Ann's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 11 May 2025 13:41:45 -0700 60 Ann's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service]]> 219551344 Who works for the government and what do they do? A timely and absorbing civics lessons from an all-star team of writers and storytellers.

The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone.

ĚýĚýĚýĚýMichael Lewis invited his favorite writers to find someone doing an interesting job for the government and write about them. The stories they found are unexpected, riveting, and inspiring, including a former coal miner devoted to making mine roofs less likely to collapse, saving thousands of lives; an IRS agent straight out of a crime thriller; and the manager who made the National Cemetery Administration the best-run organization, public or private, in the entire country. Each essay shines a spotlight on the essential behind-the-scenes work of exemplary federal employees.

ĚýĚýĚýĚýWhether they’re digitizing archives, chasing down cybercriminals, or discovering new planets, these workers are committed to their work and universally reluctant to take credit. The vivid profiles in On Duty blow up the stereotype of the irrelevant bureaucrat. They show how the essential business of government makes our lives possible, and how much it matters.]]> 272 Michael Lewis Ann 4 4.20 2025 Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service
author: Michael Lewis
name: Ann
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/05/11
date added: 2025/05/11
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]]> Frankie 210085071
Always just on the periphery, looking on, young Frankie is never quite sure enough of herself to take centre stage. But the outsider holds certain advantages, sees things others don't, can influence without drawing attention. And when the map has been lost, it's anyone's guess where you may end up, or the accidental choices you find you have made. Frankie discovers that life is not always the one we hope for, or the one others expect of us.

Travelling from post-war Ireland to the dazzling art scene of 1960s New York by way of London, Frankie is an immersive, decade-sweeping novel about love, bravery and what it means to live a significant life.]]> 291 Graham Norton Ann 3 4.30 2024 Frankie
author: Graham Norton
name: Ann
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/30
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]]> The Last Samurai 190372 544 Helen DeWitt 0786887001 Ann 5 4.12 2000 The Last Samurai
author: Helen DeWitt
name: Ann
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/25
date added: 2025/04/25
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]]> <![CDATA[My Father's House: An Ode to America's Longest-Serving Black Congressman]]> 217432756 In this moving work, part clear-eyed assessment, part memoir, the son of iconic African American Congressman John Conyers Jr. shines a spotlight on his father and his political legacy, and reveals how, as his son, he eventually learned to leverage his own voice in a world that his father helped create.

A respectful, thoughtful, yet clear-eyed reframing of a national hero’s personal and political odyssey, My Father’s House is John Conyers III's love letter to his father and a record of his own journey. Conyers reveals a towering figure in modern American political history and an ordinary family man; a leader whose work in Washington necessitated his many absences as a father from a son coming of age in Detroit.

John Conyers III introduces us to John James Conyers, Jr. the legislator, who changed lives and made history, and of his equity-focused work that remains to be done. We meet Conyers the politician and mentor who worked with and counselled a network of powerbrokers—often from the family home on Seven Mile Road in the Motor City—including President Bill Clinton, Congressmen Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Charlie Rangel, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, feminist Gloria Steinem, entertainer-activists Harry Belafonte, Berry Gordy, Stevie Wonder, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Chris Tucker, Vivica Fox, and a slew of other players in Washington, DC, and across the nation.

A resonant political, historical, and family story, My Father’s House explores how John James Conyers, Jr., was at once a man of deep and abiding spiritual faith, human talents, and human weaknesses. As he places his father among this land's greatest lawmakers, he also demystifies and grounds the Civil Rights giants of that era, reminding us of their noble yet deeply flawed humanity. This exploration of John James Conyers, Jr., told through John Conyers III's eyes and experiences, is essential to a thorough understanding of modern U.S. politics and the cultures and human lives it continues to shape.

My Father’s House includes a black-and-white photo insert.]]> 272 John Conyers III 0063336812 Ann 0 to-read 0.0 My Father's House: An Ode to America's Longest-Serving Black Congressman
author: John Conyers III
name: Ann
average rating: 0.0
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/24
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]]> Wild Dark Shore 211004089
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.

Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.]]> 303 Charlotte McConaghy 1250827957 Ann 5 4.25 2025 Wild Dark Shore
author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: Ann
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/22
date added: 2025/04/22
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]]> Dead Money 212294441 “A stone-cold banger of a novel—a twisty journey through Silicon Valley’s dark side, wrapped in a stunning mystery package with some wild surprises along the way.”—Blake Crouch, New York Timesbestselling author of Dark Matter

Don’t call me a fixer. This isn’t HBO.

In her job as unofficial “problem solver� for Silicon Valley’s most ruthless venture capitalist, Mackenzie Clyde’s gotten used to playing for high stakes. Even if none of those tech-bro millions she’s so good at wrangling ever make it into her pockets.

But this time, she’s in way over her head—or so it seems.

The lightning-rod CEO of tech’s hottest startup has just been murdered, leaving behind billions in “dead money� frozen in his will. As the company’s chief investor, Mackenzie’s boss has a fortune on the line—and with the police treading water, it’s up to Mackenzie to step up and resolve things, fast.

Mackenzie’s a lawyer, not a detective. Cracking this fiendishly clever killing, with its list of suspects that reads like a who’s-who of Valley power players, should be way out of her league.

Except that Mackenzie’s used to being underestimated. In fact, she’s counting on it.

Because the way she sees it, this isn’t an investigation. It’s an opportunity. And she’ll do anything it takes to seize it.

Anything at all.

Featuring jaw-dropping twists and a wily, outsider heroine you can’t help rooting for, Dead Money is a brilliant sleight-of-hand mystery. Written by a longtime insider, it is also a dead-on snapshot of the Valley’s rich and famous—and a glimpse at the darkness lurking behind the tech world’s cheery facade.]]> 416 Jakob Kerr 0593726707 Ann 4 3.98 2025 Dead Money
author: Jakob Kerr
name: Ann
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/20
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]]> The English Problem 212806722 A young Indian man is tapped to help his country’s fight for freedom—but his heart engages him in a different war.

Shiv Advani is an eighteen-year-old growing up in India. But he is no ordinary young man. Shiv has been personally chosen by Mahatma Gandhi to come to England, learn their laws, and then return home and help drive the British out of India. Before he leaves, his family insists he fulfill his arranged marriage, and he is hastily betrothed to a young woman he hardly knows.

He arrives in London and soon discovers a world he is both repelled by and drawn to. Shiv knows his duty: get in, learn the letter of the law, get out. But as anyone who has ever lived in a British colony can tell you, “the English Problem� is multifaceted. The racist colonialism of “the empire on which the sun never sets� seeps into everything—not just landed territories, but territories of the mind: literature, language, religion, sexuality, self-identity. Soon the people Shiv sought to be liberated from will be the people he desperately wants to be a part of. In the end, Shiv must fight not only for his country’s liberation but also his own.

Set against the backdrop of the Indian independence movement, with appearances by historical figures such as Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Mahatma Gandhi, The English Problem is so self-assured and ambitious, it is hard to believe it is a debut.]]> 480 Beena Kamlani 0593798465 Ann 4 3.56 2025 The English Problem
author: Beena Kamlani
name: Ann
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/15
date added: 2025/04/15
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]]> The Fury 123206645 A masterfully paced thriller about a reclusive ex–movie star and her famous friends whose spontaneous trip to a private Greek island is upended by a murder � from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Patient.

This is a tale of murder.

Or maybe that’s not quite true. At its heart, it’s a love story, isn’t it?

Lana Farrar is a reclusive ex–movie star and one of the most famous women in the world. Every year, she invites her closest friends to escape the English weather and spend Easter on her idyllic private Greek island.

I tell you this because you may think you know this story. You probably read about it at the time � it caused a real stir in the tabloids, if you remember. It had all the necessary ingredients for a press a celebrity; a private island cut off by the wind…and a murder.

We found ourselves trapped there overnight. Our old friendships concealed hatred and a desire for revenge. What followed was a game of cat and mouse � a battle of wits, full of twists and turns, building to an unforgettable climax. The night ended in violence and death, as one of us was found murdered.

But who am I?

My name is Elliot Chase, and I’m going to tell you a story unlike any you’ve ever heard.]]> 298 Alex Michaelides 125075898X Ann 3 3.34 2024 The Fury
author: Alex Michaelides
name: Ann
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/10
date added: 2025/04/10
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]]> The Women 127305853
Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances "Frankie" McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.

As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is over-whelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal; friendships run deep and can be shattered in an instant. In war, she meets—and becomes one of—the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost.

But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.

The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm's way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.]]> 471 Kristin Hannah 1250178630 Ann 4 4.58 2024 The Women
author: Kristin Hannah
name: Ann
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/05
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]]> Beautiful Ugly 211004123 The million-copy bestselling Queen of Twists Alice Feeney returns with a gripping and deliciously dark thriller about marriage. . .
. . . and revenge.

Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life.

Grady calls his wife to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge the headlights are on, the driver door is open, her phone is still there. . . but his wife has disappeared.

A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. Then he sees the impossible � a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife.

Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t.
Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.]]> 306 Alice Feeney 125033778X Ann 1 3.63 2025 Beautiful Ugly
author: Alice Feeney
name: Ann
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2025
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
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An unbelievable book about unpleasant people. I kept reading to the end, thinking surely it will resolve into something sane, if not satisfying, but nope.
]]> <![CDATA[The Knight and the Butcherbird]]> 227836621 In this dystopian fairy tale from the New York Times bestselling author of Starling House, a small town’s storyteller struggles to protect a local demon from the knight hired to kill it.

Hundreds of years after the end of the world, the Appalachian community of Iron Hollow finds itself beset by demons. Such horrors are common these days in the outlands, where most folks die young—if they don’t turn into monsters first.

When a legendary knight is summoned to hunt down the latest unearthly beast to haunt their woods, the town’s new oral historian, Shrike, has more reason than most to be concerned. Because that demon was her wife. And while Shrike is certain that May still recognizes her—that May is still herself, somewhere beneath it all—she can’t prove it.

Determined to keep May safe, Shrike stalks the knight and his demon-hunting hawk through the recesses of the forest. But as they creep through toxic creeks and overgrown kudzu, Shrike realizes the knight has a secret of his own. And he’ll do anything to protect it.]]> 39 Alix E. Harrow Ann 5 4.12 2025 The Knight and the Butcherbird
author: Alix E. Harrow
name: Ann
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> <![CDATA[The Orb of Cairado (The Chronicles of Osreth, #1.1)]]> 221288099 The Goblin Emperor, The Orb of Cairado offers an unlikely hero in historian Ulcetha Zhorvena.

Five years ago, Ulcetha was studying at the University of Cairado, working his way toward becoming a scholar first-class in the Department of History. Then a prize artifact disappeared and Ulcetha, deftly framed, was kicked out. Now he works for a crooked importer, using his knowledge of elven history to write provenances for the fake artifacts Salathgarad sells.

