acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, a meditation on what we must give up to feel more alive.To give up or not to give up?The question can feel inescapable but the answer is never simple.Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is profoundly unsettling, if not actively undesirable.There are always, it turns out, both good and bad sacrifices, but it is not always clear beforehand which is which. We give something up because we believe we can no longer go on as we are. In this sense, giving up is a critical moment - an attempt to make a different future.In On Giving Up, acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up, and helps us to address the central what must we give up in order to feel more alive?'One of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time' John Banville'The best living essayist writing in English' John Gray]]> 160 Adam Phillips 0241656591 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.52
author: Adam Phillips
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.52
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rating: 0
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]]> 194985431
Kristine S. Ervin was just eight years old when her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and violently murdered in an oil field. First, there was grief. Then the desire to what happened to her, what she felt in her last terrible moments, and all she was before these acts of violence defined her life.

In her mother’s absence, Ervin tries to reconstruct a woman she can never fully grasp—from her own memory, from letters she uncovers, and the stories of other family members. As more information about her mother's death comes to light, Ervin’s drive to know her mother only intensifies, winding its way into her own fraught adolescence. In the process of both, she reckons with contradictions of what a woman is allowed to be—a self beyond the roles of wife, mother, daughter, victim—what a “true�� victim is supposed to look like, and, finally, how complicated and elusive justice can be.

Told fearlessly and poetically, Rabbit Heart weaves together themes of power, gender, and justice into a manifesto of grief and our stories do not need to be simple to be true, and there is power in the telling.]]> 304 Kristine S. Ervin 164009637X Cecilia 0 to-read 3.99 2024
author: Kristine S. Ervin
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/06
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]]> 182112382 When ghostwriter Zara falls for her celebrity chef client, Jane Bailey, she starts to see the side Jane keeps hidden from the cameras and gets stuck in a plot she never saw coming.

Reeling from the death of her domineering father, Zara Pines accepts a ghostwriting gig for celebrity chef Jane Bailey. Jane, star of the thrifty and wildly popular cooking show 30 Bucks Top, invites Zara to live in her East Hampton estate for the summer. Jane insists–this way, they can truly get to know each other.

As Zara starts to fall for Jane romantically, Jane sloughs off the curated personality she maintains for the media. Zara spends all of her time in Jane’s estate, shadowing Jane’s life–even wearing Jane’s clothes. As they become ever more linked, Zara watches as she changes in ways she never expected. Can Zara get out before Jane subsumes her?]]> 288 Swan Huntley 1958506710 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.48 2024
author: Swan Huntley
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/06
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]]> 197828937
"A giddy, bold, mind-blowing tour de force by one of our most important literary writers." �� George Saunders, Booker-Prize winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo

"Profound and bawdy and deeply human, a brilliant work of art from a completely blown open and fearless mind."—Emma Cline, New York Times bestselling author of The Guest

A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty 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.]]> 333 Miranda July 0593190289 Cecilia 4 3.48 2024
author: Miranda July
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/02
date added: 2024/07/02
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]]> 61189184
As people get up each morning and go to work, school, church or the pub, the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploded, another man beaten, killed or left for dead. In the class Cushla teaches, the vocabulary of seven-year-old children now includes phrases like 'petrol bomb' and 'rubber bullets'. And as she is forced to tread lines she never thought she would cross, tensions in the town are escalating, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together.]]> 343 Louise Kennedy 0593540913 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.06 2022
author: Louise Kennedy
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6080822
Once again, Hilderbrand masterfully weaves an intense tale of love and loyalty set against the backdrop of endless summer island life.]]> 359 Elin Hilderbrand 0316043893 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.63 2009
author: Elin Hilderbrand
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/25
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]]> 2285777
Hearts break and emotions stretch to the point of snapping in this in-depth look at one woman's attempt to deal with loves past and present, raise a family, run a business, and pull of a charity event unlike any the island of Nantucket has ever seen. Claire discovers that doing good and being bad are not mutually exclusive—and that nothing is ever as simple as it seems.]]> 416 Elin Hilderbrand 0316018600 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.52 2008
author: Elin Hilderbrand
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/25
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]]> 34840184
But it's going to be memorable for all the wrong reasons after tragedy strikes: a body is discovered in Nantucket Harbor just hours before the ceremony-and everyone in the wedding party is suddenly a suspect. As Chief of Police Ed Kapenash interviews the bride, the groom, the groom's famous mystery-novelist mother, and even a member of his own family, he discovers that every wedding is a minefield-and no couple is perfect. Featuring beloved characters from The Castaways, Beautiful Day, and A Summer Affair, The Perfect Couple proves once again that Elin Hilderbrand is the queen of the summer beach read.]]> 480 Elin Hilderbrand 0316375241 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.93 2018
author: Elin Hilderbrand
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/25
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]]> 200484931 In the grand finale of "queen of the beach read" Elin Hilderbrand's beloved Nantucket novels, there's a new couple in town... and they instantly shake things up. Amid the extravagant parties on land and sea, there's trouble on the island, forcing Chief of Police Ed Kapanesh to postpone his retirement and changing the fabric of life on the picturesque island forever...

