en-US Sun, 06 Apr 2025 13:55:52 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 213974078 From critically acclaimed author Nicole Galland, a vibrant and thought-provoking historical tale of love, political intrigue, and gender-swapping set in the theatre world of Elizabethan London.

Alexander “Sander� Cooke is the most celebrated “boy player� in the Chamberlain’s Men, William Shakespeare’s theatre company. Indeed, Sander’s androgynous beauty and deft portrayal of female roles have made him the toast of London, and his companionship is sought by noblewomen and -men alike. And yet, now at the height of his fame, he teeters on the cusp of adulthood, his future uncertain. Often, he wishes he could stop time and remain a boy forever.

Joan Buckler, Sander’s best friend, also has a dream. Though unschooled, she is whip-smart and fascinated by the snippets of natural philosophy to which she’s been exposed. And while she senses that Sander’s admiration for her is more than mere friendship, Joan’s true passion is knowledge, something that is nearly impossible for her to attain. As a woman, she has no place in the intellectual salons and cultural community of the day; only in disguise can she learn to her heart’s content.

Joan’s covert intellectual endeavors, coupled with Sander’s theatrical triumphs, attract the attention of none other than Francis Bacon: natural philosopher and trusted adviser to Queen Elizabeth. It is through their connection with Bacon—one of the greatest minds of their time—that their lives will be changed forever as they become embroiled in an intricate game of political intrigue that threatens their very survival.

Brimming with heart, curiosity, and rich historical detail,Ěýµţ´Ç˛âĚýoffers an intimate glimpse of the moral complexities of a singular artistic era, and the roles we all choose to play on the world’s stage.]]> 352 Nicole Galland 0063342855 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.94 2025
author: Nicole Galland
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 31933450
Bill ten Boom has walked out on everything he thought was important to him: his career, his wife, even his country. Invited to become a prosecutor at The Hague’s International Criminal Court, it was a chance to start afresh.

But when his first case is to examine the disappearance of four hundred Roma refugees � an apparent war crime left unsolved for ten years � it’s clear this new life won’t be an easy one . . .

Whispered rumours have the perpetrators ranging from Serb paramilitaries to the U.S. Army, but there’s no hard evidence to hold either accountable, and only a single witness to say it happened at all.

To get to the truth, Boom must question the integrity of every person linked to the case � from Layton Merriwell, a disgraced US Major General, to flirtatious barrister, Esma Czarni � as it soon becomes apparent that every party has a vested interest and no qualms in steering the investigation their way . . .]]> 416 Scott Turow 1478971045 Deborah 3 3.51 2008
author: Scott Turow
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2017/07/10
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves:
review:

]]> 42202117 Now a limited Netflix series starring Zoe Saldana!

This Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick and New York Times bestseller is “a captivating story of love lost and found� (Kirkus Reviews) set in the lush Sicilian countryside, where one woman discovers the healing powers of food, family, and unexpected grace in her darkest hours.

It was love at first sight when actress Tembi met professional chef, Saro, on a street in Florence. There was just one problem: Saro’s traditional Sicilian family did not approve of his marrying a black American woman. However, the couple, heartbroken but undeterred, forged on. They built a happy life in Los Angeles, with fulfilling careers, deep friendships, and the love of their lives: a baby girl they adopted at birth. Eventually, they reconciled with Saro’s family just as he faced a formidable cancer that would consume all their dreams.

From Scratch chronicles three summers Tembi spends in Sicily with her daughter, Zoela, as she begins to piece together a life without her husband in his tiny hometown hamlet of farmers. Where once Tembi was estranged from Saro’s family, now she finds solace and nourishment—literally and spiritually—at her mother-in-law’s table. In the Sicilian countryside, she discovers the healing gifts of simple fresh food, the embrace of a close knit community, and timeless traditions and wisdom that light a path forward. All along the way she reflects on her and Saro’s romance—an incredible love story that leaps off the pages.

In Sicily, it is said that every story begins with a marriage or a death—in Tembi Locke’s case, it is both. “Locke’s raw and heartfelt memoir will uplift readers suffering from the loss of their own loved ones� (Publishers Weekly), but her story is also about love, finding a home, and chasing flavor as an act of remembrance. From Scratch is for anyone who has dared to reach for big love, fought for what mattered most, and those who needed a powerful reminder that life is...delicious.]]> 339 Tembi Locke 1501187651 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.94 2019
author: Tembi Locke
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 228136996 There, There meets Winter Counts in this gripping literary debut about power and corruption, love lost and gained, and the importance of facing one’s past head on.

Mitch Caddo started out with the best of intentions. After his mother’s sudden death in a car crash, he finished law school and returned to Passage Rouge—the reservation where he grew up—hoping to represent disadvantaged families in tribal court. But that was before he got sucked into the world of Mack Plum, his charismatic childhood friend. Before Mack ran and won the race for Tribal President as an underdog populist. Before they compromised their morals to keep Mack at the head of the tribal council. And before he came face to face once again with his teenage flame, Layla Plum—none other than Mack’s sister.

Now, on the eve of Passage Rouge’s next tribal election, Mitch finds himself torn between two rivals. He’s unsettled by his own complicity in Mack’s abuse of power, but he doesn’t quite trust Mack’s opponent, Gloria Hawkins, a nationally known activist and politician—whose campaign happens to be run by Layla. But when an accident claims the life of a central figure in the reservation’s complicated political landscape, the election descends into chaos, and Mitch and Layla find themselves trying to stop the tribe’s slide towards all-out violence while doing their best to correct the wrongs of the past.

Compelling and timely, Big Chief is an unforgettable story that What would you do if the very problems you sought to fix consumed you? It’s about the search for belonging, not just as an individual, but as a sovereign people at a moment of great historical importance.]]> 320 Jon Hickey 0771015496 Deborah 0 to-read 0.0 2025
author: Jon Hickey
name: Deborah
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 202608190
In an isolated outport on Newfoundland's northern coastline, Abe Strapp is about to marry the daughter of a rival merchant to cement his hold on the shore when the Widow Caines arrives to throw the wedding and Abe's plans into chaos.
Ěý Ěý That ruthless act of sabotage is the opening salvo in a battle between the man and woman who own Mockbeggar's largest mercantile firms, each fighting for the scarce resources of the north Atlantic fishery, each seeking a measure of revenge on the person they despise most in the world. As their unshakeable animosity spirals further each year into vendettas and violence, the community is increasingly divided and even the innocents in Mockbeggar find themselves forced to take sides, with devastating consequences.
Ěý Ěý Through merciless seasons of uncertainty and want, through predatory storms and pandemics and marauding privateers, it is the human heart that reveals itself to be the most formidable and unpredictable adversary for each person drawn, inevitably and helplessly, into that endless feud.
Ěý Ěý Compulsively readable and uncompromising, The Adversary is a pitch-perfect evocation of a lost time, and a shadowed mirror to our modern politics of grievance and retribution. It is Michael Crummey's finest novel to date.]]> Michael Crummey 1039008909 Deborah 0 currently-reading This historical fiction set in a Newfoundland outport in the late 1700s revisits the same time and place as Crummey’s remarkable preceding novel, The Innocents. It is not for the faint of heart in its depiction of the brutal struggle between the two wealthiest merchants of the area to gain the ascendancy. Their power is virtually absolute over the locals (whose impoverished lives are indeed nasty, brutish and short), and in their unflagging focus on besting each other, they are entirely unconcerned about the devastation and damage inflicted on those around them. This book was compulsively readable in its portrayal of larger-than-life characters locked in a mortal struggle. Oh, did I mention that they are siblings? And, oh dang, I’ve neglected to say they’re brother and sister, haven’t I? I wanted to admire the sister, who was a couple of centuries ahead of her time. Intelligent and capable, educated in running her father’s business in spite of the strong objections of his manager, adopting male dress to the shock of scandalized locals, only to lose all to her oafish younger brother upon her father’s death. But she just couldn’t be liked, as she was even more ruthless and terrible than her disgusting brother. A brilliant book without anyone to like, as the tragedy unfurls like a slow-motion trainwreck.]]> 3.64 2023
author: Michael Crummey
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/18
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

This historical fiction set in a Newfoundland outport in the late 1700s revisits the same time and place as Crummey’s remarkable preceding novel, The Innocents. It is not for the faint of heart in its depiction of the brutal struggle between the two wealthiest merchants of the area to gain the ascendancy. Their power is virtually absolute over the locals (whose impoverished lives are indeed nasty, brutish and short), and in their unflagging focus on besting each other, they are entirely unconcerned about the devastation and damage inflicted on those around them. This book was compulsively readable in its portrayal of larger-than-life characters locked in a mortal struggle. Oh, did I mention that they are siblings? And, oh dang, I’ve neglected to say they’re brother and sister, haven’t I? I wanted to admire the sister, who was a couple of centuries ahead of her time. Intelligent and capable, educated in running her father’s business in spite of the strong objections of his manager, adopting male dress to the shock of scandalized locals, only to lose all to her oafish younger brother upon her father’s death. But she just couldn’t be liked, as she was even more ruthless and terrible than her disgusting brother. A brilliant book without anyone to like, as the tragedy unfurls like a slow-motion trainwreck.
]]> 214565614 A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.

A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.]]> 448 Stephen Graham Jones 1668075083 Deborah 0 currently-reading 4.30 2025
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 230235863 Carpet specialist Dorothy Armstrong tells the stories surrounding twelve of the world’s most fascinating carpets.

Dorothy Armstrong’s Threads of Empire is a spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets. Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world’s 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status. And yet these seductive objects are made by poor and illiterate weavers, using the most basic materials and crafts; hedgerow plants for dyes, fibers from domestic animals, and the millennia-old skills of interweaving warps, wefts and knots.

In Threads of Empire, Armstrong tells the histories of some of the world’s most fascinating carpets, exploring how these textiles came into being then were transformed as they moved across geography and time in the slipstream of the great. She shows why the world’s powerful were drawn to them, but also asks what was happening in the weavers� lives, and how they were affected by events in the world outside their tent, village or workshop. In its wide-ranging examination of these dazzling objects, from the 5th century BCE contents of the tombs of Scythian chieftains, to the carpets under the boots of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the 1945 Yalta Peace Conference, Threads of Empire uncovers a new, hitherto hidden past right beneath our feet.]]> 320 Dorothy Armstrong Deborah 0 to-read 4.00
author: Dorothy Armstrong
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213730826 From the award-winning novelist, a ravishing new novel set between London and rural Australia, both a love story and a ghost story.

Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he is still here, he watches his girlfriend Hannah lost in grief in the apartment they shared and begins to realize how much of her life was invisible to him.