When the airship Wisdom of Choharo explodes, killing the emperor and three of his four sons, it takes with it Ulcetha's best friend, Mara Lilana. But Mara leaves behind a puzzle--the one thing Ulcetha can't resist. And the puzzle leads Ulcetha back to the Department of History... and maybe the chance to clear his name.]]> 120 Katherine Addison 1645242137 Ann 4 4.08 2025 The Orb of Cairado (The Chronicles of Osreth, #1.1)
author: Katherine Addison
name: Ann
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> The Oligarch's Daughter 212995906 From the New York Times bestselling author of House on Fire, a breakneck thriller that marries the dynastic opulence of Succession with the tense and disorienting spy craft of The Americans.

Paul Brightman is a man on the run, living under an assumed name in a small New England town with a million-dollar bounty on his head. When his security is breached, Paul is forced to flee into the New Hampshire wilderness to evade Russian operatives who can seemingly predict his every move.

Six years ago, Paul was a rising star on Wall Street who fell in love with a beautiful photographer named Tatyana—unaware that her father was a Russian oligarch and the object of considerable interest from several US intelligence agencies. Now, to save his own life, Paul must unravel a decades-old conspiracy that extends to the highest reaches of the government.

Rivaling the classic spy novels of the Cold War, The Oligarch’s Daughter is a breakneck thriller built for the frightening world we live in now.]]> 447 Joseph Finder 0063396025 Ann 3 4.14 2025 The Oligarch's Daughter
author: Joseph Finder
name: Ann
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> <![CDATA[Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home]]> 220160925 An exuberant, hilarious, and profound memoir by a mailman in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, who found that working for the post office saved his life, taught him who he was, gave him purpose, and educated him deeply about a country he loves but had lost touch with.

Steve Grant was laid off in March of 2020. He was fifty and had cancer, so he needed health insurance, fast. Which is how he found himself a rural letter carrier in Appalachia, back in his old hometown.

Suddenly, he was the guy with the goods, delivering dog food and respirators and lube and heirloom tomato seeds and Lord of the Rings replica swords. He transported chicken feed to grandmothers living alone in the mountains and forded a creek with a refrigerator on his back. But while he carried the mail, he also carried a whole lot more than just the mail, including a family legacy of rage and the anxiety of having lost his identity along with his corporate job.

And yet, slowly, surrounded by a ragtag but devoted band of letter carriers, working this different kind of job, Grant found himself becoming a different kind of person. He became a lifeline for lonely people, providing fleeting moments of human contact and the assurance that our government still cares. He embraced the thrill of tackling new challenges, the pride of contributing to something greater than himself, the joy of camaraderie, and the purpose found in working hard for his family and doing a small, good thing for his community. He even kindled a newfound faith.

A brash and loving portrait of an all-American institution, Mailman offers a deeply felt portrait of both rural America and the dedicated (and eccentric) letter carriers who keep our lives running smoothly day to day. One hell of a raconteur, Steve Grant has written an irreverent, heartfelt, and often hilarious tribute to the simple heroism of daily service, the dignity and struggle of blue-collar work, the challenge and pleasure of coming home again after twenty-five years away, and the delight of going the extra mile for your neighbors, every day.]]> 304 Stephen Starring Grant 1668018047 Ann 0 to-read 4.33 Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home
author: Stephen Starring Grant
name: Ann
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Tomb of Dragons (The Cemeteries of Amalo, #3)]]> 211492066
While his title may be gone, his duties are not. Celehar contends with a municipal cemetery with fifty years of secrets, the damage of a revethavar he’s terrified to remember, and a group of miners who are more than willing to trade Celehar’s life for a chance at what they feel they’re owed.

Celehar does not have to face these impossible tasks alone. Joining him are his mentee Velhiro Tomasaran, still finding her footing with the investigative nature of their job; Iäna Pel-Thenhior, his beloved opera director friend and avid supporter; and the valiant guard captain Hanu Olgarezh.

Amidst the backdrop of a murder and a brewing political uprising, Celehar must seek justice for those who cannot find it themselves under a tense political system. The repercussions of his quest are never as simple they seem, and Celehar’s own life and happiness hang in the balance.]]> 336 Katherine Addison 1250821010 Ann 5 4.62 2025 The Tomb of Dragons (The Cemeteries of Amalo, #3)
author: Katherine Addison
name: Ann
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/03/25
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]]> The Frozen River 56699106
Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.

Clever, layered, and subversive, Ariel Lawhon’s newest offering introduces an unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice at a time when women were considered best seen and not heard. The Frozen River is a thrilling, tense, and tender story about a remarkable woman who left an unparalleled legacy yet remains nearly forgotten to this day.]]> 432 Ariel Lawhon 0385546882 Ann 4 4.52 2023 The Frozen River
author: Ariel Lawhon
name: Ann
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
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]]> <![CDATA[In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin]]> 9938498
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the New Germany, she has one affair after another, including with the surprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition.

Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Goring and the expectedly charming—yet wholly sinister—Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.]]> 448 Erik Larson 0307408841 Ann 4 3.87 2011 In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
author: Erik Larson
name: Ann
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/16
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]]> Harlem Rhapsody 212807643 The extraordinary story of Jessie Redmon Fauset whose exhilarating world of friends, rivals, and passions all combined to create the magic that was the Harlem Renaissance, written by Victoria Christopher Murray, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Personal Librarian.
Ěý
In 1919, as civil and social unrest grips the country, there is a little corner of America, a place called Harlem where something special is stirring. Here, the New Negro is rising and Black pride is evident everywhere…in music, theatre, fashion and the arts. And there on stage in the center of this renaissance is Jessie Redmon Fauset, the new literary editor ofĚýthe preeminent Negro magazine The Crisis.
Ěý
W.E.B. Du Bois, the founder and editor of The Crisis, has charged her with discovering young writers whose words will change the world. Jessie attacks the challenge with fervor, quickly finding sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen, seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, who becomes one of her best friends.ĚýUnder Jessie’s leadership, The Crisis thrives, the writers become notable and magazine subscriptions soar. Every Negro writer in the country wants their work published in the magazine now known for its groundbreaking poetry and short stories.Ěý
Ěý
Jessie’s rising star is shining bright�.but her relationship with W.E.B. could jeopardize all that she’s built. The man, considered by most to be the leader of Black America, is not only Jessie’s boss, he’s her lover. And neither his wife, nor their fourteen-year-age difference can keep the two apart. Their torrid and tumultuous affair is complicated by a secret desire that Jessie harbors � to someday, herself, become the editor of the magazine, a position that only W.E.B. Du Bois has held.
Ěý
In the face of overwhelming sexism and racism, Jessie must balance her drive with her desires. However, as she strives to preserve her legacy, she’ll discover the high cost of her unparalleled success.]]> 395 Victoria Christopher Murray 0593638492 Ann 3 4.31 2025 Harlem Rhapsody
author: Victoria Christopher Murray
name: Ann
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
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]]> The Wolf Tree 213243921 A remote Scottish island hides shocking secrets in this page-turning debut mystery laced with dark folklore.

An island lost in time. A cryptic, pagan past. Some secrets should stay buried.

Eilean Eadar is a barren, windswept rock inhabited by a few hundred humans and sheep. Until now, the island was best known for the unsolved mystery of the three lighthouse keepers who vanished back in 1919. But when a young man is found dead at the base of the same lighthouse, two detective inspectors are sent from Glasgow to investigate.

Georgina â€Georgeâ€� Lennox is finally back from leave after a devastating accident and happy to be on the case with her partner, Richie Stewart. That is, until she meets the hostile islanders who seem determined to thwart their investigation, and their enigmatic, omnipresent priest who inserts himself into every interview. Then there’s Richie, who just wants to close the case and head home to his family. He doesn’t see that there is something off about the island and its tiny community. He hasn’t heard the wolves howling or seen the dark figures at their window at night. He’s too busy watching George as if waiting for her to break.

With the dark secrets of Eilean Eadar swirling around them, George and Richie must decide who to trust and what to believe as they spin closer to the terrible truth. Laced with Scottish legend, yet sharp and modern in voice, The Wolf Tree announces a spellbinding new voice in crime and mystery fiction.]]> 336 Laura McCluskey 0593852540 Ann 3 3.72 2025 The Wolf Tree
author: Laura McCluskey
name: Ann
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/05
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]]> Call Us What We Carry 56804007 The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman

Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, Amanda Gorman’s remarkable new collection reveals an energizing and unforgettable voice in American poetry. Call Us What We Carry is Gorman at her finest. Including “The Hill We Climb,� the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, and bursting with musical language and exploring themes of identity, grief, and memory, this lyric of hope and healing captures an important moment in our country’s consciousness while being utterly timeless.]]> 240 Amanda Gorman Ann 5 4.27 2021 Call Us What We Carry
author: Amanda Gorman
name: Ann
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
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]]> The God of the Woods 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

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

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore Ann 4 4.15 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Ann
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/25
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]]> <![CDATA[Murder on Black Swan Lane (Wrexford & Sloane, #1)]]> 33024254
The Earl of Wrexford possesses a brilliant scientific mind, but boredom and pride lead him to reckless behavior. He does not suffer fools gladly. So when pompous, pious Reverend Josiah Holworthy publicly condemns him for debauchery, Wrexford unsheathes his rapier-sharp wit and strikes back. As their war of words escalates, London’s most popular satirical cartoonist, A.J. Quill, skewers them both. But then the clergyman is found slain in a church—his face burned by chemicals, his throat slashed ear to ear—and Wrexford finds himself the chief suspect.]]> 340 Andrea Penrose 1496710770 Ann 3 3.78 2017 Murder on Black Swan Lane (Wrexford & Sloane, #1)
author: Andrea Penrose
name: Ann
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
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]]> <![CDATA[A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel (The Books of Earthsea)]]> 214504702 Ursula K. Le Guin’s timeless and revered A Wizard of Earthsea is reimagined in a richly expansive graphic novel by acclaimed artist Fred Fordham, creator of stunning adaptations To Kill a Mockingbird and Brave New World.

"The magic of Earthsea is primal; the lessons of Earthsea remain as potent, as wise, and as necessary as anyone could dream." —Neil Gaiman

Ged was the greatest sorcerer in Earthsea, but in his youth he was the reckless Sparrowhawk. In his hunger for power and knowledge, he tampered with long-held secrets and unleashed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tumultuous tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death's threshold to restore the balance.

Experience the bestselling first adventure of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle as a masterly crafted graphic novel. Fred Fordham brings new life to Le Guin's iconic fantasy classic with his breathtaking illustrations and thoughtful text adaptation.]]> 288 Fred Fordham 0063285762 Ann 0 to-read 4.04 2025 A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel (The Books of Earthsea)
author: Fred Fordham
name: Ann
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Lost Bookshop 65137920 The Keeper of Stories meets The Lost Apothecary in this evocative and charming novel full of mystery and secrets.

â€The thing about books,â€� she said â€is that they help you to imagine a life bigger and better than you could ever dream of.â€�

On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found�

For too long, Opaline, Martha and Henry have been the side characters in their own lives.

But when a vanishing bookshop casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as extraordinary as the ones found in the pages of their beloved books. And by unlocking the secrets of the shelves, they find themselves transported to a world of wonder� where nothing is as it seems.]]> 432 Evie Woods 0008609209 Ann 2 4.03 2023 The Lost Bookshop
author: Evie Woods
name: Ann
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/16
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]]> The Things They Carried 133518
The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.

Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.]]> 246 Tim O'Brien 0767902890 Ann 5 4.14 1990 The Things They Carried
author: Tim O'Brien
name: Ann
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1990
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/14
date added: 2025/02/14
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]]> Three Days in June 213243949 A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.

Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit.

But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.

Told with deep sensitivity and a tart sense of humor, full of the joys and heartbreaks of love and marriage and family life,ĚýThree Days in JuneĚýis a triumph, and gives us the perennially bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer at the height of her powers

]]> 165 Anne Tyler 0593803485 Ann 5 3.60 2025 Three Days in June
author: Anne Tyler
name: Ann
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/12
date added: 2025/02/12
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]]> All the Water in the World 211003759 In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York’s Museum of Natural History in a flooded future.

All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they've saved.

Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story—with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most � love and work, community and knowledge � will survive.]]> 304 Eiren Caffall 1250353521 Ann 4 3.55 2025 All the Water in the World
author: Eiren Caffall
name: Ann
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/12
date added: 2025/02/12
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]]> The Butchers' Blessing 51188676

The Butchers� Blessing moves between the events of 1996 and the present, offering a simmering glimpse into the modern tensions that surround these eight fabled men. For Úna, being a Butcher’s daughter means a life of tangled ambition and incredible loneliness. For her mother Grá, it’s a life of faith and longing, of performing a promise that she may or may not be able to keep. For non-believer Fionn, The Butchers represent a dated and complicated reality, though for his son Davey, they represent an entirely new world—and potentially new love. For photographer Ronan, The Butchers are ideal subjects: representatives of an older, more folkloric Ireland whose survival is now being tested. As he moves through the countryside, Ronan captures this world image by image—a lake, a cottage, and his most striking photo: a single butcher, hung upside-down in a pose of unspeakable violence.]]> 312 Ruth Gilligan 1947793780 Ann 4 3.86 2020 The Butchers' Blessing
author: Ruth Gilligan
name: Ann
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/09
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]]> This Motherless Land 203927997 From the acclaimed author ofĚýWahala,Ěýa “vibrantâ€� (Charmaine Wilkerson) retelling of Mansfield Park, exploring identity, culture, race, and love.

Quiet Funke is happy in Nigeria. She loves her art teacher mother, her professor father, and even her annoying little brother (most of the time). But when tragedy strikes, she’s sent to England, a place she knows only from her mother’s stories. To her dismay, she finds the much-lauded estate dilapidated, the food tasteless, the weather grey. Worse still, her mother’s family are cold and distant. With one exception: her cousin Liv.

Free-spirited Liv has always wanted to break free of her joyless family. She becomes fiercely protective of her little cousin, and her warmth and kindness give Funke a place to heal. The two girls grow into adulthood the closest of friends.

But the choices their mothers made haunt Funke and Liv, and when a second tragedy occurs their friendship is torn apart. Against the long shadow of their shared family history, each woman will struggle to chart a path forward, separated by country, misunderstanding, and ambition.

Moving between Somerset and Lagos over the course of two decades,ĚýThis Motherless LandĚýis a sweeping examination of identity, culture, race, and love that asks how we find belonging and whether a family’s generational wrongs can be righted.]]> 352 Nikki May 0063084317 Ann 3 4.41 2024 This Motherless Land
author: Nikki May
name: Ann
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/02/04
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]]> Motheater 211960914 In this nuanced queer fantasy set amid the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia, the last witch of the Ridge must choose sides in a clash between industry and nature.

After her best friend dies in a coal mine, Benethea “Bennie� Mattox sacrifices her job, her relationship, and her reputation to uncover what’s killing miners on Kire Mountain. When she finds a half-drowned white woman in a dirty mine slough, Bennie takes her in because it’s right—but also because she hopes this odd, magnetic stranger can lead her to the proof she needs. Instead, she brings more questions. The woman called Motheater can’t remember her true name, or how she ended up inside the mountain. She knows only that she’s a witch of Appalachia, bound to tor and holler, possum and snake, with power in her hands and Scripture on her tongue. But the mystery of her fate, her doomed quest to keep industry off Kire Mountain, and the promises she bent and broke have followed her a century and half into the future. And now, the choices Motheater and Bennie make together could change the face of the town itself.]]> 416 Linda H. Codega 1645661792 Ann 3 3.41 2025 Motheater
author: Linda H. Codega
name: Ann
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/02
date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> <![CDATA[A Mirror Mended (Fractured Fables, #2)]]> 58724595 A Mirror Mended is the next installment in USA Today bestselling author Alix E. Harrow's Fractured Fables series.

Zinnia Gray, professional fairy-tale fixer and lapsed Sleeping Beauty, is over rescuing snoring princesses. Once you’ve rescued a dozen damsels and burned fifty spindles, once you’ve gotten drunk with twenty good fairies and made out with one too many members of the royal family, you start to wish some of these girls would just get a grip and try solving their own narrative issues.

Just when Zinnia’s beginning to think she can't handle one more princess, she glances into a mirror and sees another face looking back at her: the shockingly gorgeous face of evil, asking for her help. Because there’s more than one person trapped in a story they didn’t choose. Snow White's Evil Queen has found out how her story ends, and she's desperate for a better ending. She wants Zinnia to help her before it’s too late for everyone. Will Zinnia accept the Queen's poisonous request and save them both from the hot-iron shoes that wait for them, or will she try another path?]]> 128 Alix E. Harrow 1250766648 Ann 3 3.72 2022 A Mirror Mended (Fractured Fables, #2)
author: Alix E. Harrow
name: Ann
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2022
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering]]> 216857785
Why is Miami…Miami? What does the heartbreaking fate of the cheetah tell us about the way we raise our children? Why do Ivy League schools care so much about sports? What is the Magic Third, and what does it mean for racial harmony? In this provocative new work, Malcolm Gladwell returns for the first time in twenty-five years to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time with the aim of explaining the dark side of contagious phenomena.

Through a series of riveting stories, Gladwell traces the rise of a new and troubling form of social engineering. He takes us to the streets of Los Angeles to meet the world’s most successful bank robbers, rediscovers a forgotten television show from the 1970s that changed the world, visits the site of a historic experiment on a tiny cul-de-sac in northern California, and offers an alternate history of two of the biggest epidemics of our day: COVID and the opioid crisis. Revenge of the Tipping Point is Gladwell’s most personal book yet. With his characteristic mix of storytelling and social science, he offers a guide to making sense of the contagions of modern world. It’s time we took tipping points seriously.]]> 352 Malcolm Gladwell 0316575801 Ann 3 4.03 2024 Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering
author: Malcolm Gladwell
name: Ann
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/01/25
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]]> The Resurrectionist 210531873 Historical fiction, true crime, and dark academia intertwine in a harrowing tale of murder, greed, and the grisly origins of modern medicine.

Edinburgh, Scotland, 1828. Naïve but determined James Willoughby has abandoned his posh, sheltered life at Oxford to pursue a lifelong dream of studying surgery in Edinburgh. A shining beacon of medical discovery in the age of New Enlightenment, the city’s university offers everything James desires—except the chance to work on a human cadaver.

For that he needs to join one of the private schools in Surgeon’s Square, at a cost he cannot afford. In desperation he strikes a deal with Aneurin “Nye� MacKinnon, a dashing young dissectionist with an artist’s eye for anatomy and a reckless passion for knowledge. Nye promises to help James gain the surgical experience he craves—but it doesn’t take long for James to realize he’s made a devil’s bargain... Nye is a body snatcher—and James has unwittingly become his accomplice.]]> 337 A. Rae Dunlap Ann 3 3.97 2024 The Resurrectionist
author: A. Rae Dunlap
name: Ann
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> <![CDATA[The Six Deaths of the Saint (Into Shadow, #3)]]> 62991463
Always mindful of the debt she owes, the girl finds her worth as a weapon in the hand of the Prince. Her victories make him a king, then an emperor. The bards sing her name and her enemies fear it. But the war never ends and the cost keeps rising—how many times will she repeat her own story?]]> 31 Alix E. Harrow 166250957X Ann 5 4.32 2022 The Six Deaths of the Saint (Into Shadow, #3)
author: Alix E. Harrow
name: Ann
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
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]]> Brooklyn (Eilis Lacey, #1) 4954833 Hauntingly beautiful and heartbreaking, Colm TĂłibĂ­n's sixth novel, Brooklyn, is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself.

Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America--to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland"--she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian from a big family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. He talks of having children who are Dodgers fans. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.]]> 262 Colm TĂłibĂ­n 1439138311 Ann 3 3.71 2009 Brooklyn (Eilis Lacey, #1)
author: Colm TĂłibĂ­n
name: Ann
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/10
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]]> The Glassmaker 202167720
It is 1486 and Venice is a wealthy, opulent center for trade. Orsola Rosso is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers in Murano, the island revered for the craft. As a woman, she is not meant to work with glass—but she has the hands for it, the heart, and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make beads in secret, and her work supports the Rosso family fortunes.

Skipping like a stone through the centuries, in a Venice where time moves as slowly as molten glass, we follow Orsola and her family as they live through creative triumph and heartbreaking loss, from a plague devastating Venice to Continental soldiers stripping its palazzos bare, from the domination of Murano and its maestros to the transformation of the city of trade into a city of tourists. In every era, the Rosso women ensure that their work, and their bonds, endure.

Chevalier is a master of her own craft, and The Glassmaker is as inventive as it is a mesmerizing portrait of a woman, a family, and a city that are as everlasting as their glass.]]> 416 Tracy Chevalier 0525558276 Ann 3 3.86 2024 The Glassmaker
author: Tracy Chevalier
name: Ann
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/06
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I love historical fiction and I love time travel books, but this mash-up didn’t quite work for me. I really liked the detail of early glassmaking and daily life in 15th century Venice, but the jumps in time felt forced and gimmicky.
]]> <![CDATA[The Voyage Home (Women of Troy, #3)]]> 59427493
Continuing the story of the captured Trojan women as they set sail for Mycenae with the victorious Greeks, this new novel centres on the fate of Cassandra -- daughter of King Priam, priestess of Apollo, and a prophet condemned never to be heeded. (When she refuses to have sex with Apollo, after he has kissed her, granting her the gift of true prophecy, he spits in her mouth to make sure she will never be believed.)

Psychologically complex and dangerously driven, Cassandra's arrival in Mycenae will set in motion a bloody train of events, drawing in King Agamemnon, his wife Clytemnestra and daughter Electra. Agamemnon's triumphant return from Troy is far from the celebration he imagined, and the fate of the Trojan women as uncertain as they had feared.]]> 320 Pat Barker 0241568269 Ann 4 3.98 2024 The Voyage Home (Women of Troy, #3)
author: Pat Barker
name: Ann
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> <![CDATA[The Murder of Mr. Ma (A Dee and Lao Mystery Book 1)]]> 182775425 Two unlikely allies race through the cobbled streets of 1920s London in search of a killer targeting Chinese immigrants.

London, 1924. When shy academic Lao She meets larger-than-life Judge Dee Ren Jie, his quiet life abruptly turns from books and lectures to daring chases and narrow escapes. Dee has come to London to investigate the murder of a man he’d known during World War I when serving with the Chinese Labour Corps. No sooner has Dee interviewed the grieving widow than another dead body turns up. Then another. All stabbed to death with a butterfly sword. Will Dee and Lao be able to connect the threads of the murders—or are they next in line as victims?