After thirty-five years serving as the Chief of Police on the island of Nantucket, Ed Kapenash's heart can no longer take the stress. But his plans to retire are thwarted when, with only three days left to serve, he receives a phone call. A 22-million-dollar summer home, recently purchased by the flashy new couple in town, the Richardsons, has burned to the ground. The Richardsons are far from hurt—in fact, they're out on the water, throwing a lavish party on their yacht—but when news of the fire reaches them, they discover that their personal assistant has vanished. The Chief is well-acquainted with the Richardsons, and his daughter is best friends with the now-missing girl, leaving him no choice but to postpone his retirement and take on the double case.

On a small island like Nantucket, the Richardsons shook things up from the second they stepped on to the scene, throwing luxurious parties and doing whatever they could to gain admittance to the coveted lunches at the Field & Oar Club (with increasing desperation). They instantly captured the attention of local real estate agent Fast Eddie, and the town gossip Blond Sharon, both dealing with their own personal dramas. Blond Sharon is going through a divorce, and in order to avoid becoming a cliché, she's enrolled in a creative writing class, putting her natural affinity for scandal towards a more noble purpose. To solve the case of the fire and track down his daughter's best friend, the Chief will have to string together the pieces of the lives of all of these characters and more, rallying his strength for his final act of service to the tight-knit community he knows and loves.

The last of Elin Hilderbrand's bestselling Nantucket novels, Swan Song is a propulsive medley of glittering gatherings, sun-soaked drama, wisdom and heart, featuring the return of some of her most beloved characters, including, most importantly, the beautiful and timeless island of Nantucket itself.]]> 384 Elin Hilderbrand 0316258873 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.98 2024
author: Elin Hilderbrand
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/25
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]]> 42283286

Welcome to the most tumultuous summer of the twentieth century. It's 1969, and for the Levin family, the times they are a-changing. Every year the children have looked forward to spending the summer at their grandmother's historic home in downtown Nantucket. But like so much else in America, nothing is the same: Blair, the oldest sister, is marooned in Boston, pregnant with twins and unable to travel. Middle sister Kirby, caught up in the thrilling vortex of civil rights protests and determined to be independent, takes a summer job on Martha's Vineyard. Only-son Tiger is an infantry soldier, recently deployed to Vietnam. And thirteen-year-old Jessie suddenly feels like an only child, marooned in the house with her out-of-touch grandmother and her worried mother, while each of them hides a troubling secret.


As the summer heats up, Ted Kennedy sinks a car in Chappaquiddick, man flies to the moon, and Jessie and her family experience their own dramatic upheavals along with the rest of the country. In her first historical novel, rich with the details of an era that shaped both a nation and an island thirty miles out to sea, Elin Hilderbrand once again earns her title as queen of the summer novel.]]> 432 Elin Hilderbrand 0316420018 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.92 2019
author: Elin Hilderbrand
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/25
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]]> 55643278 In this #1 bestselling page-turner a Nantucket novelist has one final summer to protect her secrets while her loved ones on earth learn to live without their golden girl.