In the weeks and months before Max’s death, Hannah was haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seemed to offer the potential of a fresh new chapter, but the past refused to stay hidden. It found expression in the untold stories of the people she grew up with, and the events that broke her family apart and led her to Max.

Both a celebration and autopsy of a relationship, spanning multiple generations, The Echoes is a novel about love and grief, motherhood and sisterhood, secrets and who has the right to reveal them—what of our past can be cast away and what is fixed forever, echoing down through the years.]]> 234 Evie Wyld 1101871911 Deborah 4
If this barebones description makes it all sound a grim mess, the novel is anything but. It’s a beautifully constructed and written and ultimately sensitive exploration of the lasting effect, over generations, of abuse. Gorgeous, really, with a redemptive arc.]]> 3.83 2024
author: Evie Wyld
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves:
review:
This evocative novel travels between rural Australia and London and is filled with the echoes and ghosts of the past. Max and Hannah make their home in a London flat until Max is killed suddenly. His ghost returns to the flat and watches, helpless to intervene, as Hannah is consumed by grief, where Max realizes he knew almost nothing of Hannah’s girlhood in Australia. There, she’d lived in The Echoes, so-called by the locals, on the truly haunted grounds of an abandoned girls� school, where generations of sorrowing and suffering aboriginal children were held against their will and had white education crammed into them. Indeed, the very ground is full of the bones of children who were murdered with no one ever held to account. This novel is already full of various hauntings and echoes of the past, but there’s also Hannah’s sad family history, her family that had its own legacy of violence and abuse and was finally torn asunder by the events of a fateful summer.

If this barebones description makes it all sound a grim mess, the novel is anything but. It’s a beautifully constructed and written and ultimately sensitive exploration of the lasting effect, over generations, of abuse. Gorgeous, really, with a redemptive arc.
]]> 219521090 A publishing event ten years in the making�a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists�the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until � betrayed and brokenhearted � she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America � but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 416 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 059380273X Deborah 4
Adichie’s writing skills and story-telling ability are much in evidence in this story of four African women’s lives and aspirations. Three of them are educated and very comfortable financially, having either blazed a career in finance or springing from very successful Nigerian families, and one is an immigrant to America who works as a cleaner. Her character is inspired by the shocking real-life story of the hotel cleaner who was sexually assaulted in his hotel room by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was head of the IMF at the time. This portrayal was a marvel of empathy as Adichie richly imagines the circumstances of her life and the events stemming from the assault. Of the other three, two also live in the States and the third does temporarily while attaining an MBA. Many vividly imagined settings and scenes, but some of what stuck with me most: the depth of corruption in the Nigerian banking system, and the rigid paucity of empathy in the American intellectual left. (I laughed even as I winced at the razor-sharp portrayal of Omelogor’s soul-crushing conflicts in the post-grad American classroom.)]]> 3.99 2025
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/24
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves:
review:
[Just an aside to begin: This is the third new “dream� novel I’ve read in the space of a month: this one, and just earlier The Dream Hotel and Dream State. There the similarity ends, as the three books treat very different subject matter, but it just struck me. Some mini-trend in publishing?]

Adichie’s writing skills and story-telling ability are much in evidence in this story of four African women’s lives and aspirations. Three of them are educated and very comfortable financially, having either blazed a career in finance or springing from very successful Nigerian families, and one is an immigrant to America who works as a cleaner. Her character is inspired by the shocking real-life story of the hotel cleaner who was sexually assaulted in his hotel room by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was head of the IMF at the time. This portrayal was a marvel of empathy as Adichie richly imagines the circumstances of her life and the events stemming from the assault. Of the other three, two also live in the States and the third does temporarily while attaining an MBA. Many vividly imagined settings and scenes, but some of what stuck with me most: the depth of corruption in the Nigerian banking system, and the rigid paucity of empathy in the American intellectual left. (I laughed even as I winced at the razor-sharp portrayal of Omelogor’s soul-crushing conflicts in the post-grad American classroom.)
]]> 220225482
Gabriela Menchaca and Edwin Saucedo are hardworking, undocumented employees at the Detmer Foods chicken plant in Springdale, Arkansas, just a stone’s throw from the trailer park where they’ve lived together for seven years. While dealing with personal tragedies of their own, the young couple endures the brutal, dehumanizing conditions at the plant in exchange for barebones pay.

When the plant manager, Luke Jackson, fires Edwin to set an example for the rest of the workers—and to show the higherups that he’s ready for a major promotion—Edwin is determined to get revenge on Luke and his wife, Mimi, a new mother who stays at home with her six-month-old son. Edwin’s impulsive action sets in motion a devastating chain of events that illuminates the deeply entrenched power dynamics between those who revel at the top and those who toil at the bottom.

From the nationally bestselling and Edgar Award–winning author of 'Don’t Know Tough' and 'Ozark Dogs' comes another edge-of-your-seat noir thriller that exposes the dark, bloody heart of life on the margins in the American South and the bleak underside of a bygone American Dream.]]> Eli Cranor Deborah 3
Eli Cranor specializes in writing novels about the working class, so we’re back in familiar territory here. We’re in a small town in Arkansas where the principal industry is the raising and processing (slaughter) of chickens. The plant manager is ruthlessly ambitious, driving his employees to process ever larger numbers of birds in service of his intention to be promoted up the ladder. And the plant is an absolute hellscape that drives the workers to their physical breaking point: 10 hours on their feet, endlessly repeating the same motion, no bathroom breaks allowed, so they work in diapers or piss in their clothes where they stand and continue working. The focus is on two couples: a young Mexican man and woman, undocumented even though they’ve been in the States since they were infants, working at the plant for subsistence wages for nine years now, living in a trailer park, trying to save and get ahead, but with no real hope of making it; and the plant manager and his wife, parents of a six-month-old boy, living in a large, well-appointed house, with fancy vehicles, etc., etc., with a large debt burden, of course. These two very different worlds clash after a triggering event at the plant, and the tension builds until everything erupts into shocking violence.]]> 3.86 2024
author: Eli Cranor
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves:
review:
3.75 stars

Eli Cranor specializes in writing novels about the working class, so we’re back in familiar territory here. We’re in a small town in Arkansas where the principal industry is the raising and processing (slaughter) of chickens. The plant manager is ruthlessly ambitious, driving his employees to process ever larger numbers of birds in service of his intention to be promoted up the ladder. And the plant is an absolute hellscape that drives the workers to their physical breaking point: 10 hours on their feet, endlessly repeating the same motion, no bathroom breaks allowed, so they work in diapers or piss in their clothes where they stand and continue working. The focus is on two couples: a young Mexican man and woman, undocumented even though they’ve been in the States since they were infants, working at the plant for subsistence wages for nine years now, living in a trailer park, trying to save and get ahead, but with no real hope of making it; and the plant manager and his wife, parents of a six-month-old boy, living in a large, well-appointed house, with fancy vehicles, etc., etc., with a large debt burden, of course. These two very different worlds clash after a triggering event at the plant, and the tension builds until everything erupts into shocking violence.
]]> 228379263 Set over the course of one day, a heart-racing debut about a woman facing the unimaginable, determined to find safety.

Last night, you and I were safe. Last night, in another universe, your father and I stood fighting in the kitchen.

Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.

Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. If she can just make it home, she’s determined to change her life.

A propulsive debut, Tilt is a primal scream of a novel about the disappointments and desires we all carry, and what each of us will do for the people we love.]]> Emma Pattee Deborah 3
Annie is heavily pregnant (37 weeks) and shopping one morning for a crib at Ikea in Portland, Oregon, when the long-predicted Big One strikes the west coast. The massive earthquake leaves her buried under shelving units but she’s pulled out by the extremely snotty sales clerk who, just moments before, had completely dissed Annie and driven her to rage but who now becomes her partner on the long trek on foot to find their loved ones. And thus begins a very long and dangerous day through a wrecked city, full of many perils, human and otherwise. It has its moments of suspense, for sure, but the book is really more of a long rumination by Annie (the story is told in the first person) about her life: the lacklustre job that leaves her frustrated and joyless, her growing irritation with her husband, an aspiring actor who’s been at it for years and getting nowhere fast and who contributes little to the family purse, and her growing resentment about that and their mounting squabbles. As she struggles on, trying to reach her husband and fearful of his fate, she feels a great shift into a new perspective on her life that the earth’s tilt has caused. ]]> 3.56 2025
author: Emma Pattee
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves:
review:
3.75 stars

Annie is heavily pregnant (37 weeks) and shopping one morning for a crib at Ikea in Portland, Oregon, when the long-predicted Big One strikes the west coast. The massive earthquake leaves her buried under shelving units but she’s pulled out by the extremely snotty sales clerk who, just moments before, had completely dissed Annie and driven her to rage but who now becomes her partner on the long trek on foot to find their loved ones. And thus begins a very long and dangerous day through a wrecked city, full of many perils, human and otherwise. It has its moments of suspense, for sure, but the book is really more of a long rumination by Annie (the story is told in the first person) about her life: the lacklustre job that leaves her frustrated and joyless, her growing irritation with her husband, an aspiring actor who’s been at it for years and getting nowhere fast and who contributes little to the family purse, and her growing resentment about that and their mounting squabbles. As she struggles on, trying to reach her husband and fearful of his fate, she feels a great shift into a new perspective on her life that the earth’s tilt has caused.
]]> 214339571 From the exceptionally original mind of CWA Gold Dagger Award winner and Booker longlisted author Belinda Bauer comes this sweeping tale of obsession, greed, ambition, and a crime that has remained unsolved for a hundred years.

How do you find something that doesn’t exist?

1926. On the cliffs of Yorkshire, men are lowered on ropes to steal the eggs of the sea birds who nest there. The most beautiful are sold for large sums. A small girl—penniless and neglected by her family—retrieves one such treasure. Its discovery will forever alter the course of her life.

A century later. In a remote cottage in Wales, Patrick Fort finds his friend, Nick, and his mother tied up and robbed. The only thing missing: a carved case containing an incredible scarlet egg. Doggedly attempting to retrieve it, Patrick and Nick discover the cruel world of egg trafficking, and soon find themselves on the trail of a priceless collection of eggs lost to history. Until now.

A taut, wonderfully imagined novel brimming with skullduggery at every turn, The Impossible Thing is a blazing testament to Belinda Bauer’s status as one of our greatest living crime writers.]]> 336 Belinda Bauer 0802164412 Deborah 0 to-read 4.23
author: Belinda Bauer
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.23
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213344053 Winner of the Prix Goncourt

A powerful autobiographical novel of loss, the incandescent love that remains, and the small decisions that define the course of fate.

Paced and structured with the inevitable suspense of a countdown, Brigitte Giraud’s tense and haunting novel follows one woman’s quest to comprehend the motorcycle accident that took the life of her partner Claude at age 41.