Blending traditional gong’an crime fiction with the most iconic aspects of the Sherlock Holmes canon, Dee and Lao’s first adventure is as thrilling and visual as an action film, as imaginative and transportive as a timeless classic.]]> 272 John Shen Yen Nee 1641295503 Ann 4 3.93 2024 The Murder of Mr. Ma (A Dee and Lao Mystery Book 1)
author: John Shen Yen Nee
name: Ann
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
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]]> The Secret War of Julia Child 203751793
Single, 6 foot 2, and thirty years old, Julia McWilliams took a job working for America's first espionage agency, years before cooking or Paris entered the picture.ĚýThe Secret War of Julia Child traces Julia's transformation from ambitious Pasadena blue blood to Washington, DC file clerk, to head of General "Wild Bill" Donovan's secret File Registry as part of the Office of Strategic Services.Ěý

TheĚýwartime journey takes her to the Far East, to Asia's remote frontlines of then-Ceylon, India, and China, where she finds purpose, adventure, self-knowledge â€� and love with mapmaker Paul Child.ĚýThe spotlight has rarely shone on this fascinating period of time in the life of ("I'm not a spy") Julia Child, and this lyrical story allows us to explore the unlikely world of a woman in World War II spy station who has no idea of the impact she'll eventually impart.]]> 389 Diana R. Chambers 1464219044 Ann 3 3.52 2024 The Secret War of Julia Child
author: Diana R. Chambers
name: Ann
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/11
date added: 2024/12/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania]]> 24356669 #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER â€� From theĚýbestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania“Both terrifying and enthralling.”—Entertainment Weeklyâ€�Thrilling, dramatic and powerful.â€�—N±Ę¸éâ€�Thoroughly engrossing.â€�—George R.R. MartinOn May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era’s great transatlantic “Greyhounds”—the fastest liner then in service—and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack.ĚýGermany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but told no one. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small—hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and more—all converged to produce one of the great disasters of history. It is a story that many of us think we know but don’t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love.Ěý Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster whose intimate details and true meaning have long been obscured by history.Finalist for the Washington State Book Award â€� One of the Best Books of the The Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Miami Herald, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, LibraryReads, Indigo]]> 482 Erik Larson 0553446754 Ann 5 4.26 2015 Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
author: Erik Larson
name: Ann
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/28
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]]> Mansfield Park 45032 488 Jane Austen Ann 4 3.86 1814 Mansfield Park
author: Jane Austen
name: Ann
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1814
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/11/27
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]]> <![CDATA[The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook]]> 191746386
On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution . Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment?

Hampton Sides� bravura account of Cook’s last journey both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s. Cook was renowned for his peerless seamanship, his humane leadership, and his dedication to science-–the famed naturalist Joseph Banks accompanied him on his first voyage, and Cook has been called one of the most important figures of the Age of Enlightenment. He was also deeply interested in the native people he encountered. In fact, his stated mission was to return a Tahitian man, Mai, who had become the toast of London, to his home islands. On previous expeditions, Cook mapped huge swaths of the Pacific, including the east coast of Australia, and initiated first European contact with numerous peoples. He treated his crew well, and endeavored to learn about the societies he encountered with curiosity and without judgment.

Yet something was different on this last voyage. Cook became mercurial, resorting to the lash to enforce discipline, and led his two vessels into danger time and again. Uncharacteristically, he ordered violent retaliation for perceived theft on the part of native peoples. This may have had something to do with his secret orders, which were to chart and claim lands before Britain’s imperial rivals could, and to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. Whatever Cook’s intentions, his scientific efforts were the sharp edge of the colonial sword, and the ultimate effects of first contact were catastrophic for Indigenous people around the world. The tensions between Cook’s overt and covert missions came to a head on the shores of Hawaii. His first landing there was harmonious, but when Cook returned after mapping the coast of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, his exploitative treatment of the Hawaiians led to the fatal encounter.

At once a ferociously-paced story of adventure on the high seas and a searching examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration, THE WIDE WIDE SEA is a major work from one of our finest narrative nonfiction writers.]]> 408 Hampton Sides 0385544766 Ann 4 4.47 2024 The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook
author: Hampton Sides
name: Ann
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/24
date added: 2024/11/24
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]]> <![CDATA[The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science]]> 213689250 The acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Galileo’s Daughter crafts a luminous chronicle of the life and work of the most famous woman in the history of science, and the untold story of the many young women trained in her laboratory who were launched into stellar scientific careers of their own

“Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist most people can name,� writes Dava Sobel at the opening of her shining portrait of the sole Nobel laureate decorated in two separate fields of science—Physics in 1903 with her husband Pierre and Chemistry by herself in 1911. And yet, Sobel makes clear, as brilliant and creative as she was in the laboratory, Marie Curie was equally passionate outside it. Grieving Pierre’s untimely death in 1906, she took his place as professor of physics at the Sorbonne; devotedly raised two brilliant daughters; drove a van she outfitted with x-ray equipment to the front lines of World War I; befriended Albert Einstein and other luminaries of twentieth-century physics; won support from two U.S. presidents; and inspired generations of young women the world over to pursue science as a way of life.

As Sobel did so memorably in her portrait of Galileo through the prism of his daughter, she approaches Marie Curie from a unique angle, narrating her remarkable life of discovery and fame alongside the women who became her legacy—from France’s Marguerite Perey, who discovered the element francium, and Norway’s Ellen Gleditsch, to Mme. Curie’s elder daughter, Irène, winner of the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For decades the only woman in the room at international scientific gatherings that probed new theories about the interior of the atom, Marie Curie traveled far and wide, despite constant illness, to share the secrets of radioactivity, a term she coined. Her two triumphant tours of the United States won her admirers for her modesty even as she was mobbed at every stop; her daughters, in Ăve’s later recollection, “discovered all at once what the retiring woman with whom they had always lived meant to the world.â€�

With the consummate skill that made bestsellers of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, and the appreciation for women in science at the heart of her most recent The Glass Universe, Dava Sobel has crafted a radiant biography and a masterpiece of storytelling, illuminating the life and enduring influence of one of the most consequential figures of our time.]]> 337 Dava Sobel 0802163831 Ann 4 4.13 2024 The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science
author: Dava Sobel
name: Ann
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/13
date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> On Bullshit 385
Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.

Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.]]> 67 Harry G. Frankfurt 0691122946 Ann 0 to-read 3.58 2005 On Bullshit
author: Harry G. Frankfurt
name: Ann
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/09
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]]> <![CDATA[Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin]]> 8161006 482 Hampton Sides Ann 5 4.50 2010 Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin
author: Hampton Sides
name: Ann
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/03
date added: 2024/11/03
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]]> <![CDATA[The More the Terrier: An Andy Carpenter Mystery]]> 204159147 The next installment in David Rosenfelt’s bestselling Andy Carpenter series brings a lone pup to his doorstep, but when it comes to dogs, The More the Terrier.

Reluctant lawyer Andy Carpenter is relieved to be headed back to Paterson, New Jersey, after a week-long family vacation in the Adirondacks. He's ready to put the holly jolly season way behind him and settle in at home with his three dogs. But when they finally arrive, there is an extra dog eagerly awaiting them, as well as one anxious dog sitter.

When the dog showed up on the doorstep a few days ago, the sitter knew Andy would know what to do. Indeed, Andy recognizes Murphy, who the Carpenters fostered before the dog went home with BJ Bremer and his mother. BJ wanted to learn all he could about caring for Murphy, which made Andy like him immediately.

When Andy goes to take Murphy back to the Bremers, though, instead of the happy reunion he expects, he finds BJ's mother in tears. It turns out Murphy ran off…after BJ was arrested for murder. Andy had hoped for a quiet Christmas vacation, but he likes Murphy’s family and his golden retriever, Tara, likes Murphy, so he can't resist getting involved. The case isn’t as simple as Andy thought it would be, though, with BJ suspected of murdering one of his professors. With nothing to go on but Andy's own conviction in BJ's dog-loving character, proving his innocence would be a Christmas miracle.

With equal doses of doggy humor and courtroom drama, as well as Andy Carpenter's traditional humbug Christmas spirit, David Rosenfelt delivers another winner.]]> 299 David Rosenfelt 1250324556 Ann 3 4.61 The More the Terrier: An Andy Carpenter Mystery
author: David Rosenfelt
name: Ann
average rating: 4.61
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/30
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]]> <![CDATA[No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters]]> 33503495 From acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin, and with an introduction by Karen Joy Fowler, a collection of thoughts—always adroit, often acerbic—on aging, belief, the state of literature, and the state of the nation.

Ursula K. Le Guin has taken readers to imaginary worlds for decades. Now she’s in the last great frontier of life, old age, and exploring new literary territory: the blog, a forum where her voice—sharp, witty, as compassionate as it is critical—shines. No Time to Spare collects the best of Ursula’s blog, presenting perfectly crystallized dispatches on what matters to her now, her concerns with this world, and her wonder at it.Ěý Ěý

On the absurdity of denying your age, she says, If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub. On cultural perceptions of fantasy: The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is â€escapismâ€� an accusation of? On her new cat: He still won’t sit on a lap…I don’t know if he ever will. He just doesn’t accept the lap hypothesis. On breakfast: Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice, but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime. And on all that is unknown, all that we discover as we muddle through life: How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.]]> 215 Ursula K. Le Guin 1328661598 Ann 4 3.99 2017 No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Ann
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/27
date added: 2024/10/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants]]> 17465709 Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.]]> 408 Robin Wall Kimmerer 1571313354 Ann 3 4.52 2013 Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Ann
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/26
date added: 2024/10/26
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]]> North Woods 71872930
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire.ĚýA crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?]]> 372 Daniel Mason 0593597036 Ann 4 4.11 2023 North Woods
author: Daniel Mason
name: Ann
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/22
date added: 2024/10/22
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]]> Martyr! 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Ann 3 4.22 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Ann
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/12
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]]> Searching for Caleb 233904
Through the syncopated rhythms of the ragtime era to the thumping, rocking beats of the 1970s, generations of Pecks have maintained a determined steadiness. Adamantly middle class—Peck-proud, as the family slogan goes—they are quick to sweep under the rug those members who do not live up to their standards. Maybe that’s why Caleb Peck took off with his violincello as a boy? Sixty years later, his brother Daniel is still wondering. No longer willing to live without answers, he turns to his daughter-in-law, Justine, another Peck family eccentric. A studied tarot card reader, Justine comes across one message over and over in the change is coming. With Daniel’s help, she’s hoping to find the courage to embrace whatever happens next.

An unlikely pair struggling against a stifling family, Daniel and Justine believe they’ll find freedom in just the right mix of magic, music, and mystery.]]> 328 Anne Tyler 0449911748 Ann 4 3.89 1975 Searching for Caleb
author: Anne Tyler
name: Ann
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1975
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/08
date added: 2024/10/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Confronting the Presidents: No Spin Assessments from Washington to Biden]]> 203947303 Every American president, from Washington to Their lives, policies, foibles, and legacies, assessed with clear-eyed authority and wit.