On a perfect June day, Vivian Howe, author of thirteen��beach novels and mother of three nearly grown children, is killed in a hit-and-run car accident while jogging near her home on Nantucket. She ascends to the Beyond where she's assigned to a Person named Martha, who allows Vivi to watch what happens below for one last summer. Vivi also is granted three “nudges�� to change the outcome of events on earth, and with her daughter Willa on her third miscarriage, Carson partying until all hours, and Leo currently “off again�� with his high-maintenance girlfriend, she’ll have to think carefully where to use them.

From the Beyond, Vivi watches “The Chief�� Ed Kapenash investigate her death, but her greatest worry is her final book, which contains a secret from her own youth that could be disastrous for her reputation. But when hidden truths come to light, Vivi’s family will have to sort out their past and present mistakes—with or without a nudge of help from above—while Vivi finally lets them grow without her.

With all of Elin’s trademark beach scenes, mouth-watering meals, and picture-perfect homes, plus a heartfelt message—the people we lose never really leave us��Golden Girl is a beach book unlike any other.]]> 384 Elin Hilderbrand 0316420085 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.09 2021
author: Elin Hilderbrand
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/25
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]]> 52588078
When Mallory Blessing's son, Link, receives deathbed instructions from his mother to call a number on a slip of paper in her desk drawer, he's not sure what to expect. But he certainly does not expect Jake McCloud to answer. It's the late spring of 2020 and Jake's wife, Ursula DeGournsey, is the frontrunner in the upcoming Presidential election.

There must be a mistake, Link thinks. How do Mallory and Jake know each other?

Flash back to the sweet summer of 1993: Mallory has just inherited a beachfront cottage on Nantucket from her aunt, and she agrees to host her brother's bachelor party. Cooper's friend from college, Jake McCloud, attends, and Jake and Mallory form a bond that will persevere -- through marriage, children, and Ursula's stratospheric political rise -- until Mallory learns she's dying.

Based on the classic film Same Time Next Year (which Mallory and Jake watch every summer), 28 Summers explores the agony and romance of a one-weekend-per-year affair and the dramatic ways this relationship complicates and enriches their lives, and the lives of the people they love.]]> 432 Elin Hilderbrand 0316420042 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.12 2020
author: Elin Hilderbrand
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> 199126293 A biting portrait of British class, politics, and money told through five interconnected families and their rising―and declining―fortunes.

Campbell Flynn, art historian and biographer of Vermeer, always knew that when his life came crashing down, it would happen in public―yet he never imagined that a single year in London would expose so much. Entangled with a brilliant student, he begins to see trouble brewing for his family and friends. All his worlds collide―the art scene and academia, fashion and the English aristocracy, journalism and the internet―as dangerous forces enter his life and Caledonian Road gives up its secrets.
Andrew O’Hagan has written a social novel in the Victorian style, drawing a whole cast of characters into company with each other and revealing the inner energies of the way we live now.

“Not only a peerless chronicler of our times, O’Hagan has generosity, humour and tenderness, which make this novel an utter joy to read.”―Monica Ali, author of Love Marriage and Brick Lane]]> 614 Andrew O'Hagan 1324074876 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.73 2024
author: Andrew O'Hagan
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 193781998 An exuberant debut, The Husbands delights in how do we navigate life, love, and choice in a world of never-ending options?

When Lauren returns home to her flat in London late one night, she is greeted at the door by her husband, Michael. There’s only one problem—she’s not married. She’s never seen this man before in her life. But according to her friends, her much-improved decor, and the photos on her phone, they’ve been together for years.