The narrator of Live Fast recounts the chain of events that led up to the fateful accident, tracing the tiny, madden twists of fate that might have prevented its tragic outcome. Each chapter asks the rhetorical question, “what if,� departing from an image or memory from early years meeting in Algeria during the war, to moving to the suburbs of Lyon, buying and renovating a home where they could “put down their suitcase for a whole life.� A sensitive elegy to her husband and a subtle, precise vision of a lasting love, Live Fast is a moving and electrifying portrait of two people caught up in the mundane activities of life, forgetting that living itself can be dangerous.]]> 176 Brigitte Giraud 0063346729 Deborah 4
I will also mention that the book won France’s Prix Goncourt and this is the author’s first translated into English (she’s written several). It’s also called a novel, though it describes in detail the events leading up to the death, the research she did into many aspects involved, including having spoken (in some cases, at years� remove) to some of the people involved. So, a novel? Certainly a deeply autobiographical one.]]> 3.82 2022
author: Brigitte Giraud
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves:
review:
A deeply affecting memoir of the death of the author’s husband and her lasting grief. The format is especially memorable. She starts by recounting the many small decisions and actions that piled one on the other to lead to her husband being in a specific place at a specific time, on a ferociously powerful motorcycle not his own, that led to his death in a traffic accident at a busy intersection in the heart of Lyon. It sounds a dirge: If only he had� If only he hadn’t� If only she had� etc. Such small things, individually. Then she tells the story of their last few days, creating a taut countdown-like effect. I believe I’ll be thinking about this one for a while. There’s nothing more forlorn than the useless wail of “if only.�

I will also mention that the book won France’s Prix Goncourt and this is the author’s first translated into English (she’s written several). It’s also called a novel, though it describes in detail the events leading up to the death, the research she did into many aspects involved, including having spoken (in some cases, at years� remove) to some of the people involved. So, a novel? Certainly a deeply autobiographical one.
]]> 229079260
OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK � An astonishing memoir that explores how far we will go to protect ourselves, and the healing made possible when we face our secrets and begin to share our stories

“A beautiful account of the journey of courage it takes to face the truth of one’s past.”—Bessel van der Kolk, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Body Keeps the Score

For decades, Amy ran. Through the dirt roads of Amarillo, Texas, where she grew up; to the campus of the University of Virginia, as a student athlete; on the streets of New York, where she built her adult life; through marriage, motherhood, and a thriving career. To outsiders, it all looked, in many ways, perfect. But Amy was running from something—a secret she was keeping not only from her family and friends, but unconsciously from herself. “You’re here, but you’re not here,� her daughter said to her one night. “Where are you, Mom?� So began Amy’s quest to solve a mystery trapped in the deep recesses of her own memory—a journey that would take her into the burgeoning field of psychedelic therapy, to the limits of the judicial system, and ultimately, home to the Texas panhandle, where her story began.

In her search for the truth, to understand and begin to recover from buried childhood trauma, Griffin interrogates the pursuit of perfectionism, control, and maintaining appearances that drives so many women, asking, when, in our path from girlhood to womanhood, did we learn to look outside ourselves for validation? What kind of freedom is possible if we accept the whole story and embrace who we really are? With hope, heart, and relentless honesty, she points a way forward for all of us, revealing the power of radical truth-telling to deepen our connections—with others and ourselves.]]> Amy Griffin Deborah 0 4.28 2025
author: Amy Griffin
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves:
review:
I’m not going to rate this one because I can’t figure out whether there’s a right way to assign stars to a memoir that recounts a troubling personal story, something terrible that happened to the author as a child 30 years earlier, by a person I don’t much care for as an adult. In her early 40s, Amy Griffin, highly successful in seemingly all aspects of her life, tries a new form of therapy and uncovers deeply hidden memories of her abuse by a trusted teacher in middle school. I feel for the suffering 12-year-old girl she was. But her account of the two years after her memories resurfaced spent trying to come to terms with this new knowledge and the light it shed on her driven perfectionism in the decades since left me feeling a little—what?—creeped-out by her profound narcissism, of which she seems entirely unaware. And did I mention shallow? And the book was so repetitive. It felt like there was a lot of padding to turn this into something book-length. Hmmmm� I’m being very uncharitable about this account of someone’s trauma, aren’t I? And yet I am aware of my shortcomings, I think. Ms. Griffin could use a smidge of that. Just sayin�.
]]> 214537790 FromĚýPulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestsellingĚýauthor of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. A gripping Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch," whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples� memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.]]> 432 Karen Russell 059380225X Deborah 0 currently-reading 4.05 2025
author: Karen Russell
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 34840184
But it's going to be memorable for all the wrong reasons after tragedy strikes: a body is discovered in Nantucket Harbor just hours before the ceremony-and everyone in the wedding party is suddenly a suspect. As Chief of Police Ed Kapenash interviews the bride, the groom, the groom's famous mystery-novelist mother, and even a member of his own family, he discovers that every wedding is a minefield-and no couple is perfect. Featuring beloved characters from The Castaways, Beautiful Day, and A Summer Affair, The Perfect Couple proves once again that Elin Hilderbrand is the queen of the summer beach read.]]> 480 Elin Hilderbrand 0316375241 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.93 2018
author: Elin Hilderbrand
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 214985934 A scathing, provocative novel about contemporary existence by a rising star in Italian literature.

"One of Europe’s most talented young writers, Latronico has written the great Berlin novel we’ve all been waiting for." —Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker staff journalist

Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, plant-filled apartment in Neukölln. They are young digital creatives, freelancers without too many constraints. They have a passion for food, progressive politics, sexual experimentation, and Berlin’s twenty-four-hour party scene. Their ideal existence is also that of an entire generation, lived out on Instagram, but outside the images they create for themselves, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Their work as graphic designers becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism during the refugee crisis proves fruitless. And in that picture-perfect life Anna and Tom feel increasingly trapped, yearning for an authenticity and a sense of purpose that seem perennially just out of their grasp. With the stylistic mastery of Georges Perec and nihilism of Michel Houellebecq, Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico’s first book to be translated into English, is a brilliantly scathing sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, beautifully written, impossibly bleak.]]> 125 Vincenzo Latronico 1681378736 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.94 2022
author: Vincenzo Latronico
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 215361877 An “urgent [and] ingenious� (The New York Times Book Review) novel of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean—from the New York Times bestselling author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin

“The spirit of Joseph Conrad hovers over the text, but here the heart of darkness lies at the bottom of the ocean.”—Salman Rushdie

“Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.�

Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.

Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.

When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?

Resoundingly simple and turbulent at the same time, Twist is a meditation on the nature of narrative and truth from one of the great storytellers of our times.]]> 256 Colum McCann 0593241738 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.82 2025
author: Colum McCann
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 229733549 One of Literary Hub and The Today Show's Most Anticipated Release of 2025.

A sweeping historical novel in the vein of Hilary Mantel and Maggie O’Farrell set during the time of the Tudors� ascent, The Pretender is a rollicking portrait of British monarchy and life within the court.

In 1480 John Collan’s greatest anxiety is how to circumvent the village’s devil goat on the way to collect water. But the arrival of a well-dressed stranger from London upends his life John is not John Collan, not the son of Will Collan, but the son of the long-deceased Duke of Clarence, hidden in the countryside after a brotherly rift over the crown, and because Richard III has a habit of disappearing his nephews. Removed from his humble origins, sent to Oxford to be educated in a manner befitting the throne’s rightful heir, John is put into play by his masters, learning the rules of etiquette in Burgundy and the machinations of the court in Ireland, where he encounters the intractable Joan, the delightfully strong-willed and manipulative daughter of his Irish patrons, a girl imbued with both extraordinary political savvy and occasional murderous tendencies. Joan has two paths available her—marry, or become a nun. John’s choices are similarly he will either become King, or die in battle. Together they form an alliance that will change the fate of the English monarchy.

Inspired by a footnote to history—the true story of the little known Lambert Simnel, who was a figurehead of the 1487 Yorkist rebellion and ended up working as a spy in the court of King Henry VII�The Pretender is historical fiction at its finest, a gripping, exuberant, rollicking portrait of British monarchy and life within the court, with a cast of unforgettable heroes and villains drawn from fifteenth century England. A masterful new work from a major new author.]]> 496 Jo Harkin 1039056695 Deborah 0 to-read 0.0 2025
author: Jo Harkin
name: Deborah
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 228564023 An introduction to traditional and modern Nigerian home cooking featuring 100 delicious recipes by food explorer, culinary anthropologist, and Nigerian Native of @kitchenbutterfly fame, Ozoz Sokoh.

In Nigeria, the word “chop� is all about food and feasting and “chop chop� is a nickname for someone who loves to eat. It's no surprise Nigeria has an entire vernacular dedicated to eating. With more than 50 nationally recognized languages and 250 ethnicities, Nigeria offers food that is as rich and diverse as its people. Despite the foodway's incredibly flavorful complexity, its recipes have never been gathered in one place. Until now.

In Chop Chop, author, culinary anthropologist, and Nigerian native Ozoz Sokoh celebrates classic and traditional Nigerian cuisine to underscore the ingredients, flavors, and textures that make it not only beloved, but delicious and easy for the home cook.

A COLLECTION OF CLASSIC AND MODERN NIGERIAN Think smoky spicy beef suya skewer]]> 352 Ozoz Sokoh 0525612548 Deborah 0 to-read 4.75
author: Ozoz Sokoh
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.75
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 68044997 Offutt’s acclaimed crime series, Mick Hardin is tested like never before as
familial allegiances and old wounds collide, threatening to destroy everything
he loves

Master storyteller and award-winning author Chris Offutt’s latest book, Code
of the Hills, is a dark, witty, and propulsive thriller of murder and
secrets in a town where little is as it seems.

Mick Hardin is back in the hills of Kentucky. He’d planned to touch down
briefly before heading to France, marking the end to his twenty-year Army
career. In Rocksalt, his sister Linda the sheriff is investigating the murder
of Pete Lowe, a sought-after mechanic at the local racetrack. After
another body is found, Linda and her deputy Johnny Boy Tolliver wonder if the
two murders are related. Linda steps into harm’s way just as a third body turns
up and Mick ends up being deputized again, uncovering evidence of illegal
cockfighting, and trying to connect all the crimes.

An explosive return to the mayhem of the Kentucky hills, Code of
the Hills is a harrowing novel of family—of what we’re willing to do
to protect and avenge the ones we love.]]> 271 Chris Offutt 080216191X Deborah 0 3.91 2023
author: Chris Offutt
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/21
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 75257282 In a brilliant and addictive thriller for fans of Tana French and Liz Moore, FBI rookie Riley Fisher must navigate a brutal serial killer as well as a kidnapping plot against the governor

It's a brutal winter in Des Moines, Iowa, and the city is gripped by fear. A serial attacker known as the Sin Eater is stalking women and has just struck again. It's a tough time and a tough place for Riley Fisher, a former small-town sergeant, to be reporting for duty as an FBI agent on her first assignment.