Authors of the acclaimed Killing books, the #1 bestselling narrative history series in the world, Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard begin a new direction with Confronting the Presidents.

From Washington to Jefferson, Lincoln to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Kennedy to Nixon, Reagan to Obama and Biden, the 45 United States presidents have left lasting impacts on our nation. Some of their legacies continue today, some are justly forgotten, and some have changed as America has changed. Whether famous, infamous, or obscure, all the presidents shaped our nation in unexpected ways.

The authors' extensive research has uncovered never before seen historical facts based on private correspondence and newly discovered documentation, such as George Washington's troubled relationship with his mother.

In Confronting the Presidents, O’Reilly and Dugard present 45 wonderfully entertaining and insightful portraits of each president, with no-spin commentary on their achievements—or lack thereof. Who best served America, and who undermined the founding ideals? Who were the first ladies, and what were their surprising roles in making history? Which presidents were the best, which the worst, and which didn’t have much impact? How do decisions made in one era, under the pressure of particular circumstances, still resonate today? And what do presidents like to eat, drink, and do when they aren’t working—or even sometimes when they are?

These and many more questions are answered in each fascinating chapter of Confronting the Presidents. Written with O’Reilly and Dugard’s signature style, authority, and eye for telling detail, Confronting the Presidents will delight all readers of history, politics, and current affairs, especially during the 2024 election season.]]> 419 Bill O'Reilly 1250346436 Ann 3 4.44 2024 Confronting the Presidents: No Spin Assessments from Washington to Biden
author: Bill O'Reilly
name: Ann
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/05
date added: 2024/10/05
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]]> <![CDATA[Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)]]> 204811915 People) of a novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.

With her remarkable insight into the human condition and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more—as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?�

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known—“unrecorded lives,� Olive calls them—reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”]]> 326 Elizabeth Strout 0593446097 Ann 5 3.98 2024 Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Ann
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/01
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]]> Year of Wonders 4965
Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition.

As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love.

As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders."

Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. ]]> 304 Geraldine Brooks 0142001430 Ann 3 4.00 2001 Year of Wonders
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Ann
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/09/29
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Four stars for the first 3/4 of the book, two stars for the rest, which felt like the author was tired of the story she was writing and decided to go a completely different direction all of a sudden.
]]> The War Pianist 61308309
July, 1940

Blitz-ridden London: Marnie Fern’s life is torn apart when her grandfather is killed in an air raid. But once she discovers that he’d been working undercover as a radio operative � or Pianist � for the Dutch resistance, Marnie knows she must complete his mission � no matter the cost�

Nazi-occupied Amsterdam: At the other end of the wireless, fellow pianist Corrie Bakker is caught in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse as she desperately tries to keep her loved ones out of the line of fire � even if it means sacrificing herself�

Bound together by the invisible wires of their radios, the two women lead parallel lives in their home cities, as both are betrayed by those they trust the most. But when the Nazis close in on one of them, only the other can save her�

Two cities. Two spies. But which woman survives?]]> 400 Mandy Robotham 0008453454 Ann 3 4.33 2023 The War Pianist
author: Mandy Robotham
name: Ann
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/09/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Death at the Sign of the Rook (Jackson Brodie, #6)]]> 203164357 The stage is set. Marooned overnight by a snowstorm in a grand country house are a cast of characters and a setting that even Agatha Christie might recognize â€� a vicar, an Army major, a Dowager, a sleuth and his sidekick - except that the sleuth is Jackson Brodie, and the â€sidekickâ€� is DC Reggie Chase.

The crumbling house - Burton Makepeace and its chatelaine the Dowager Lady Milton - suffered the loss of their last remaining painting of any value, a Turner, some years ago. The housekeeper, Sophie, who disappeared the same night, is suspected of stealing it.

Jackson, a reluctant hostage to the snowstorm, has been investigating the theft of another The Woman with a Weasel, a portrait, taken from the house of an elderly widow, on the morning she died. The suspect this time is the widow’s carer, Melanie. Is this a coincidence or is there a connection? And what secrets does The Woman with a Weasel hold? The puzzle is Jackson’s to solve. And let’s not forget that a convicted murderer is on the run on the moors around Burton Makepeace.

All the while, in a bid to make money, Burton Makepeace is determined to keep hosting a shambolic Murder Mystery that acts as a backdrop while the real drama is being played out in the house.

A brilliantly plotted, supremely entertaining, and utterly compulsive tour de force from a great writer at the height of her powers.]]> 320 Kate Atkinson 0385547994 Ann 4 3.69 2024 Death at the Sign of the Rook (Jackson Brodie, #6)
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Ann
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/24
date added: 2024/09/24
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A total farce, without being at all ridiculous. It has plenty of laugh out loud moments, but still suspense, human emotion, and danger - it is a Jackson Brodie murder mystery, after all. I want to read it all over again, just to savor the story building.
]]> Empire of the Summer Moon 7648269 In the tradition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a stunningly vivid historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West, centering on Quanah, the greatest Comanche chief of them all.

S. C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches.

Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined just how and when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. So effective were the Comanches that they forced the creation of the Texas Rangers and account for the advent of the new weapon specifically designed to fight them: the six-gun.

The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. Gwynne’s exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads—a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being.

Against this backdrop Gwynne presents the compelling drama of Cynthia Ann Parker, a lovely nine-year-old girl with cornflower-blue eyes who was kidnapped by Comanches from the far Texas frontier in 1836. She grew to love her captors and became infamous as the "White Squaw" who refused to return until her tragic capture by Texas Rangers in 1860. More famous still was her son Quanah, a warrior who was never defeated and whose guerrilla wars in the Texas Panhandle made him a legend.

S. C. Gwynne’s account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told.

]]> 371 S.C. Gwynne 1416591052 Ann 4 4.22 2010 Empire of the Summer Moon
author: S.C. Gwynne
name: Ann
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/15
date added: 2024/09/15
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]]> Violeta 57933338 The epic story of Violeta del Valle, a woman whose life spans one hundred years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century.

Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family of five boisterous sons. From the start, her life will be marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth.

Through her father's prescience, the family will come through that crisis unscathed, only to face a new one as the Great Depression transforms the genteel city life she has known. Her family loses all and is forced to retreat to a wild and beautiful but remote part of the country. There, she will come of age, and her first suitor will come calling. . . .

She tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others, recounting devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, times of both poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy. Her life will be shaped by some of the most important events of history: the fight for women's rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and, ultimately, not one but two pandemics.

Told through the eyes of a woman whose unforgettable passion, determination, and sense of humor will carry her through a lifetime of upheaval, Isabel Allende once more brings us an epic that is both fiercely inspiring and deeply emotional.]]> 322 Isabel Allende 0593496205 Ann 3 3.97 2022 Violeta
author: Isabel Allende
name: Ann
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/11
date added: 2024/09/11
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]]> There Are Rivers in the Sky 202468422 From the Booker Prize finalist author of The Island of Missing Trees, an enchanting new tale about three characters living along two rivers, all under the shadow of one of the greatest epic poems of all time.

In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives.

In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.

In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.

In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.

A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, a drop which remanifests across the centuries. Both a source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.�]]> 464 Elif Shafak 0593801717 Ann 4 4.38 2024 There Are Rivers in the Sky
author: Elif Shafak
name: Ann
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/02
date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> Navola 199927764
"You must be as sharp as a stilettotore’s dagger and as subtle as a fish beneath the waters. This is what it is to be Navolese, this is what it is to be di Regulai."

In Navola, a bustling city-state dominated by a handful of influential families, business is power, and power is everything. For generations, the di Regulai family—merchant bankers with a vast empire—has nurtured tendrils that stretch to the farthest reaches of the known world. And though they claim not to be political, their staggering wealth has bought cities and toppled kingdoms. Soon, Davico di Regulai will be expected to take the reins of power from his father and demonstrate his mastery of the games of Navolese knowing who to trust and who to doubt, and how to read what lies hidden behind a smile. But in Navola, strange and ancient undercurrents lurk behind the gilt and grandeur—like the fossilized dragon eye in the family’s possession, a potent symbol of their raw power and a talisman that seems to be summoning Davico to act.

As tensions rise and the events unfold, Davico will be tested to his limits. His fate depends on the eldritch dragon relic and on what lies buried in the heart of his adopted sister, Celia di Balcosi, whose own family was destroyed by Nalova’s twisted politics. With echoes of Renaissance Italy, The Godfather , and Game of Thrones , Navola is a stunning feat of world-building and a mesmerizing depiction of drive and will.]]> 576 Paolo Bacigalupi 0593535057 Ann 2 3.79 2024 Navola
author: Paolo Bacigalupi
name: Ann
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/27
date added: 2024/08/28
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2.5 stars. It was compelling, but ultimately felt like Game of Thrones light. The main character was spoiled and whiny for 80% of the book and all of the other characters (especially the females) were totally two dimensional.
]]> The English Understand Wool 59468833 Maman was exigeante—there is no English word–and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.

Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge’s, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?]]> 69 Helen DeWitt 0811230074 Ann 5 4.06 2022 The English Understand Wool
author: Helen DeWitt
name: Ann
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/18
date added: 2024/08/23
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If I could give this 6 stars, I would! How does she pack so much into 70 pages? Dewitt conveys a complete backstory, plus plenty of biting social commentary, using few words and a detached, old fashioned writing style. I loved every word!
]]> Hamnet 43890641 Hamnet is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child.

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

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

A New York Times Notable Book (2020), Best Book of 2020: Guardian, Financial Times, Literary Hub, and NPR.]]> 372 Maggie O'Farrell 1472223799 Ann 4 4.16 2020 Hamnet
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Ann
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/22
date added: 2024/08/22
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]]> The Violin Conspiracy 58386733 A mystery about a Black classical musician whose family heirloom violin is stolen on the eve of the most prestigious classical music competition in the world.

Ray McMillian loves playing the violin more than anything, and nothing will stop him from pursuing his dream of becoming a professional musician. Not his mother, who thinks he should get a real job, not the fact that he can't afford a high-caliber violin, not the racism inherent in the classical music world. And when he makes the startling discovery that his great-grandfather's fiddle is actually a priceless Stradivarius, his star begins to rise. Then with the international Tchaikovsky Competition—the Olympics of classical music—fast approaching, his prized family heirloom is stolen. Ray is determined to get it back. But now his family and the descendants of the man who once enslaved Ray's great-grandfather are each claiming that the violin belongs to them. With the odds stacked against him and the pressure mounting, will Ray ever see his beloved violin again?]]> 345 Brendan Slocumb 0593315413 Ann 3 4.06 2022 The Violin Conspiracy
author: Brendan Slocumb
name: Ann
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves:
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Compelling story and lots of wonderfully nerdy details about music and the classical performance world. However, all but the main character were very two dimensional and the ending just felt forced.
]]> All the Sinners Bleed 61884832 A Black sheriff. A serial killer. A small town ready to combust.