As Lauren tries to puzzle out how she could be married to someone she can’t remember meeting, Michael goes to the attic to change a lightbulb and abruptly disappears. In his place, a new man emerges, and a new, slightly altered life re-forms around her. Realizing that her attic is creating an infinite supply of husbands, Lauren confronts the question: If swapping lives is as easy as changing a lightbulb, how do you know you’ve taken the right path? When do you stop trying to do better and start actually��living?]]> 352 Holly Gramazio 0385550618 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.50 2024
author: Holly Gramazio
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/25
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]]> 62313333
Lady Augusta Colebrook, “Gus,�� is determinedly unmarried, bored by society life, and tired of being dismissed at the age of forty-two. She and her twin sister, Julia, who is grieving her dead betrothed, need a distraction. One soon presents to rescue their friend’s goddaughter, Caroline, from her violent husband.
��
The sisters set out to Caroline’s country estate with a plan, but their carriage is accosted by a highwayman. In the scuffle, Gus accidentally shoots and injures the ruffian, only to discover he is Lord Evan Belford, an acquaintance from their past who was charged with murder and exiled to Australia twenty years ago.��What follows is a high adventure full of danger, clever improvisation, heart-racing near misses, and a little help from a revived and rather charming Lord Evan.

Back in London, Gus can’t stop thinking about her unlikely (not to mention handsome) comrade-in-arms. She is convinced Lord Evan was falsely accused of murder, and she is going to prove it. She persuades Julia to join her in a quest to help Lord Evan, and others in need—society be damned! And so begins the beguiling secret life and adventures of the Colebrook twins.]]> 452 Alison Goodman 0593440811 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.14 2023
author: Alison Goodman
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> 15781 Sideways is the story of two friends--Miles and Jack--going away together for the last time to steep themselves in everything that makes it good to be young and single: pinot, putting, and prowling bars. In the week before Jack plans to marry, the pair heads out from Los Angeles to the Santa Ynez wine country. For Jack, the tasting tour is Seven Days to D-Day, his final stretch of freedom. For Miles--who has divorced his wife, is facing an uncertain career and has lost his passion for living--the trip is a weeklong opportunity to evaluate his past, his future and himself.

A raucous and surprising novel filled with wonderful details about wine, Sideways is also a thought-provoking and funny book about men, women, and human relationships.
]]> 354 Rex Pickett 0312342519 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.71 2004
author: Rex Pickett
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/24
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]]> 60126274
Change one thing and everything changes.

One summer night in 1985, the lives of three teenagers are shattered by a horrific car crash, resulting in the death of a young woman near a sprawling oak tree that marks the perimeter of 18 Division Street. For the Wilf family, it will become the deepest kind of family secret, one so dangerous it can never be spoken.

By the time the Shenkmans move in across the street—a young couple expecting a baby boy—the accident has become a distant memory. But when Waldo Shenkman, a brilliant but lonely child, befriends Ben Wilf, a retired doctor who is struggling with his wife’s decline, the Wilfs�� and the Shenkmans�� lives and fates become deeply entwined, and the past comes hurtling back to Division Street, setting in motion a chain of spellbinding events that will transform both families forever.

In the tradition of Ann Patchett and Sue Miller, Signal Fires is riveting, emotional, impossible to put down, a literary and commercial tour de force, and a work of haunting beauty and complexity by a masterful storyteller at the height of her powers.]]> 240 Dani Shapiro Cecilia 4 4.14 2022
author: Dani Shapiro
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/19
date added: 2024/06/19
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]]> 60699135 By the author of Something Wild, a gripping portrait of a tumultuous, consuming relationship between a young woman and a recovering addict

When Leah Kempler meets Charlie Nelson in line at the grocery store, their connection is immediate and intense. Charlie, with his big feelings and grand proclamations of love, captivates her completely. But there are peculiarities of his life—he’s older than her but lives with his parents; he meets up with a friend at odd hours of the night; he sleeps a lot and always seems to be coming down with something. He confesses that he’s a recovering heroin addict, but he promises Leah that he’s never going to use again.

Leah's friends and family are concerned. As she finds herself getting deeper into an isolated relationship, one of manipulation and denial, the truth about Charlie feels as blurry as their time together. Even when Charlie’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic, when he starts to make Leah feel unsafe, she can’t help but feel that what exists between them is destined. Charlie is wide open, boyish, and unbearably attractive. The bounds of Leah’s own pain—and love—are so deep that she can’t see him spiraling into self-destruction.