Teamed with a man she's not sure she can trust and struggling to prove herself - while fighting the pull of her old life and family dramas - Riley is tasked with investigating a vicious death threat against the newly elected female state governor. Gradually, she traces a disturbing connection between this case and the hunt for the Sin Eater. Through snow, ice, violence and lies, Riley Fisher is drawn towards a terrifying revelation.

Erin Young follows up her acclaimed crime debut, The Fields, which has drawn comparisons with Mare of Easttown, Silence of the Lambs and True Detective, with another stunning thriller full of dark menace and suspense.]]> 352 Erin Young Deborah 3 3.77 2024
author: Erin Young
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/06
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 57693667
Some things don't stay buried.

It starts with a body—a young woman found dead in an Iowa cornfield, on one of the few family farms still managing to compete with the giants of Big Agriculture.

When Sergeant Riley Fisher, newly promoted to head of investigations for the Black Hawk County Sheriff’s Office, arrives on the scene, an already horrific crime becomes personal when she discovers the victim was a childhood friend, connected to a dark past she thought she’d left behind.

The investigation grows complicated as more victims are found. Drawn deeper in, Riley soon discovers implications far beyond her Midwest town.]]> 345 Erin Young 1250799392 Deborah 3 3.46 2022
author: Erin Young
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/21
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 213619983 With echoes of Shirley Hazzard and Virginia Woolf, a new novel of startling intelligence from prize–winning author Michelle de Kretser, following a woman looking back on her young adulthood, and grappling with the collision of her emotions and her values

In the late 1980s, the narrator of Theory & Practice—a first generation immigrant from Sri Lanka who moved to Sydney in her childhood—sets up a life in Melbourne for graduate school. Jilted by a lover who cheats on her with another self-described "feminist," she is thrown into deeper confusion about her identity and the people around her.Ěý

The narrator begins to fall for a man named Kit, who is in a “deconstructed relationship� with a woman named Olivia. She struggles to square her feminism against her jealousy toward Olivia—and her anti-colonialism against her feelings about Virginia Woolf, whose work she is called to despite her racism.

What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? In Theory & Practice, Michelle de Kretser offers a spellbinding meditation on the moral complexities that arise in this gap. Peopled with brilliantly drawn characters, the novel also stitches together fiction and essay, taking up Woolf’s quest for adventurous literary form.]]> 192 Michelle de Kretser 1646222873 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.71 2024
author: Michelle de Kretser
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 214175077 An extraordinary and urgent debut by a prize-winning Irish writer, Nesting introduces an unforgettable new voice in fiction.

On a bright spring afternoon in Dublin, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes from the washing line, Ciara straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away. Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe.

This was meant to be an escape. But with dwindling savings, no job, and her family across the sea, Ciara finds herself adrift, facing a broken housing system and the voice of her own demons. As summer passes and winter closes in, she must navigate raising her children in a hotel room, searching for a new home and dealing with her husband Ryan’s relentless campaign to get her to come back. Because leaving is one thing, but staying away is another.

What will it take for Ciara to rebuild her life? Can she ever truly break away from Ryan’s control � and what will be the cost?

Tense, beautiful, and underpinned by an unassailable love, hope and resilience, this is the story of one woman’s bid to start over.]]> 400 Roisín O’Donnell 1643755706 Deborah 3
A young Irishwoman, married and the mother of two small daughters, flees her emotionally abusive husband and then has to work out a way to safely stay away from the marital home, with no local family safety net, a dysfunctional social housing system that parks her in a hotel room with her young ones, and an insidious campaign by her nasty ex to return her and the girls to his control. Very convincingly portrays the scenario with everything stacked against her.]]> 4.31 2025
author: Roisín O’Donnell
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars

A young Irishwoman, married and the mother of two small daughters, flees her emotionally abusive husband and then has to work out a way to safely stay away from the marital home, with no local family safety net, a dysfunctional social housing system that parks her in a hotel room with her young ones, and an insidious campaign by her nasty ex to return her and the girls to his control. Very convincingly portrays the scenario with everything stacked against her.
]]> 208431230 In the final months of World War II, a clandestine group known as The Choir smuggles thousands of escapees out of Nazi-occupied Rome via a secret route known as the Rome Escape Line. When an unidentified airman falls from the sky, The Choir is plunged into lethal danger and the survival of the Escape Line itself is threatened.

The Choir is riven with internal tensions and infighting. The organization is in danger of falling apart, which would leave thousands of escaped allied soldiers, POWs, Jews, and objectors stranded in a Rome that is ruled with vicious efficiency by the Nazis. Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, the architect of the Escape Line and acknowledged leader of The Choir, broods inside the Vatican, seemingly paralyzed by what he sees as the intolerable risks of keeping the Escape Line in operation.

One man has been given the task of definitively destroying the entire operation and the price of his failure is high—SS Commander Paul Hauptmann’s wife and children are under Gestapo supervision in Berlin. Hauptmann is ordered to stay on in the city he both loathes and loves and to dismantle the Escape Line, or watch his family perish. Into this deliriously thrilling melee steps the Contessa Giovanna Landini, a reckless, audacious, and magnetic member of the Italian Resistance who has the nerve to challenge Hauptmann’s authority.

A beautifully written and expertly crafted historical suspense novel that is bursting with action, atmosphere, and unforgettable characters, The Ghosts of Rome is the thrilling follow-up to Joseph O’Connor’s best-selling My Father’s House.]]> 362 Joseph O'Connor 1529933765 Deborah 3
The second novel in a planned trilogy set during the Second World War about a real-life resistance network operating in great secrecy out of the Vatican in Nazi-occupied Rome. Fascinating stuff about the disparate group made up of a rogue Monsignor operating under the radar of his superiors, an Italian countess, the wife and daughter of the Irish ambassador to the Vatican, a cockney chauffeur, many working class locals, etc. etc. i couldn’t help but put myself in their place and know I’d have fallen short, entirely absent the grit and courage they required to daily put their lives very much on the line to save hundreds of downed pilots and escaped prisoners of war.]]> 4.06 2025
author: Joseph O'Connor
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars

The second novel in a planned trilogy set during the Second World War about a real-life resistance network operating in great secrecy out of the Vatican in Nazi-occupied Rome. Fascinating stuff about the disparate group made up of a rogue Monsignor operating under the radar of his superiors, an Italian countess, the wife and daughter of the Irish ambassador to the Vatican, a cockney chauffeur, many working class locals, etc. etc. i couldn’t help but put myself in their place and know I’d have fallen short, entirely absent the grit and courage they required to daily put their lives very much on the line to save hundreds of downed pilots and escaped prisoners of war.
]]> 214269374 Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power from a "powerful new voice in British Literature� (The Sunday Times).

Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar.

An ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that has taken up residence on the farm. She solves the mystery, but her viral exposé raises more questions than it answers, Who wrote it? Why? And how much of it is true? Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, the book focuses in on what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.

The thrilling novel from one of the most acclaimed and incisive young novelists working today, Universality is a compelling, unsettling celebration of the spectacular, appalling force of language. It dares you to look away.]]> 176 Natasha Brown 0593977300 Deborah 3 3.48 2025
author: Natasha Brown
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
review:
This was something of a sophomore novel letdown after Brown’s stunning debut, Assembly. That one was an anguished interior monologue about the main (only) character’s grinding down by implacable and ubiquitous racism. This one is almost the flipside, featuring a large cast of characters and many, many moving parts in a satire (alas, minus a sense of humour) of the chattering classes in the UK, triggered by a missing gold bar that was used to bash a youthful member of a commune of cultish squatters.
]]> 206029568 1 Alan Murrin Deborah 4
Two women develop a fragile friendship in the Ireland of the 1990s, in the time just before the reform of the marriage laws that made divorce possible. Both are experiencing their own marriage difficulties, but before the legal reforms, it simply did not matter what your problems were—beatings, infidelity, you name it—any woman who left her marriage was treated hideously by the law, and her husband could deny her access to her children or financial support pretty much with impunity and often to the general approval of the neighbours. These two women are both affected by the legal unfairnesses but experience very different fates.]]> 3.92 2024
author: Alan Murrin
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars

Two women develop a fragile friendship in the Ireland of the 1990s, in the time just before the reform of the marriage laws that made divorce possible. Both are experiencing their own marriage difficulties, but before the legal reforms, it simply did not matter what your problems were—beatings, infidelity, you name it—any woman who left her marriage was treated hideously by the law, and her husband could deny her access to her children or financial support pretty much with impunity and often to the general approval of the neighbours. These two women are both affected by the legal unfairnesses but experience very different fates.
]]> 220803460
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.]]> 10 Charlotte McConaghy 1250381533 Deborah 4
Dominic Salt and his three children, 18, 17, and 9 years old, are the only remaining people on remote Shearwater Island, hundreds of kilometres from any land and situated between Australia and Antarctica. It’s home to the world’s largest seed repository and had formerly been an active research station fully peopled by many scientists of various disciplines. But the changing climate, well, changed, far more than anticipated, and the increasingly violent storms and rising water are putting an end to the depository. Only Dominic’s family remains, responsible for salvaging what they can of the seed bank and packing it up in anticipation of the final boat coming to get them all off in the near future. Into this desperate scenario arrives a female castaway from a wrecked small boat, and, after a period of initial mistrust on both sides, she’s soon incorporated into the family and their activities.

McConaghy’s usual deft handling of her overarching theme recurring across her novels: sorrow for the many grievous losses of the natural world and a melodramatic human story firmly planted amid those losses.

]]> 4.20 2025
author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
review:
4.5 stars

Dominic Salt and his three children, 18, 17, and 9 years old, are the only remaining people on remote Shearwater Island, hundreds of kilometres from any land and situated between Australia and Antarctica. It’s home to the world’s largest seed repository and had formerly been an active research station fully peopled by many scientists of various disciplines. But the changing climate, well, changed, far more than anticipated, and the increasingly violent storms and rising water are putting an end to the depository. Only Dominic’s family remains, responsible for salvaging what they can of the seed bank and packing it up in anticipation of the final boat coming to get them all off in the near future. Into this desperate scenario arrives a female castaway from a wrecked small boat, and, after a period of initial mistrust on both sides, she’s soon incorporated into the family and their activities.

McConaghy’s usual deft handling of her overarching theme recurring across her novels: sorrow for the many grievous losses of the natural world and a melodramatic human story firmly planted amid those losses.


]]> 213653947 From the award-winning author of Flux comes a dazzling novel about love, family, and the art of sushi that asks: What if you could return to the point of a fateful choice, wiser than before, and find the courage to forge a new path?