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

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

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

Powerful and unforgettable, All the Sinners Bleed confirms S. A. Cosby as “one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction� (The Washington Post).]]> 338 S.A. Cosby 1250831911 Ann 4 4.18 2023 All the Sinners Bleed
author: S.A. Cosby
name: Ann
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/17
date added: 2024/08/17
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]]> The Dead Cat Tail Assassins 126918054 The Dead Cat Tail Assassins are not cats.

Nor do they have tails.

But they are most assuredly dead.

Nebula and Alex Award winner P. Djèlí Clark introduces a brand new world and a fantastical city full of gods and assassins. 2024.

Eveen the Eviscerator is skilled, discreet, professional, and here for your most pressing needs in the ancient city of Tal Abisi. Her guild is strong, her blades are sharp, and her rules are simple. Those sworn to the Matron of Assassins—resurrected, deadly, wiped of their memories—have only three unbreakable vows.

First, the contract must be just. That’s above Eveen’s pay grade.

Second, even the most powerful assassin may only kill the contracted. Eveen’s a professional. She’s never missed her mark.

The third and the simplest: once you accept a job, you must carry it out. And if you stray? A ď¬nal death would be a mercy. When the Festival of the Clockwork King turns the city upside down, Eveen’s newest mission brings her face-to-face with a past she isn’t supposed to remember and a vow she can’t forget.]]> 208 P. DjèlĂ­ Clark Ann 5 4.01 2024 The Dead Cat Tail Assassins
author: P. Djèlí Clark
name: Ann
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/15
date added: 2024/08/15
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]]> The Act of Disappearing 146145936 —Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue

“A thrilling story, remarkably told.�
—Lara Prescott, New York Times bestselling author of The Secrets We Kept

Julia White is struggling: her bartending job isn’t cutting it and her first book has sold hardly any copies. She’s broke, barely able to make ends meet while drowning in her late mother’s medical bills and reeling after a one-night stand with her ex-boyfriend, who’s now completely ghosted her. Enter Johnathan Aster, world-renowned photographer, with a proposal: he has a never-before-seen photograph of a woman falling from a train bridge, clutching what appears to be a baby. And he wants Julia to research the story.

Alternating between present-day Brooklyn and Kentucky as it enters the 1960s, the story unfolds as Julia races to find answers: Who was the woman in the photograph? Why was she on the bridge? And what happened to the baby? Each detail is more propulsive than the last as Julia unravels the mystery surrounding the Fairchilds of Gray Station and discovers a story more staggering than anything she could have imagined.]]> 400 Nathan Gower 0778369544 Ann 4 4.27 2024 The Act of Disappearing
author: Nathan Gower
name: Ann
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/14
date added: 2024/08/14
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]]> The Briar Club 181110045 A haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, D.C. boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.

Washington, D.C., 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital, where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; police officer’s daughter Nora, who is entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Bea, whose career has ended along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears apart the house, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: Who is the true enemy in their midst?]]> 432 Kate Quinn 0063244748 Ann 4 4.26 2024 The Briar Club
author: Kate Quinn
name: Ann
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/10
date added: 2024/08/10
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]]> The Night Ship 59366231
1629: A newly orphaned young girl named Mayken is bound for the Dutch East Indies on the Batavia , one of the greatest ships of the Dutch Golden Age. Curious and mischievous, Mayken spends the long journey going on misadventures above and below the deck, searching for a mythical monster. But the true monsters might be closer than she thinks.

1989: A lonely boy named Gil is sent to live off the coast of Western Australia among the seasonal fishing community where his late mother once resided. There, on the tiny reef-shrouded island, he discovers the story of an infamous shipwreck�

With her trademark “thrilling, mysterious, twisted, but more than anything, beautifully written� (Graham Norton, New York Times bestselling author) storytelling, Jess Kidd weaves “a true work of magic� (V.E. Schwab, author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue ) about friendship, sacrifice, brutality, and forgiveness.]]> 400 Jess Kidd 1982180811 Ann 3 3.61 2022 The Night Ship
author: Jess Kidd
name: Ann
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/06
date added: 2024/08/06
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]]> The Berry Pickers 123036004 A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that haunts the survivors, unravels a community, and remains unsolved for nearly fifty years.

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

For readers of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.]]> 307 Amanda Peters 1646221958 Ann 4 4.04 2023 The Berry Pickers
author: Amanda Peters
name: Ann
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/01
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]]> <![CDATA[The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder]]> 61714633 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

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

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

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.]]> 331 David Grann 0385534264 Ann 4 4.14 2023 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
author: David Grann
name: Ann
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/30
date added: 2024/07/30
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]]> <![CDATA[The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America]]> 62919746
When Judith Jones began working at Doubleday’s Paris office in 1949, the twenty-five-year-old spent most of her time wading through manuscripts in the slush pile until one caught her eye. She read the book in one sitting, then begged her boss to consider publishing it. A year later, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl became a bestseller. It was the start of a culture defining career in publishing.

Over more than half a century as an editor at Knopf, Jones became a legend, nurturing future literary icons such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. At the forefront of the cookbook revolution, she published the who’s who of food: Edna Lewis, M.F.K. Fisher, Madhur Jaffrey, James Beard, and, most famously, Julia Child. Jones celebrated culinary diversity, forever changing the way Americans think about food.

Her work spanned the decades of America’s most dramatic cultural change. From the end of World War II through the Cold War; from the civil rights movement to the fight for women’s equality, Jones’s work questioned convention, using books as a tool of quiet resistance.

Now, her astonishing and career is explored for the first time. Based on exclusive interviews, never-before-seen personal papers, and years of research, The Editor tells the riveting behind-the scenes-narrative of how stories are made, finally bringing to light the audacious life of one of our most influential tastemakers.]]> 336 Sara B. Franklin 1982134348 Ann 5 4.21 The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America
author: Sara B. Franklin
name: Ann
average rating: 4.21
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rating: 5
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]]> Westport 199408564 351 James B. Comey 1613165242 Ann 4 3.78 2024 Westport
author: James B. Comey
name: Ann
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/20
date added: 2024/07/20
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]]> <![CDATA[Life Without Children: Stories]]> 59727187 A brilliantly warm and witty portrait of our pandemic lives, told in ten heartrending short stories, from the Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

Love and marriage. Children and family. Death and grief. Life touches everyone the same. But living under lockdown, it changes us alone.

In these ten beautifully moving short stories written mostly over the last year, Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle paints a collective portrait of our strange times. A man abroad wanders the stag-and-hen-strewn streets of Newcastle, as news of the virus at home asks him to question his next move. An exhausted nurse struggles to let go, having lost a much-loved patient in isolation. A middle-aged son, barred from his mother's funeral, wakes to an oncoming hangover of regret.

Told with Doyle's signature warmth, wit, and extraordinary eye for the richness that underpins the quiet of our lives, Life Without Children cuts to the heart of how we are all navigating loss, loneliness, and the shifting of history underneath our feet.]]> 190 Roddy Doyle Ann 4 3.48 2021 Life Without Children: Stories
author: Roddy Doyle
name: Ann
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/08
date added: 2024/07/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club]]> 196845474 Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

It is the summer of 1919 and Constance Haverhill is without prospects. Now that all the men have returned from the front, she has been asked to give up her cottage and her job at the estate she helped run during the war. While she looks for a position as a bookkeeper or—horror—a governess, she’s sent as a lady’s companion to an old family friend who is convalescing at a seaside hotel. Despite having only weeks to find a permanent home, Constance is swept up in the social whirl of Hazelbourne-on-Sea after she rescues the local baronet’s daughter, Poppy Wirrall, from a social faux pas.

Poppy wears trousers, operates a taxi and delivery service to employ local women, and runs a ladies� motorcycle club (to which she plans to add flying lessons). She and her friends enthusiastically welcome Constance into their circle. And then there is Harris, Poppy’s recalcitrant but handsome brother—a fighter pilot recently wounded in battle—who warms in Constance’s presence. But things are more complicated than they seem in this sunny pocket of English high society. As the country prepares to celebrate its hard-won peace, Constance and the women of the club are forced to confront the fact that the freedoms they gained during the war are being revoked.

Whip-smart and utterly transportive, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club is historical fiction of the highest order: an unforgettable coming-of-age story, a tender romance, and a portrait of a nation on the brink of change.]]> 432 Helen Simonson 1984801317 Ann 3 3.84 2024 The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club
author: Helen Simonson
name: Ann
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/30
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]]> The Ministry of Time 199798179 A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all: Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kaliane Bradley.

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats� from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge�: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as �1847� or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,� “Spotify,� and “the collapse of the British Empire.� But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.

An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks: What does it mean to defy history, when history is living in your house? Kaliane Bradley’s answer is a blazing, unforgettable testament to what we owe each other in a changing world.]]> 339 Kaliane Bradley 1668045141 Ann 3 3.54 2024 The Ministry of Time
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Ann
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[The Last Murder at the End of the World]]> 136276877
Outside the island there is nothing: the world was destroyed by a fog that swept the planet, killing anyone it touched.

On the island: it is idyllic. One hundred and twenty-two villagers and three scientists, living in peaceful harmony. The villagers are content to fish, farm and feast, to obey their nightly curfew, to do what they're told by the scientists.

Until, to the horror of the islanders, one of their beloved scientists is found brutally stabbed to death. And then they learn that the murder has triggered a lowering of the security system around the island, the only thing that was keeping the fog at bay. If the murder isn't solved within 107 hours, the fog will smother the island—and everyone on it.

But the security system has also wiped everyone's memories of exactly what happened the night before, which means that someone on the island is a murderer—and they don't even know it.

And the clock is ticking.

From the bestselling author of The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and The Devil and the Dark Water comes an inventive, high-concept murder mystery: an ingenious puzzle, an extraordinary backdrop, and an audacious solution.]]> 368 Stuart Turton Ann 2 3.63 2024 The Last Murder at the End of the World
author: Stuart Turton
name: Ann
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/06/18
date added: 2024/06/18
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]]> Silk: A World History 181110043 304 Aarathi Prasad 0063160250 Ann 5 3.61 Silk: A World History
author: Aarathi Prasad
name: Ann
average rating: 3.61
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/15
date added: 2024/06/15
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]]> The Great Divide 183542441
It is said that the canal will be the greatest feat of engineering in history. But first, it must be built. For Francisco, a local fisherman who resents the foreign powers clamoring for a slice of his country, nothing is more upsetting than the decision of his son, Omar, to work as a digger in the excavation zone. But for Omar, whose upbringing was quiet and lonely, this job offers a chance to finally find connection.

Ada Bunting is a bold sixteen-year-old from Barbados who arrives in Panama as a stowaway alongside thousands of other West Indians seeking work. Alone and with no resources, she is determined to find a job that will earn enough money for her ailing sister’s surgery. When she sees a young man—Omar—who has collapsed after a grueling shift, she is the only one who rushes to his aid.

John Oswald has dedicated his life to scientific research and has journeyed to Panama in single-minded pursuit of one goal: eliminating malaria. But now, his wife, Marian, has fallen ill herself, and when he witnesses Ada’s bravery and compassion, he hires her on the spot as a caregiver. This fateful decision sets in motion a sweeping tale of ambition, loyalty, and sacrifice.