Hanna Halperin writes with aching vulnerability and intimacy, sharply attuned to Leah’s desire for consuming, compulsive connection. I Could Live Here Forever exposes the chasm between perception and truth to tell an intoxicating story of one woman’s relationship with an addict, the accompanying swirl of compassion and codependence, and her enduring search for love and]]> 332 Hanna Halperin Cecilia 3 3.83 2023
author: Hanna Halperin
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/24
date added: 2024/05/24
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]]> 127282246
In 1967, the dancer Marta Becket and her husband were traveling through Death Valley Junction when they came across an abandoned theater. Marta decided it was hers. She painted her ideal audience on its walls and danced her own dances until her death five decades later.

In the present day, Gia has ended a relationship and taken a leave from her job in film studies at a university. She is sleeping fifteen hours a night and ignoring calls from her mother. In a library archive, she comes across a photo of Marta Becket and decides to write her a letter. Soon Marta magically appears in her home.

Gia hopes Marta Becket will guide her out of her despair. But is Marta―the example of her single-minded, solitary life―enough? Through precise, vivid vignettes, Bitter Water Opera follows Gia as she resists the urge to escape into herself and struggles to form a lasting connection to the world. Her search has her reckoning with a set of terrifying charcoal drawings on her garage walls, a corpse in the middle of a pond, a crooked pear sapling, and other mysterious entities before bringing her to Marta’s theater, the Amargosa Opera House. There in the desert, Gia finds one answer.

In this brief, astonishing novel, Nicolette Polek describes an individual awakening to faith while exploring our deepest existential questions. How do we look beyond ourselves? Where do words go? What is art for?]]> 128 Nicolette Polek 1644452839 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.87 2024
author: Nicolette Polek
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/11
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]]> 194802722 A shimmering, joyful new novel about a pair of opposites with the wrong thing in common, from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.

Daphne always loved the way her fiancé, Peter, told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it... right up until the moment he realized he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra.

Which is how Daphne begins her new story: stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak.

Scruffy and chaotic—with a penchant for taking solace in the sounds of heart break love ballads—Miles is exactly the opposite of practical, buttoned-up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them?

But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex... right?]]> 400 Emily Henry Cecilia 4 4.21 2024
author: Emily Henry
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/02
date added: 2024/05/02
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]]> 179550498
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin��), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon�� (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.]]> 304 Percival Everett 0385550375 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.60 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/26
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]]> 40520251 A gripping novel about the whirlwind rise of an iconic 1970s rock group and their beautiful lead singer, revealing the mystery behind their infamous break up.

Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six, but nobody knows the real reason why they split at the absolute height of their popularity...until now.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go-Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it's the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she's twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.

Another band getting noticed is The Six, led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she's pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.

Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.]]> 404 Taylor Jenkins Reid Cecilia 3 4.21 2019
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2019/06/18
date added: 2024/04/26
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]]> 122892583 A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE

A suspenseful new psychological thriller from the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlisted and Dublin Literary Award shortlisted author of Remote Sympathy, Catherine Chidgey.

Like every other girl in her class, twelve-year-old Justine is drawn to her glamorous, charismatic new teacher and longs to be her pet. However, when a thief begins to target the school, Justine’s sense that something isn’t quite right grows ever stronger. With each twist of the plot, this gripping story of deception and the corrosive power of guilt takes a yet darker turn. Justine must decide where her loyalties lie.

Set in New Zealand in the 1980s and probing themes of racism, misogyny and the oppressive reaches of Catholicism, Pet will take a rightful place next to other classic portraits of childhood betrayal and psychological suspense: Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping among them.

“Refreshing, compelling and surprising.”—Ann Morgan, author of Beside Myself and Reading the World]]> 332 Catherine Chidgey 1609459318 Cecilia 3 4.10 2023
author: Catherine Chidgey
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/26
date added: 2024/04/26
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]]> 60194162 "Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver 0063251922 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.46 2022
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 60114458 “The queen of beach reads�� (New York Magazine) and #1��New York Times��bestselling author delivers an immensely satisfying page-turner in this tale about a summer of scandal at a storied Nantucket hotel.