A coma can change a man, but the world Jack Jr. awakens to is one he barely recognizes. His advertising job is history, his Manhattan apartment is gone, and the love of his life has left him behind. He’s been asleep for two years; with no one to turn to, he realizes it’s been ten years since he last saw his family.

Lost and disoriented, he makes a reluctant homecoming back to the bustling Korean American enclave of Fort Lee, New Jersey; back into the waiting arms of his parents, who are operating under the illusion he never left; and back to Joja, their ever-struggling sushi restaurant that he was set to inherit before he ran away from it all. As he steps back into the life he abandoned—learning his Appa’s life lessons over crates of tuna on bleary-eyed 4 AM fish runs, doling out amberjack behind the omakase counter while his Umma tallies the night's pitiful number of customers, and sparring with his recovering alcoholic brother, James—he embraces new roles, too: That of romantic interest to the male nurse who took care of him throughout, and that of sage (but underqualified) uncle to his gangly teenage nephew.

There is value in the joyous rhythms of this once-abandoned life. But second chances are an even messier business than running a restaurant, and the lure of a self-determined path might, once again, prove too hard to resist.

Why do we run from those we love, and why do we still love those who run from us? A highly entertaining and poignant story about second chances and self-discovery, I Leave It Up to You navigates loss, love, and the absurdity of finding one’s footing after the ground gives way.]]> 10 Jinwoo Chong Deborah 4
A warm and charming family-oriented drama about the getting of wisdom and finding out what really matters in life. A young Korean-American man awakens in hospital from a two-year coma and discovers that his old life is *poof* gone with the wind. He turned 30 while he was in the coma, so there’s that, and he’s hospitalized in New Jersey, not Manhattan, where he’d been living for 10 years and engaged to a man he was very happy with—come to think of it, why is his fiance ghosting him?—and his job in a Manhattan advertising agency is gone, so it looks as if his only choice of having a place to live and recover is back with his kind of screwed-up family, none of whom he’d even spoken to for many years, in Fort Lee, NJ, very much a Korean enclave. And once he’s back on his feet, he returns to helping out at his family’s small restaurant, where his father is an accomplished sushi chef and under whom he’d been apprenticing before ditching it all and running for the Big Apple at 18. I was listening along and wondering why the title until I looked up one of the Japanese terms (yes, they’re a Korean family and they run a sushi restaurant, and that’s a whole thing in the novel.) You know how in a good sushi restaurant you can choose to sit at the counter and just put yourself in the chef’s hands, not ordering anything specific but leaving it up to him? It’s called “omakase,� which loosely translates as “I leave it up to you,� which is a also a tidy metaphor for what’s going on in the novel.]]> 3.80 2025
author: Jinwoo Chong
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/24
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars

A warm and charming family-oriented drama about the getting of wisdom and finding out what really matters in life. A young Korean-American man awakens in hospital from a two-year coma and discovers that his old life is *poof* gone with the wind. He turned 30 while he was in the coma, so there’s that, and he’s hospitalized in New Jersey, not Manhattan, where he’d been living for 10 years and engaged to a man he was very happy with—come to think of it, why is his fiance ghosting him?—and his job in a Manhattan advertising agency is gone, so it looks as if his only choice of having a place to live and recover is back with his kind of screwed-up family, none of whom he’d even spoken to for many years, in Fort Lee, NJ, very much a Korean enclave. And once he’s back on his feet, he returns to helping out at his family’s small restaurant, where his father is an accomplished sushi chef and under whom he’d been apprenticing before ditching it all and running for the Big Apple at 18. I was listening along and wondering why the title until I looked up one of the Japanese terms (yes, they’re a Korean family and they run a sushi restaurant, and that’s a whole thing in the novel.) You know how in a good sushi restaurant you can choose to sit at the counter and just put yourself in the chef’s hands, not ordering anything specific but leaving it up to him? It’s called “omakase,� which loosely translates as “I leave it up to you,� which is a also a tidy metaphor for what’s going on in the novel.
]]> 201421823 A unique tale that interweaves crime fiction with intimate tales of morality and search for individual freedom.

After Rita is found dead in the bell tower of the church she used to attend, the official investigation into the incident is quickly closed. Her sickly mother is the only person still determined to find the culprit. Chronicling a difficult journey across the suburbs of the city, an old debt and a revealing conversation, Elena Knows unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden facets of authoritarianism and hypocrisy in our society.]]> 6 Claudia Piñeiro Deborah 0 to-read 4.00 2007
author: Claudia Piñeiro
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 223898858 With masterful storytelling and unexpected twists, Kristin Koval’s debut novel Penitence is a multigenerational story of grief and hope that asks powerful When and why should we forgive? And are some things unforgivable?Late one night in Lodgepole, Colorado, 13-year-old Nora Sheehan fatally shoots her older brother Nico in their family’s home. Her parents, Angie and David, recruit small-town lawyer Martine Dumont in their fight against an overreaching prosecutor determined to try Nora as an adult, but soon-to-be-retired Martine faces a crucial challenge in building the Nora refuses to speak. Several years before, Nico was diagnosed with juvenile Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative illness with a grim prognosis, and the family must now grieve Nico’s death earlier than expected. Angie, unsure how to continue loving her daughter, refuses to visit Nora in jail, and her marriage to David is on the brink of falling apart. David, desperate for help, asks Martine’s son Julian—a successful New York criminal defense attorney and Angie’s ex-boyfriend—to step in on the case. When Julian arrives in Lodgepole, he and Angie are forced to consider their former life together in New York and their joint culpability in a tragic accident decades ago. For readers of Ann Patchett and Celeste Ng, Penitence is a compelling and intimate portrait of a family pulled apart in the wake of tragedy that will leave readers and book clubs thinking long into the night.]]> 320 Kristin Koval 1250343003 Deborah 4 3.67 2025
author: Kristin Koval
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves:
review:
This novel is so assured it’s hard to believe it’s the author’s first. It movingly limns the tribulations of two Colorado families that were torn apart 20 years earlier by a tragic accident and are brought back together again when a 13-year-old girl engages in a shocking and inexplicable act of violence. These characters were so well drawn in all their love and sorrow; they felt very real and human to me, and the guilt and penitence that drove so many of their actions were entirely believable.
]]> 228438422 From Emma Donoghue, author of Room , The Wonder and Pull of the Stars comes a taut and suspenseful historical novel that reimagines an 1895 French railway disaster, an event famously documented in dramatic photographs

Set over a single day, as the morning train travels from the Normandy coast to Paris, men, women and children take their seats in the passenger cars, which are divided by wealth and status. Among the passengers is an anarchist intent on destruction, a young boy travelling alone, a pregnant woman fleeing her home village for the anonymity of the big city, a medical student who suspects a girl may have a fatal disease, and the railway men, devoted to the train, to the company and to each other.

Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a thrilling ride and a literary masterpiece that captures the politics, fears and chaos of the end of the nineteenth century.]]> Emma Donoghue Deborah 4 3.00 2025
author: Emma Donoghue
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves:
review:
An intriguing historical novel that documents a real-life 1895 Paris train disaster, in which the author brings together a cast of characters, several entirely imagined, others who were real-life figures actually on the train and still others who could well have been passengers but for whom no evidence exists of their having been there. The total package creates a slice-of-life capsule of the time and place that reflects the contrast of rich and poor, women’s struggle for independence, the political unrest (anarchists were pretty thick on the ground in the Paris of the time), race and the broader freedoms afforded American blacks living in France (well, at least the absence of Jim Crow laws), the conditions for artists, sex workers, and a pair of lesbians hiding in plain sight. And the author clearly did her homework about steam trains and the working conditions of the train crew (miserable). Whew. That’s a lot packed into a short novel. Treat yourself to an Internet search of the staggering photos of the actual crash, but maybe wait till you’ve finished the book or at least avoid reading about the details in order not to spoil the suspense about what our characters might be facing at the sudden end of their journey.
]]> 228421000 “Much like fine wine, battle-hardened assassins grow better with age.”�#1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner

Four women assassins, senior in status—and in age—sharpen their knives for another bloody good adventure in this riotous follow-up to the New York Times bestselling sensation Killers of a Certain Age .

After more than a year of laying low, Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie are called back into action. They have enjoyed their time off, but the lack of excitement is starting to a professional killer can only take so many watercolor classes and yoga sessions without itching to strangle someone...literally. When they receive a summons from the head of the elite assassin organization known as the Museum, they are ready tackle the greatest challenge of their careers.

Someone on the inside has compiled a list of important kills committed by Museum agents, connected to a single, shadowy figure, an Eastern European gangster with an iron fist, some serious criminal ambition, and a tendency to kill first and ask questions later. This new nemesis is murdering agents who got in the way of their power hungry plans and the aging quartet of killers is next.

Together the foursome embark on a wild ride across the globe on the double mission of rooting out the Museum’s mole and hunting down the gangster who seems to know their next move before they make it. Their enemy is unlike any they’ve faced before, and it will take all their killer experience to get out of this mission alive.]]> Deanna Raybourn Deborah 4
Is it wrong to be so entertained by this story (#2 in a series) about a team of 60-something women working as professional assassins for a shadowy organization that works on the side of good? (It only orders the deaths of very, very evil people untouchable by the law.) Well, call me guilty! This time around, our team of four assassins-of-a-certain-age are themselves in the crosshairs of a vengeful killer who intends to punish them for a decades-old kill they carried out. Throw in a cache of long-hidden priceless art looted by the Nazis, a traitor in their own organization, and a showdown on a decidedly un-deluxe train through the Balkans, and we have a recipe for a fun romp.]]> 3.61 2025
author: Deanna Raybourn
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves:
review:
3.75 stars

Is it wrong to be so entertained by this story (#2 in a series) about a team of 60-something women working as professional assassins for a shadowy organization that works on the side of good? (It only orders the deaths of very, very evil people untouchable by the law.) Well, call me guilty! This time around, our team of four assassins-of-a-certain-age are themselves in the crosshairs of a vengeful killer who intends to punish them for a decades-old kill they carried out. Throw in a cache of long-hidden priceless art looted by the Nazis, a traitor in their own organization, and a showdown on a decidedly un-deluxe train through the Balkans, and we have a recipe for a fun romp.
]]> 228709169 “Stirring and mysterious…fires directly at the human heart and hits the mark.� —Delia Owens, New York Times bestselling author of Where the Crawdads Sing

A love triangle unearths dangerous, deadly secrets from the past in this thrilling tale perfect for fans of The Paper Palace and Where the Crawdads Sing.

“The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.�

Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.

As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel’s life, tensions around the village rise and dangerous secrets and jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences. Beth is forced to make a choice between the woman she once was, and the woman she has become.