Searing and empathetic, The Great Divide explores the intersecting lives of activists, fishmongers, laborers, journalists, neighbors, doctors, and soothsayers—those rarely acknowledged by history even as they carved out its course.]]> 336 Cristina Henríquez 0063291347 Ann 4 3.91 2024 The Great Divide
author: Cristina HenrĂ­quez
name: Ann
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/06
date added: 2024/06/06
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]]> Long Island (Eilis Lacey, #2) 199798868 New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work, twenty years later.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis� life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.]]> 294 Colm Tóibín 1476785112 Ann 4 3.68 2024 Long Island (Eilis Lacey, #2)
author: Colm TĂłibĂ­n
name: Ann
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/24
date added: 2024/05/24
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]]> Nuclear War: A Scenario 182733784
Every generation, a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment: the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These investigations are vital to how we understand the world we really live in—where one nuclear missile will beget one in return, and where the choreography of the world’s end requires massive decisions made on seconds� notice with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario explores this ticking-clock scenario, based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made. Nuclear War: A Scenario examines the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch. It is essential reading, and unlike any other book in its depth and urgency.]]> 400 Annie Jacobsen 0593476093 Ann 5 4.37 2024 Nuclear War: A Scenario
author: Annie Jacobsen
name: Ann
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/05/19
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This book should be required reading for every adult in the U.S., particularly those who did not grow up during the Cold War. This stuff is no joke and no amount of “duck and cover� will protect us from the horrors that can be unleashed in moments by a few power crazy men. Jacobsen has done an incredible amount of research and paints a scenario that is as believable as it is sobering. We would do well to pay attention.
]]> Table for Two 195474144 From the bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility, a richly detailed and sharply drawn collection of stories set in New York and Los Angeles. The millions of readers of Amor Towles are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter six stories set in New York City and a novella in Los Angeles. The New York stories, most of which are set around the turn of the millennium, take up everything from the death-defying acrobatics of the male ego, to the fateful consequences of brief encounters, and the delicate mechanics of compromise which operate at the heart of modern marriages. In Towles’s novel, Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September, 1938, with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood� describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself—and others—in the midst of Hollywood’s golden age. Throughout the stories, two characters often find themselves sitting across a table for two where the direction of their futures may hinge upon what they say to each other next. Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting historical fiction.]]> 451 Amor Towles 0593296370 Ann 5 4.15 2024 Table for Two
author: Amor Towles
name: Ann
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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]]> Clear 176443690
Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies's intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.]]> 196 Carys Davies 1668030667 Ann 4 3.85 Clear
author: Carys Davies
name: Ann
average rating: 3.85
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/10
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Ann 4 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Ann
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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]]> I Cheerfully Refuse 198276006 I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of Rainy, an aspiring musician setting sail on Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. An endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, he seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs, and remote islands of the inland sea. After encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, he eventually lands to find an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, a crumbled infrastructure, and a lawless society. As his guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy’s private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his wake.]]> 336 Leif Enger 0802162932 Ann 4 3.95 2024 I Cheerfully Refuse
author: Leif Enger
name: Ann
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/02
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]]> Hard by a Great Forest 145624505
“My mother stayed, so that we could go.�

Having fled conflict in the former-Soviet Republic of Georgia as children, Saba and his brother have fought to make peace with the past. In particular, they struggle with the sacrifices of a mother who remained in a war zone so that their father could get them out. Now, years later, the brothers are young adults, their mother is dead, and their father has been lured back to their beautiful, decaying homeland � only to disappear. Then Saba’s older brother, chasing after their missing father, vanishes too.

Left alone to figure out what has happened and to find his family, Saba sets off on his own urgent, haunted search across his homeland. Accompanied by new friends and old ghosts as he follows a breadcrumb trail of clues, he must wrestle the present from the past as he crosses into the kind of danger zones â€� both physical and emotional â€� that he thought he had left behind.Ěý

Harrowing and tender but leavened with humor and an appreciation for the absurd, Hard by a Great Forest offers a unique story about traumas of war felt even decades after the fighting, and the long-term effects on those families driven not just to survive, but to remember.]]> 352 Leo Vardiashvili 0593545036 Ann 4 3.85 2024 Hard by a Great Forest
author: Leo Vardiashvili
name: Ann
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/28
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]]> Rules of Civility 10054335 335 Amor Towles Ann 3 4.06 2011 Rules of Civility
author: Amor Towles
name: Ann
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2011
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/04/24
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]]> The Familiar 133286777 From the New York Times bestselling author of Ninth House, Hell Bent, and creator of the Grishaverse series comes a highly anticipated historical fantasy set during the Spanish Golden Age

In a shabby house, on a shabby street, in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic to get through her days of endless toil as a scullion. But when her scheming mistress discovers the lump of a servant cowering in the kitchen is actually hiding a talent for little miracles, she demands Luzia use those gifts to better the family's social position.

What begins as simple amusement for the bored nobility takes a perilous turn when Luzia garners the notice of Antonio Pérez, the disgraced secretary to Spain's king. Still reeling from the defeat of his armada, the king is desperate for any advantage in the war against England's heretic queen—and Pérez will stop at nothing to regain the king's favor.

Determined to seize this one chance to better her fortunes, Luzia plunges into a world of seers and alchemists, holy men and hucksters, where the line between magic, science, and fraud is never certain. But as her notoriety grows, so does the danger that her Jewish blood will doom her to the Inquisition's wrath. She will have to use every bit of her wit and will to survive—even if that means enlisting the help of Guillén Santangel, an embittered immortal familiar whose own secrets could prove deadly for them both.]]> 387 Leigh Bardugo 125088425X Ann 5 3.74 2024 The Familiar
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Ann
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/23
date added: 2024/04/23
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]]> The Jane Austen Project 32930819
London England, 1815: Two travelers—Rachel Katzman and Liam Finucane—arrive in a field, disheveled and weighed down with hidden money. They are not what they seem, but colleagues from a technologically advanced future, posing as a doctor and his spinster sister. While Rachel and Liam aren’t the first team of time travelers, their mission is the most audacious yet: meet, befriend, and steal from Jane Austen.

Carefully selected and rigorously trained by The Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics, disaster-relief doctor Rachel and actor-turned-scholar Liam have little in common excerpt their extraordinary circumstances. Circumstances that call for Rachel to stifle her independent nature and let Liam take the lead as they infiltrate Austen’s circle via her favorite brother, Henry.

But diagnosing Jane’s fatal illness and obtaining an unpublished novel hinted at in her letters pose enough of a challenge without the convolutions of living a lie. While her friendship with Jane deepens and her relationship with Liam grows complicated, Rachel fights to reconcile her true self with the constrictions of 19th century society. As their portal to the future prepares to close, Rachel and Liam struggle with their directive to leave history as they found it…however heartbreaking that proves.]]> 384 Kathleen A. Flynn Ann 3 3.68 2017 The Jane Austen Project
author: Kathleen A. Flynn
name: Ann
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/18
date added: 2024/04/18
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]]> Fifty Words for Rain 49691870
Kyoto, Japan, 1948. "If a woman knows nothing else, she should know how to be silent. . . . Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist." Such is eight-year-old Noriko "Nori" Kamiza's first lesson. She will not question why her mother abandoned her with only these final words. She will not fight her confinement to the attic of her grandparents' imperial estate. And she will not resist the scalding chemical baths she receives daily to lighten her shameful skin.

The illegitimate child of a Japanese aristocrat and her African American GI lover, Nori is an outsider from birth. Though her grandparents take her in, they do so only to conceal her, fearful of a stain on the royal pedigree that they are desperate to uphold in a changing Japan. Obedient to a fault, Nori accepts her solitary life for what it is, despite her natural intellect and nagging curiosity about what lies outside the attic's walls. But when chance brings her legitimate older half-brother, Akira, to the estate that is his inheritance and destiny, Nori finds in him the first person who will allow her to question, and the siblings form an unlikely but powerful bond—a bond their formidable grandparents cannot allow and that will irrevocably change the lives they were always meant to lead. Because now that Nori has glimpsed a world in which perhaps there is a place for her after all, she is ready to fight to be a part of it—a battle that just might cost her everything.

Spanning decades and continents, Fifty Words for Rain is a dazzling epic about the ties that bind, the ties that give you strength, and what it means to try to break free.]]> 449 Asha Lemmie 1524746363 Ann 1 3.79 2020 Fifty Words for Rain
author: Asha Lemmie
name: Ann
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2020
rating: 1
read at: 2024/04/11
date added: 2024/04/11
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What the heck did I just read? To say this book is like a soap opera is unfair to soap operas. Two dimensional characters, tragedy after pointless tragedy, lack of research into the culture of this place and time, and a completely preposterous ending.
]]> The Weeds 60784664 Two women, connected across time, edge toward transgression in pursuit of their desires.

A Mississippi woman pushes through the ruin of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. She has escaped her life, apprenticed herself to catalog all the species growing in this place. Crawling along the stones, she wonders how she has landed here, a reluctant botanist amid a snarl of tourists in comfortable sandals. She hunts for a scientific agenda and a direction of her own.

In 1855, a woman pushes through the jungle of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. As punishment for her misbehavior, she has been indentured to the English botanist Richard Deakin, for whom she will compile a flora. She is a thief, and she must find new ways to use her hands. If only the woman she loves weren’t on a boat, with a husband. But love isn’t always possible. She logs 420 species.

Through a list of seemingly minor plants and their uses—medical, agricultural, culinary—these women calculate intangible threats: a changing climate, the cost of knowledge, and the ways repeated violence can upend women’s lives. They must forge their own small acts of defiance and slip through whatever cracks they find. How can anyone survive?

Lush, intoxicating, and teeming with mischief, Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds is a tense, mesmerizing page-turner about science and survival, the roles women are given and have taken from them, and the lives they make for themselves.]]> 320 Katy Simpson Smith 0374605475 Ann 2 3.54 2023 The Weeds
author: Katy Simpson Smith
name: Ann
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/04/07
date added: 2024/04/07
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]]> Wandering Stars 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 Ann 4 3.83 2024 Wandering Stars
author: Tommy Orange
name: Ann
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/05
date added: 2024/04/05
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]]> <![CDATA[The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration]]> 8171378
Wilkerson tells this interwoven story through the lives of three unforgettable protagonists: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, who in 1937 fled Mississippi for Chicago; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of making it in California.

Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World. The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration� within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is a modern classic.]]> 622 Isabel Wilkerson 0679444327 Ann 5 4.45 2010 The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
author: Isabel Wilkerson
name: Ann
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/02
date added: 2024/04/02
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]]> The Ferryman 205064676 New York Times bestselling author of The Passage comes a riveting standalone novel about a group of survivors on a hidden island utopia--where the truth isn't what it seems.

Founded by a mysterious genius, the archipelago of Prospera lies hidden from the horrors of a deteriorating outside world. In this island paradise, Prospera's lucky citizens enjoy long, fulfilling lives until the monitors embedded in their forearms, meant to measure their physical health and psychological well-being, fall below 10 percent. Then they retire themselves, embarking on a ferry ride to the island known as the Nursery, where their failing bodies are renewed, their memories are wiped clean, and they are readied to restart life afresh.