Fresh off a bad breakup with a longtime boyfriend, Nantucket sweetheart Lizbet Keaton is desperately seeking a second act. When she’s named the new general manager of the Hotel Nantucket, a once Gilded Age gem turned abandoned eyesore, she hopes that her local expertise and charismatic staff can win the favor of their new London billionaire owner, Xavier Darling, as well as that of Shelly Carpenter, the wildly popular Instagram tastemaker who can help put them back on the map. And while the Hotel Nantucket appears to be a blissful paradise, complete with a celebrity chef-run restaurant and an idyllic wellness center, there’s a lot of drama behind closed doors. The staff (and guests) have complicated pasts, and the hotel can’t seem to overcome the bad reputation it earned in 1922 when a tragic fire killed nineteen-year-old chambermaid Grace Hadley. With Grace gleefully haunting the halls, a staff harboring all kinds of secrets, and Lizbet’s own romantic uncertainty, is the Hotel Nantucket destined for success or doom? ��

Filled with the emotional depth and multiple points of view that characterize Hilderbrand’s novels (The Blue Bistro, Golden Girl) as well as an added dash of Roaring Twenties history, The Hotel Nantucket offers something for everyone in this compelling summer drama.��]]> 417 Elin Hilderbrand 031625908X Cecilia 4 4.21 2022
author: Elin Hilderbrand
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/04
date added: 2024/04/05
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]]> 91239751
Out on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant.]]> 240 Melissa Broder 1668024845 Cecilia 3 3.46 2023
author: Melissa Broder
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/30
date added: 2024/03/30
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]]> 77265006 An incandescent novel about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, and love across three generations of women.

Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the famed Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless, full of verve and wit, twenty-two-year-old Nell leaves her mother Carmel’s home to find her voice as a writer and live a life of her choosing. Carmel, too, knows the magic of her Daddo’s poetry—and the broken promises within its verses. When Phil abandons the family, Carmel struggles to reconcile “the poet�� with the man whose desertion scars Carmel, her sister, and their cancer-ridden mother.

The Wren, the Wren brings to life three generations of women who contend with inheritances—of abandonment and of sustaining love that is “more than a strand of DNA, but a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood.�� In sharp prose studded with crystalline poetry, Anne Enright masterfully braids a family story of longing, betrayal, and hope.]]> 278 Anne Enright 1324005696 Cecilia 2 3.51 2023
author: Anne Enright
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/03/21
date added: 2024/03/21
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]]> 127463471
It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardised by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks and illicit intrigue.

A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and bad behavior.]]> 400 Kiley Reid Cecilia 3 3.48 2024
author: Kiley Reid
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/05
date added: 2024/03/05
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]]> 127282792
Sheila Heti kept a record of her thoughts over a ten-year period, then arranged the sentences from A to Z. Passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing, these are her alphabetical diaries.]]> 224 Sheila Heti 0374610789 Cecilia 0 to-read 3.95 2024
author: Sheila Heti
name: Cecilia
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 58838767
When introverted, eccentric Ethan Fawcett falls in love with the vivacious Barb, he has every reason to believe he will be delivered from a lifetime of solitude. But then the global pandemic hits, and their relationship takes a turn for the worse. Ethan grows obsessed with providing the perfect life for their adopted 8-year-old twins, Tommy and Sam. And he pushes Barb away, unable to share with her the secret he harbors about his parents�� untimely deaths. Once the planet returns to a version of normalcy, Ethan takes Tommy and Sam on a week-long biking adventure in Italy. During this disastrous excursion, it becomes clear just how unusual Ethan and his children are—and what it will take for Ethan to repair his marriage. This hauntingly beautiful novel—about loneliness and connection—is also filled with humor and surprise. Reminiscent of the best works by Anne Tyler, Ann Patchett, and Jane Smiley, it is a poignant, page-turning debut that, above all, is a bold and highly original literary high-wire feat.]]> 224 Katie Hafner 1954118066 Cecilia 3 4.10 2022
author: Katie Hafner
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/25
date added: 2024/02/25
shelves:
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]]> 58733693 Remarkably Bright Creatures, an exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tracing a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.]]> 368 Shelby Van Pelt 0063204150 Cecilia 0 to-read 4.35 2022
author: Shelby Van Pelt
name: Cecilia
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/24
shelves: to-read
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]]>