A sweeping love story with the pace and twists of a thriller, Broken Country is a novel of simmering passion, impossible choices, and explosive consequences that toggles between the past and present to explore the far-reaching legacy of first love.]]> 319 Clare Leslie Hall Deborah 4 4.14 2025
author: Clare Leslie Hall
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves:
review:
A literary and affecting drama that brought to my mind the lush, colour-saturated 1950s movie melodramas of Douglas Sirk, featuring a love triangle in Dorset farm country in which a farmer’s wife is torn between her love for two worthy but very different men, and someone ends up dead.
]]> 223025750 A novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.]]> 336 Laila Lalami Deborah 4 3.83 2025
author: Laila Lalami
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves:
review:
A trip to a nightmarish near-future in which people are subject to extrajudicial imprisonment (oops, sorry, “detainment�) for their dreams. The protagonist is Sara, a professional archivist and the mother of toddler twins, who is unceremoniously yanked into detainment at the airport after returning to L.A. from an international conference, based on the pitiless algorithm that amalgamates every bit of data from her online presence and the dream info and determines she’s a risk. Once imprisoned (oops, again, sorry, “detained�) for a three-week observation period, her stay is extended again and again for arbitrary and non-existent infractions. It seems to me that the author intends this Kafkaesque nightmare both to reflect elements of the current reality of incarceration in the United States, when so much of the corrections system is turned over to private enterprise as a profit-making venture, and as a warning about the increasing dangers of surrendering private data to those same corporations who aim to wring profit from them. I felt very effectively warned!
]]> 217163829 #1ĚýNew York TimesĚýbestselling author Fredrik Backman returns with an unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a stranger’s life twenty-five years later.

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an artist herself, knows otherwise and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their difficult home lives by spending their days laughing and telling stories out on a pier. There’s Joar, who never backs down from a fight; quiet and bookish Ted who is mourning his father; Ali, the daughter of a man who never stays in one place for long; and finally, there’s the artist, a boy who hoards sleeping pills and shuns attention, but who possesses an extraordinary gift that might be his ticket to a better life. These four lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be put into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. As she struggles to decide what to do with this bequest, she embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn the story of how the painting came to be. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more she feels compelled to unleash her own artistic spirit, but happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this fresh testament to the transformative power of friendship and art.]]> 448 Fredrik Backman 1982121653 Deborah 0 to-read 4.00 2025
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 215748809 An atmospheric, haunting novel about a family of bootleggers, their troubled history,Ěýand the land that binds them.

The Sawbrooks have lived on prime real estate on the lakes of Michigan since before there was prime real estate. A family of smugglers and bootleggers, every man, woman, and child in each generation has been taught to navigate the nooks and cranniesĚýof the rivers and highways that flow in and out of Canada. The hidden routes are the family's legacy.

But today, the Sawbrooks are deeply fractured, and the money that's sustained the family is running out. Edward, the Sawbrook patriarch, is dying from cancer, and his wife,ĚýRhoda,Ěýis bitterlyĚýdisappointed in her three adult children. The eldest daughter, Lucy, is now a park ranger, working to federally protect the land against her mother’s will; the middle son, Buckner, hasn’t been the same since he came back from the armyĚýsuffering from alcoholism; and the youngest daughter, Jewell, is wasting her potential as a card player andĚýbartender.

When Jewell is asked to commit a crime for a major insurance payout, she agrees, eager for the cash, but too late,Ěýshe realizes that that the boat she torched wasn't empty...

Together,Ěýthe Sawbrooks will have to contend with the old, familial ways and the new, shifting world, and faceĚýeach other—and their pain-filled past—to smuggle one more thing through and out of their land toĚýsafety.]]> 288 Travis Mulhauser 1538767988 Deborah 0 to-read 3.73
author: Travis Mulhauser
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.73
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 215570667
Years later Tom makes a decision that ripples through their families' lives in ways he could not have foreseen. As the consequences of that fateful choice unfold, two women's paths become irrevocably intertwined. But when old love clashes with new, who will be left standing? And what happens when your secrets come back to haunt you?]]> 336 Loretta Rothschild 1250381827 Deborah 0 to-read 4.13 2025
author: Loretta Rothschild
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217182446 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Calamity of Souls comes David Baldacci’s newest novel, set in London in 1944, about a bereaved book shop owner and two teenagers scarred by the second world war, and the healing and hope they find in one another.

Fourteen-year-old Charlie Matters is up to no good, but for a very good reason. Without parents, peerage, or merit, ducking school but barred from actual work, he steals what he needs, living day-to-day until he’s old enough to enlist to fight the Germans. After barely surviving the Blitz, Charlie knows there’s no telling when a falling bomb might end his life.

Fifteen-year-old Molly Wakefield has just returned to a nearly unrecognizable London. One of millions of people to have been evacuated to the countryside via “Operation Pied Piper,� Molly has been away from her parents—from her home—for nearly five years. Her return, however, is not the homecoming she’d hoped for as she’s confronted by a devastating reality: both her parents are gone.

Without guardians and stability, Charlie and Molly find an unexpected ally and protector in Ignatius Oliver, and solace at his book shop, The Book Keep, where A book a day keeps the bombs away. Mourning the recent loss of his wife, Ignatius forms a kinship with both children, and in each other—over the course of the greatest armed conflict the world had ever seen—they rediscover the spirit of family each has lost.

But Charlie’s escapades in the city have not gone unnoticed, and someone’s been following Molly since she returned to London. And Ignatius is still reeling from a secret Imogen long kept from him while she was alive—something so shocking it resulted in her death, and his life being turned upside down.

As bombs continue to bear down on the city, Charlie, Molly, and Ignatius learn that while the perils of war rage on, their coming together and trusting one another may be the only way for them to survive.]]> 448 David Baldacci 1538742055 Deborah 0 to-read 4.16 2025
author: David Baldacci
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217182552 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Just for the Summer comes a new playful yet deeply emotional contemporary romance.

There might be no such a thing as a perfect guy, but Xavier Rush comes disastrously close. A gorgeous veterinarian giving Greek god vibes—all while cuddling a tiny kitten? Immediately yes. That is until Xavier opens his mouth and proves that even sculpted gods can say the absolute wrong thing. Like, really wrong. Of course, there’s nothing Samantha loves more than proving an asshole wrong�

. . . unless, of course, he can admit he made a mistake. But after one incredible and seemingly endless date—possibly the best in living history—Samantha is forced to admit the truth, that her family is in crisis and any kind of relationship would be impossible. Samantha begs Xavier to forget her. To remember their night together as a perfect moment, as crushing as that may be.

Only no amount of distance or time is nearly enough to forget that something between them. And the only thing better than one single perfect memory is to make a life—and even a love—worth remembering.]]> 368 Abby Jimenez 1538759195 Deborah 0 to-read 4.35 2025
author: Abby Jimenez
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213162488 "Anyone who wants to understand contemporary Germany must read The Granddaughter now" �Le Monde

"The great novel of German reunification" �Le Figaro

From the bestselling author of The Reader, a striking exploration of the wounds of the past, told through the story of a German bookseller’s attempt to connect with his radicalized granddaughter.

It is only after the sudden death of his wife, Birgit, that Kaspar discovers the price she paid years earlier when she fled East Germany to join him: she had to abandon her baby. Shattered by grief, yet animated by a new hope, Kaspar closes up his bookshop in present day Berlin and sets off to find her lost child in the east.

His search leads him to a rural community of neo-Nazis, intent on reclaiming and settling ancestral lands to the East. Among them, Kaspar encounters Svenja, a woman whose eyes, hair, and even voice remind him of Birgit. Beside her is a red-haired, slouching, fifteen-year-old girl. His granddaughter? Their worlds could not be more different� an ideological gulf of mistrust yawns between them� but he is determined to accept her as his own.

More than twenty-five years after The Reader, Bernhard Schlink once again offers a masterfully gripping novel that powerfully probes the past’s role in contemporary life, transporting us from the divided Germany of the 1960s to modern day Australia, and asking what unites or separates us.

Translated from German by Charlotte Collins]]> 336 Bernhard Schlink 0063295237 Deborah 4 4.10 2021
author: Bernhard Schlink
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves:
review:
After his troubled wife dies, an elderly Berlin bookseller, delving into her papers, learns she left behind an infant daughter when she escaped from East to West Berlin for a new life with him. Though she’d since thought of searching for her decades-lost daughter, her courage failed her, but now, long after the Wall has come down, her widower determines to take up the quest. He uncovers not only a daughter but a 14-year-old granddaughter, both true believers living in a neo-Nazi community. The author compellingly unwinds the story of the old man’s gentle machinations in an attempt to open the girl’s mind and expand her horizons (it keeps you guessing about what is going to happen next), firmly locating his characters in the social and political currents that buffeted post-war Germany.
]]> 223666259
After nearly losing the election to a geriatric but wildly popular donkey named Maurizio, newly installed Mayor Delizia Miccuci can’t help but feel like the sun has finally set on the rural Italian village of Lazzarini Boscarino. Tourists only stop by to ask for directions, Nonna Amara’s cherished ristorante is long shuttered, and the town hall is disgustingly overrun with glis glis poo—even Postman Duccio has been disgraced. All that’s left is Bar Celebrità, a rustic establishment where weary locals gather to quibble over decades-long disputes, submit their poor stomachs to bartender Giuseppina’s volcanic espresso, and wonder what will become of the place where together they’ve spent their entire lives.

Little do the villagers know that, mere miles away in the forest, local truffle hunter Giovanni Scarpazza has just happened upon something that could change everything. Swollen to massive proportions, soaking the atmosphere in its pungent fumes, potentially worth six figures in certain international circles, a truffle—un tartufo, that is—sits beneath the soil with the power to either be the greatest gift or the foulest curse the village has ever seen—they’re not completely sure which since Giuseppina’s psychic was a bit unclear on the matter.