Proctor Bennett, of the Department of Social Contracts, has a satisfying career as a ferryman, gently shepherding people through the retirement process--and, when necessary, enforcing it. But all is not well with Proctor. For one thing, he's been dreaming--which is supposed to be impossible in Prospera. For another, his monitor percentage has begun to drop alarmingly fast. And then comes the day he is summoned to retire his own father, who gives him a disturbing and cryptic message before being wrestled onto the ferry.

Meanwhile, something is stirring. The Support Staff, ordinary men and women who provide the labor to keep Prospera running, have begun to question their place in the social order. Unrest is building, and there are rumors spreading of a resistance group--known as "Arrivalists"--who may be fomenting revolution.

Soon Proctor finds himself questioning everything he once believed, entangled with a much bigger cause than he realized--and on a desperate mission to uncover the truth.]]> 560 Justin Cronin 0525619496 Ann 0 to-read 3.83 2023 The Ferryman
author: Justin Cronin
name: Ann
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/02
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]]> The Phoenix Crown 61047464 From bestselling authors Kate Quinn and Janie Chang, a thrilling and unforgettable narrative about the intertwined lives of two wronged women, spanning from the chaos of the San Francisco earthquake to the glittering palaces of Versailles.

San Francisco, 1906. In a city bustling with newly minted millionaires and scheming upstarts, two very different women hope to change their fortunes: Gemma, a golden-haired, silver-voiced soprano whose career desperately needs rekindling, and Suling, a petite and resolute Chinatown embroideress who is determined to escape an arranged marriage. Their paths cross when they are drawn into the orbit of Henry Thornton, a charming railroad magnate whose extraordinary collection of Chinese antiques includes the fabled Phoenix Crown, a legendary relic of Beijing’s fallen Summer Palace.

His patronage offers Gemma and Suling the chance of a lifetime, but their lives are thrown into turmoil when a devastating earthquake rips San Francisco apart and Thornton disappears, leaving behind a mystery reaching further than anyone could have imagined . . . Until the Phoenix Crown reappears five years later at a sumptuous Paris costume ball, drawing Gemma and Suling together in one last desperate quest for justice.]]> 384 Kate Quinn 0063304724 Ann 4 4.10 2024 The Phoenix Crown
author: Kate Quinn
name: Ann
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/24
date added: 2024/03/24
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]]> The House of Broken Angels 59064050 The definitive Mexican-American immigrant story, a sprawling and deeply felt portrait of a Mexican-American family occasioned by the impending loss of its patriarch, from one of the country's most beloved authors.

Prizewinning and bestselling writer Luis Urrea has written his Mexican coming-to-America story and his masterpiece. Destined to sit alongside other classic immigrant novels, The House of Broken Angels is a sprawling and epic family saga helmed by patriarch Big Angel. The novel gathers together the entire De La Cruz clan, as they meet for the final birthday party Big Angel is throwing for himself, at home in San Diego, as he nears the end of his struggle with cancer and reflects on his long and full life.

But when Big Angel's mother, Mama America, approaching one hundred, dies herself as the party nears, he must plan her funeral as well. There will be two family affairs in one weekend: a farewell double-header. Among the attendants is his half-brother and namesake, Little Angel, who comes face to face with the siblings with whom he shared a father but not, as the weekend proceeds to remind him, a life.

This story of the De La Cruzes is the story of what it means to be a Mexican in America, to have lived two lives across one border. It is a tale of the ravaging power of death to shore up the bits of life you have forgotten, whether by choice or not. Above all, this finely wrought portrait of a deeply complex family and the America they have come to call home is Urrea at his purest and best. Teeming with brilliance and humor, authentic at every turn, The House of Broken Angels cements his reputation as a storyteller of the first rank.]]> 259 Luis Alberto Urrea Ann 5 4.11 2018 The House of Broken Angels
author: Luis Alberto Urrea
name: Ann
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/19
date added: 2024/03/19
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]]> Good Night, Irene 74896889
This “powerful, uplifting, and deeply personalĚýnovelâ€� Ěý(Kristin Hannah, #1Ěý NYTĚý bestselling author ofĚý The Four Winds ), at onceĚý“a heart-wrenching wartime drama”Ě�(Christina Baker Kline, #1Ěý NYTĚý bestselling author ofĚý Orphan Train ) and “a moving and graceful tribute to heroic womenâ€� ( Publishers Weekly , starred review), asks the What if a friendship forged on the front lines of war defines a life forever?

In the tradition of Ěý The Nightingale Ěý and Ěý Transcription , this is a searing epic based on the magnificent and true story of courageousĚýRed Cross women. “Urrea’s touch is sure, his exuberance carries you through . . . He is a generous writer, not just in his approach to his craft but in the broader sense of what he feels necessary to capture about life itself.â€� â€� Financial Times In 1943, Irene Woodward abandons an abusive fiancĂ© in New York to enlist with the Red Cross and head to Europe. She makes fast friends in training with Dorothy Dunford, a towering Midwesterner with a ferocious wit. Together they are part of an elite group of women, nicknamed Donut Dollies, who command military vehicles called Clubmobiles at the front line, providing camaraderie and a taste of home that may be the only solace before troops head into battle.
ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý
After D-Day, these two intrepid friends join the Allied soldiers streaming into France. Their time in Europe will see them embroiled in danger, from the Battle of the Bulge to the liberation of Buchenwald. Through her friendship with Dorothy, and a love affair with a courageous American fighter pilot named Hans, Irene learns to trust again. Her most fervent hope, which becomes more precarious by the day, is for all three of them to survive the war intact.
Ěý
Taking as inspiration his mother’s own Red Cross service, Luis Alberto Urrea has delivered an overlooked story of women’s heroism in World War II. With its affecting and uplifting portrait of friendship and valor in harrowing circumstances, Good Night, Irene powerfully demonstrates yet again that Urrea’s “gifts as a storyteller are prodigious� (NPR).]]> 465 Luis Alberto Urrea Ann 5 4.37 2023 Good Night, Irene
author: Luis Alberto Urrea
name: Ann
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/15
date added: 2024/03/15
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]]> The Island of Sea Women 41459660 THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A mesmerizing new historical novel� (O, The Oprah Magazine) from Lisa See, the bestselling author of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, about female friendship and devastating family secrets on a small Korean island.Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends who come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook’s mother. As the girls take up their positions as baby divers, they know they are beginning a life of excitement and responsibility—but also danger. Despite their love for each other, Mi-ja and Young-sook find it impossible to ignore their differences. The Island of Sea Women takes place over many decades, beginning during a period of Japanese colonialism in the 1930s and 1940s, followed by World War II, the Korean War, through the era of cell phones and wet suits for the women divers. Throughout this time, the residents of Jeju find themselves caught between warring empires. Mi-ja is the daughter of a Japanese collaborator. Young-sook was born into a long line of haenyeo and will inherit her mother’s position leading the divers in their village. Little do the two friends know that forces outside their control will push their friendship to the breaking point. “This vivid…thoughtful and empathetic� novel (The New York Times Book Review) illuminates a world turned upside down, one where the women are in charge and the men take care of the children. “A wonderful ode to a truly singular group of women� (Publishers Weekly), The Island of Sea Women is a “beautiful story…about the endurance of friendship when it’s pushed to its limits, and you…will love it� (Cosmopolitan).]]> 383 Lisa See Ann 4 4.41 2019 The Island of Sea Women
author: Lisa See
name: Ann
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/11
date added: 2024/03/11
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]]> <![CDATA[The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan #1)]]> 150249463
In Daretana’s greatest mansion, a high imperial officer lies dead—killed, to all appearances, when a tree erupted from his body. Even here at the Empire’s borders, where contagions abound and the blood of the leviathans works strange magical changes, it’s a death both terrifying and impossible.

Assigned to investigate is Ana Dolabra, a detective whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities. Rumor has it that she wears a blindfold at all times, and that she can solve impossible cases without even stepping outside the walls of her home.

At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol, magically altered in ways that make him the perfect aide to Ana’s brilliance. Din is at turns scandalized, perplexed, and utterly infuriated by his new superior—but as the case unfolds and he watches Ana’s mind leap from one startling deduction to the next, he must admit that she is, indeed, the Empire’s greatest detective.

As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens the Empire itself, Din realizes he’s barely begun to assemble the puzzle that is Ana Dolabra—and wonders how long he’ll be able to keep his own secrets safe from her piercing intellect.

By an “endlessly inventive� (Vulture) author with a “wicked sense of humor� (NPR), The Tainted Cup mixes the charms of detective fiction with brilliant world-building to deliver a fiendishly clever mystery that’s at once instantly recognizable and thrillingly new.]]> 410 Robert Jackson Bennett 1984820729 Ann 4 4.41 2024 The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan #1)
author: Robert Jackson Bennett
name: Ann
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/07
date added: 2024/03/07
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]]> The Fox Wife 127278666 Some people think foxes are similar to ghosts because we go around collecting qi, but nothing could be further than the truth. We are living creatures, just like you, only usually better looking . . .

Manchuria, 1908.
In the last years of the dying Qing Empire, a courtesan is found frozen in a doorway. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and handsome men. Bao, a detective with an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman’s identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they’ve remained tantalizingly out of reach—until, perhaps, now.

Meanwhile, a family who owns a famous Chinese medicine shop can cure ailments but can’t escape the curse that afflicts them—their eldest sons die before their twenty-fourth birthdays. When a disruptively winsome servant named Snow enters their household, the family’s luck seems to change—or does it?

Snow is a creature of many secrets, but most of all she’s a mother seeking vengeance for her lost child. Hunting a murderer, she will follow the trail from northern China to Japan, while Bao follows doggedly behind. Navigating the myths and misconceptions of fox spirits, both Snow and Bao will encounter old friends and new foes, even as more deaths occur.

New York Times bestselling author Yangsze Choo brilliantly explores a world of mortals and spirits, humans and beasts, and their dazzling intersection. Epic in scope and full of singular, unforgettable characters, The Fox Wife is a stunning novel about old loves and second chances, the depths of maternal love, and ancient folktales that may very well be true.]]> 390 Yangsze Choo 1250266017 Ann 3 3.97 2024 The Fox Wife
author: Yangsze Choo
name: Ann
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/02/25
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]]> Ordinary Grace 15803059 “That was it. That was all of it. A grace so ordinary there was no reason at all to remember it. Yet I have never across the forty years since it was spoken forgotten a single word.�

New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold root beers were selling out at the soda counter of Halderson’s Drugstore, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay on every barbershop magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a new, young president. But for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum it was a grim summer in which death visited frequently and assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder.

Frank begins the season preoccupied with the concerns of any teenage boy, but when tragedy unexpectedly strikes his family—which includes his Methodist minister father; his passionate, artistic mother; Juilliard-bound older sister; and wise-beyond-his-years kid brother—he finds himself thrust into an adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal, suddenly called upon to demonstrate a maturity and gumption beyond his years.

Told from Frank’s perspective forty years after that fateful summer, Ordinary Grace is a brilliantly moving account of a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling apart around him. It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.]]> 307 William Kent Krueger 1451645821 Ann 5 4.23 2013 Ordinary Grace
author: William Kent Krueger
name: Ann
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/20
date added: 2024/02/20
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]]>