Tartufo is much more than a charming romp through the foothills of Tuscany. Written in the same enchanting style and raucous humor that defines Hollow Kingdom and Feral Creatures, Buxton’s newest story is a reflection on the interconnectedness of life in all its manifestations—and how holding on to harmony in the face of hardship can grow something beautiful and rare beneath the surface.]]> Kira Jane Buxton 1668646048 Deborah 4
A tiny, near-bankrupt Tuscan village finds its fortunes taking a wild swing when a gruff local truffle hunter unearths what is undoubtedly the largest white truffle (tartufo) ever found and an international auction is staged, with the truffle expected to fetch—well, who can say how much? Gazillions! A charming read to while away the time, full of amusing if stereotypical Italian village types. Definitely had me salivating and wanting to revisit Tuscany!]]> 3.47 2025
author: Kira Jane Buxton
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves:
review:
3.75 stars

A tiny, near-bankrupt Tuscan village finds its fortunes taking a wild swing when a gruff local truffle hunter unearths what is undoubtedly the largest white truffle (tartufo) ever found and an international auction is staged, with the truffle expected to fetch—well, who can say how much? Gazillions! A charming read to while away the time, full of amusing if stereotypical Italian village types. Definitely had me salivating and wanting to revisit Tuscany!
]]> 165940203 A farmhouse mysteriously goes up in flames with someone trapped inside and a community is never the same in the aftermath—both a page-turning whodunit and a deeply touching coming-of-age story by one of Sweden’s top criminologists and “a rising star in Scandinavian crime fiction� ( Reviews)

On a cold November night in rural Sweden, a farmhouse burns to the ground. Inside, a young woman is found dead—murdered. To the people of Marbäck, the fire becomes a before and after. For ten-year-old Isak, it sets in motion something he cannot control, igniting his future into an inferno.

The police immediately focus their attention on Edvard, the boyfriend of the murdered woman and Isak’s beloved uncle. After a quick investigation, Edvard is found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, and Marbäck believes it can return to its innocence. Vidar, the rookie officer who first responded to the fire, prides himself on having helped solve the murder. Little does he know this will become the defining case of his career and that it will drive him to the brink of professional and personal disaster—and link his fate to young Isak’s.

A celebrated professor of criminology, Christoffer Carlsson digs deep into the psyches of ordinary people and shows how one crime can haunt a community for decades. A #1 international bestseller, Under the Storm is already a modern classic of Scandinavian crime fiction and shows why many regard Carlsson as one of the great crime writers of his generation.]]> 416 Christoffer Carlsson 059344938X Deborah 3 3.65 2019
author: Christoffer Carlsson
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/12
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves:
review:

]]> 42378358 In an unnamed city, middle sister stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one. And she has been taking French night classes downtown. So when a local paramilitary known as the milkman begins pursuing her, she suddenly becomes “interesting,� the last thing she ever wanted to be. Despite middle sister’s attempts to avoid him—and to keep her mother from finding out about her maybe-boyfriend—rumors spread and the threat of violence lingers. Milkman is a story of the way inaction can have enormous repercussions, in a time when the wrong flag, wrong religion, or even a sunset can be subversive. Told with ferocious energy and sly, wicked humor, Milkman establishes Anna Burns as one of the most consequential voices of our day.

]]> 352 Anna Burns 164445100X Deborah 4 3.64 2018
author: Anna Burns
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/18
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves:
review:

]]> 124034916
Looking out his porch window one spring morning, Adam Shoalts spotted a majestic peregrine falcon flying across the neighbouring fields near Lake Erie. Each spring, falcons migrate from southernmost Canada to remote arctic mountains. Grabbing his backpack and canoe, Shoalts resolved to follow the falcon’s route north on an astonishing 3,400-kilometre journey to the Arctic.

Along the way, he faces a huge variety of challenges and obstacles, including storms on the Great Lakes, finding campsites in the urban wilderness of Toronto and Montreal, avoiding busy commercial freighter traffic, gale force winds, massive hydroelectric dams, bushwhacking without trails, dealing with hunger, multiple bear encounters, and navigating white-water rapids on icy northern rivers far from any help.

In his signature style, Shoalts roams as much across space as he does time, winding his way through a stunning diversity of landscapes ranging from lush Carolinian forests to lonely windswept mountains, salty seas to trackless swamps, pristine lakes to glittering mega-cities, as well as the sites of long ago battles, shipwrecks, forgotten forts, and abandoned trading posts. Through his travels, he reveals how interconnected wild places are, from the loneliest depths of the northern wilderness to busy urban parks, and the vital importance of these connections.

Where the Falcon Flies invites readers on an extraordinary armchair adventure that spans five ecoregions and centuries of fascinating history, and is a masterwork by one of Canada’s most successful and audacious authors.]]> 346 Adam Shoalts 0735241015 Deborah 3 4.19
author: Adam Shoalts
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.19
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/09
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves:
review:
I listened to the author’s narration of this book he wrote to recount the tale of his 3,400 km solo paddling and hiking expedition from his home on the north shore of Lake Erie, across that lake and Lake Ontario (portaging around Niagara Falls—duh), up the St Lawrence, taking a hard left up a Quebec River into Labrador and then the Arctic, to fetch up at the vertical cliffs of the remote Torngat Mountains, to which the majestic peregrine falcon migrates annually to nest and raise its young. Whew. After listening to this tale of physical hardship and privation—and lots and lots of dangerous rapids—all I can think is, why, Adam? Better him than me, that’s for sure. Told in a mildly gee whiz, Boy’s Own style that easily conveys how much the author loved it all, as gruelling as it was.
]]> 223227777
A funny, fiercely intelligent, and moving collection exploring marriage, friendship, fame, and artistic ambition—including a story that revisits the main character from her iconic novel, ±Ę°ů±đ±čâ€�from the New York Times bestselling author of Eligible and Romantic Comedy.

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

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

Hilarious, thought-provoking, and full of tenderness for her characters, Sittenfeld’s stories peel back layer after layer of our inner lives, keeping us riveted with her utterly distinctive voice.]]> Curtis Sittenfeld Deborah 4 3.56 2025
author: Curtis Sittenfeld
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves:
review:
A dozen stories in which Sittenfeld revisits her most fertile narrative ground—the lives of stressed middle-class (mostly) white women. Some indelibly drawn characters and fraught situations, and at times laugh-out-loud funny. And for those who wondered whatever happened to Lee Fiora, the protagonist of Prep, here we attend Lee’s 25th high school reunion with her.
]]> 226761855 In this spellbinding and provocative novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Miracles , a young mother is struck by sudden and puzzling psychological symptoms that illuminate the mysterious dimensions of the human mind—and of love.

A year after her child is born, Jane suffers a series of strange amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations, and an inexplicable sense of dread. Three days after her first visit to a psychiatrist, Jane suddenly goes missing. A day later she is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what has happened to her.

Are Jane’s strange experiences the result of being overwhelmed by motherhood, or are they manifestations of a long-buried trauma from her past? Why is she having visions of a young man who died twenty years ago and who warns her of a disaster ahead? Jane’s symptoms lead her psychiatrist ever deeper into the farthest reaches of her mind and cause him to question everything he thinks he knows about so-called reality—including events in his own life.

Karen Thompson Walker’s profound and beautifully written novel is both a speculative mystery about memory, identity, and fate and a mesmerizing literary puzzle about the bonds of love—between mother and child, between a man and a woman, and among those we’ve lost but who may still be among us.]]> Karen Thompson Walker Deborah 3 3.86 2025
author: Karen Thompson Walker
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves:
review:
A young woman seeks the help of a psychiatrist for troubling hallucinations and soon starts experiencing what the doctor suspects are fugue states, in which she disappears and later returns to herself with absolutely no memory of her time “away,� the longest episode of which is nine days—especially troubling because she disappears with her toddler son. Doctor and patient try to delve into what’s going on, while a hostile detective hovers in the background bent on digging up dirt. It soon becomes evident that something even stranger might be going on. (Hey, the title tells you that right up front—don’t say you weren’t warned!)
]]> 223649607 The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.

But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.]]> 192 Agustina Bazterrica 1668051893 Deborah 2 3.50 2023
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves:
review:
I was gobsmacked by the Argentinean author’s previous novel in translation, Tender is the Flesh, so thought I’d give this one a try, even though it seemed like it might not be entirely up my alley. Too right. In a future world ravaged by climate change and the extreme violence and nastiness rampant among the hugely reduced population, a young woman who’d experienced some of the worst of it is given shelter at a convent. But is this really shelter or imprisonment in a terrible place practising its own brand of nastiness? You probably won’t have any trouble guessing the answer. At least it’s quite short.
]]> 220994166
As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West would be a place of freedom and justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the various Wars on Terror, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, he has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realisation, a moral grappling with what it means � as a citizen of the US, as a father � to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times.

This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date. It’s a heartfelt breakup letter with the West, a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the world, in family rooms, on university campuses, on city streets. This book is for everyone who wants something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.

Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction. His books have been translated into thirteen languages.

�It is difficult to understand the nature of a true rupture while it is still tearing through the fabric of our world. Yet that is precisely what Omar El Akkad has accomplished, putting broken heart and shredded illusions into words with tremendous insight, skill and courage. A unique and urgently needed book.� Naomi Klein

�I feel inadequate to describe a book like this with the right superlatives � I don’t want to reduce the book down to one thing in doing so…but I hope Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This will find a large audience.� Jeff Vandermeer

'I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now... I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it.' Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars

'I urge you to read Omar El Akkad’s astonishing book.' David Olusoga, author of Black and British

'A startling, shocking, beautiful and essential book.' Brian Eno]]> Omar El Akkad 1923059459 Deborah 5 ł¦´Çłľ±č±ôľ±ł¦˛ąłŮ±đ»ĺ.â€� My god, I think I used almost exactly those words when I was talking with a friend recently about what’s happening in Gaza. The author’s point in this extended essay is that it’s not that complicated, that what’s currently taking place in Gaza is genocide and that the Western world not only refuses to condemn it but actually supports it. (In today’s news: the Trump administration is yanking $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University for its “failure to protect Jewish students from harassmentâ€� in the wake of last year’s student-led campus protests over the war in Gaza.) This is a passionately argued cri de coeur to stop the ongoing slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza.]]> 4.42 2025
author: Omar El Akkad
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/07
date added: 2025/03/07
shelves:
review:
I felt a visceral jolt when I instantly recognized myself among those described by the author as “…the well-meaning liberal who…can shrug their shoulders and say, Yes, it’s all so very sad, but you know, it’s all so very ł¦´Çłľ±č±ôľ±ł¦˛ąłŮ±đ»ĺ.â€� My god, I think I used almost exactly those words when I was talking with a friend recently about what’s happening in Gaza. The author’s point in this extended essay is that it’s not that complicated, that what’s currently taking place in Gaza is genocide and that the Western world not only refuses to condemn it but actually supports it. (In today’s news: the Trump administration is yanking $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University for its “failure to protect Jewish students from harassmentâ€� in the wake of last year’s student-led campus protests over the war in Gaza.) This is a passionately argued cri de coeur to stop the ongoing slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza.
]]> 228482274 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six comes an epic new novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s Space Shuttle program about the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits.

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easy-going even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant.

Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, with complex protagonists, telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love, this time among the stars.]]> 352 Taylor Jenkins Reid 0385695829 Deborah 0 to-read 4.62 2025
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216312091 The modern master of Nordic noir is back with an explosive novel about two brothers who, on the verge of losing everything, are willing to do anything to stop that from happening.

By all accounts, Carol and Roy Opgard are doing quite well for themselves. Or at least they are doing as well as can be expected in a small town like Os. Carl manages the area's swanky and successful spa, while Roy runs the local gas station and dreams of building it into an entire amusement park complete with a roller coaster. But then news breaks about a new highway that will bypass Os and leave the town cut off and isolated. Something has to be done about that, even if the methods need to be dirty. Fortunately, Roy and Carl have experience with dirty work.

Meanwhile, the town sheriff has gotten his hands on new technology that will enable him to take a deeper look at a spate of unsolved murders from years past—including that of his own father. Just as the sheriff reopens his investigation, the death toll begins to climb. Like Roy says about his roller "Once it is rolling, it's too late to get off."

Blood Ties is a tense, compulsively readable tour de force about loyalty, family ties and love that is as destructive as it is powerful.]]> 422 Jo Nesbø 1039012558 Deborah 0 currently-reading 4.31 2024
author: Jo Nesbø
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 215365999 “The story of relationships built and broken, mistakes inherited and repeated, and the beauty of trying again�.already one of the year’s best.”�People

Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her future in-laws� lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a young doctor with a brilliant life ahead of him. Charlie has asked Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate the ceremony, though Cece can’t imagine anyone more ill-suited for the task—an airport baggage handler haunted by a tragedy from his and Charlie’s shared past. But as Cece spends time with Garrett, his gruff mask slips, and she grows increasingly uncertain about her future. And why does Garrett, after meeting Cece, begin to feel, well, human again? As a contagious stomach flu threatens to scuttle the wedding, and Charlie and Garrett’s friendship is put to the ultimate test, Cece must decide between the life she’s dreamed of and a life she’s never imagined.

The events of that summer have long-lasting repercussions, not only on the three friends caught in its shadow but also on their children, who struggle to escape their parents� story. Spanning fifty years and set against the backdrop of a rapidly warming Montana, Dream State explores what it means to live with the mistakes of the past—both our own and the ones we’ve inherited.

Written with humor, precision, and enormous heart, both a love letter and an elegy to the American West, Dream State is a thrillingly ambitious ode to the power of friendship, the weird weather of marriage, and the beauty of impermanence.]]> 430 Eric Puchner 0385550677 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.87 2025
author: Eric Puchner
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 210594591
From plantsman Kelly Norris, author of New Naturalism, comes a much-needed handbook to maintaining today’s natural gardens. Naturalistic plantings, overflowing with biodiverse communities of plants, are filling front and backyards around the globe with colorful blooms, easy-care plants, and wildlife habitat. But caring for a naturalistic garden is vastly different than caring for a traditional home landscape of carefully manicured plants separated by mulch and regularly primped and pruned. In Your Natural Garden, tending your garden properly means understanding its connection to the greater natural world and using garden care methods that mimic nature instead of controlling it.

Page by page, you’re guided through all the seasons of a naturalistic garden’s life and the tasks and to-dos that come with each of them. Including how to:


Encourage and establish complexity in a new garden
Promote growth and variation by letting your plants self propagate
Determine when and what to edit, and when it’s best to let chaos rein
Decide if and when weeding is necessary
Foster the insects and other animals that rely on your plants
Understand succession in the naturalistic garden and why it’s important
Know when it’s time to cut back your garden and how to do it right

Verdant photographs accompany the text throughout, offering examples of well-tended naturalistic plantings and the tasks that are needed to properly care for them.]]> 208 Kelly D. Norris 0760388229 Deborah 0 to-read 4.11
author: Kelly D. Norris
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.11
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210594494 Get plant-care advice to make the most of low-water situations with The Water-Smart Garden.

As freshwater shortages increasingly strike regions around the globe, water-conserving gardening practices are more crucial than ever. Whether your landscape is filled with shrubs and perennials or fruits and vegetables, The Water-Smart Garden will teach you dozens of techniques to limit water use while growing a gorgeous and thriving garden.]]> 192 Noelle Johnson 0760388245 Deborah 0 to-read 4.67
author: Noelle Johnson
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.67
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213890792 New from the author of Presumed Innocent, the #1 bestseller that redefined the legal thriller and is the basis for Apple TV+’s most-watched drama series ever.

Rusty is a retired judge attempting a third act in life with a loving soon-to-be wife, Bea, with whom he shares both a restful home on an idyllic lake in the rural Midwest and a plaintive hope that this marriage will be his best, and his last. But the peace that’s taken Rusty so long to find evaporates when Bea’s young adult son, Aaron, living under their supervision while on probation for drug possession, disappears. If Aaron doesn’t return soon, he will be sent back to jail.

Aaron eventually turns up with a vague story about a camping trip with his troubled girlfriend, Mae, that ended in a fight and a long hitchhike home. Days later, when she still hasn’t returned, suspicion falls on Aaron, and when Mae is subsequently discovered dead, Aaron is arrested and set for trial on charges of first degree murder.

Faced with few choices and even fewer hopes, Bea begs Rusty to return to court one last time, to defend her son and to save their last best hope for happiness. For Rusty, the question is not whether to defend Aaron, or whether the boy is in fact innocent—it’s whether the system to which he has devoted his life can ever provide true justice for those who are presumed guilty.]]> 544 Scott Turow 1538706369 Deborah 0 to-read 4.24 2025
author: Scott Turow
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 221508547 #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly introduces a new cop relentlessly following his mission in the seemingly idyllic setting of Catalina island.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly introduces a new cop relentlessly following his mission in the seemingly idyllic setting of Catalina island.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been “exiled� to a low-key post policing rustic Catalina Island, after department politics drove him off a homicide desk on the mainland. But while following up the usual drunk-and-disorderlies and petty thefts that come with his new territory, Detective Stilwell gets a report of a body found weighed down at the bottom of the harbor—a Jane Doe identifiable at first only by a streak of purple dye in her hair. At the same time, a report of poaching on a protected reserve turns into a case fraught with violence and danger as Stilwell digs into the shady past of an island bigwig.

Crossing all lines of protocol and jurisdiction, Stilwell doggedly works both cases. Though hampered by an old beef with an ex-colleague determined to thwart him at every turn, he is convinced he is the only one who can bring justice to the woman known as “Nightshade.� Soon, his investigation uncovers closely guarded secrets and a dark heart to the serene island that was meant to be his escape from the evils of the big city.

Propulsive and atmospheric, Nightshade launches a brand new character into the Connelly universe, and proves without question that Michael Connelly is “the undisputed master of the modern crime novel� (Real Book Spy).]]> 352 Michael Connelly 0316588482 Deborah 0 to-read 4.14 2025
author: Michael Connelly
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210594666 288 Fabienne Josaphat 1643755889 Deborah 4
1968, Oakland, California. Antoinette (Nettie) is a college student with dreams of following in her father’s footsteps and becoming a doctor. She’s Haitian, brought to Oakland nine years earlier as a nine-year-old to raised by her aunt after her father was killed by Duvalier’s Tonton Macoute for his revolutionary ideals. And then she encounters the Black Panthers and gets a few revolutionary ideas herself, but mostly she falls in love with a handsome Panther security chief. The novel does a very good job of portraying the movement from the inside, the pressure from law enforcement of all levels, the unjustified raids and destruction of medical supplies at the free neighbourhood medical clinics and of foodstuffs destined for children’s breakfast programs, the paranoia at the (real) likelihood of embedded informers, and so on. ]]> 3.59 2024
author: Fabienne Josaphat
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars

1968, Oakland, California. Antoinette (Nettie) is a college student with dreams of following in her father’s footsteps and becoming a doctor. She’s Haitian, brought to Oakland nine years earlier as a nine-year-old to raised by her aunt after her father was killed by Duvalier’s Tonton Macoute for his revolutionary ideals. And then she encounters the Black Panthers and gets a few revolutionary ideas herself, but mostly she falls in love with a handsome Panther security chief. The novel does a very good job of portraying the movement from the inside, the pressure from law enforcement of all levels, the unjustified raids and destruction of medical supplies at the free neighbourhood medical clinics and of foodstuffs destined for children’s breakfast programs, the paranoia at the (real) likelihood of embedded informers, and so on.
]]> 214151348
A young student sits on a bench in a park in San Miguel, Mexico. Bonita is away from her home in India to learn Spanish. She is alone, somewhere she has no connection to. It is bliss.

And then a woman approaches her. The woman claims to recognize Bonita because she is the spitting image of her mother, who made the same journey from India to Mexico as a young artist. No, says Bonita, my mother didn’t paint. She never travelled to Mexico. But this strange woman insists, and so Bonita follows her. Into a story where Bonita and her mother will move apart and come together, and where the past threatens to flood the present, or re-write it.]]> 112 Anita Desai 1668082438 Deborah 4
A lyrical novella awash in colour in which a young Indian woman in Mexico to study is accosted by an older woman who says she knew her mother when she in turn was in Mexico as a young woman to learn to make art. This is a shock, as nothing the young woman knows of her mother suggested she’d ever been an artist. In spite of her inability to totally believe that this stranger actually knew her mother, she sets out on a quest to follow the breadcrumbs and try to unearth evidence of her mother’s unknown past. A poetic meditation on love, memory, art and more that also thoughtfully finds parallels between Mexico and India’s violent national paroxysms: Revolution and Partition.]]> 3.21 2024
author: Anita Desai
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars

A lyrical novella awash in colour in which a young Indian woman in Mexico to study is accosted by an older woman who says she knew her mother when she in turn was in Mexico as a young woman to learn to make art. This is a shock, as nothing the young woman knows of her mother suggested she’d ever been an artist. In spite of her inability to totally believe that this stranger actually knew her mother, she sets out on a quest to follow the breadcrumbs and try to unearth evidence of her mother’s unknown past. A poetic meditation on love, memory, art and more that also thoughtfully finds parallels between Mexico and India’s violent national paroxysms: Revolution and Partition.
]]> 203164415 From a literary master, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing.

An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world.

Add two children. And a horse.

From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.]]> 288 Ali Smith 0593701569 Deborah 4
I found this near-future dystopian novel to be a little less captivating than Smith’s other recent novels (particularly the Seasons quartet), but her verbal playfulness and many of her major themes are here. Two siblings, Briar and Rose, 11 and 13 when the novel opens, are unexpectedly separated from their adults and left to fend for themselves in a totalitarian state that labels and hunts down the “invalidated,� subjecting them to reeducation, forced labour and worse. The two are on the run and hiding out when they encounter the horse that Rose names Gliff—a name fraught with meaning, as the novel spells out. I wonder if I might have appreciated this better if I’d read it rather than listening to the audiobook, as the timelines are quite fractured and the wordplay dense. ]]> 3.96 2024
author: Ali Smith
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/12
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves:
review:
3.75 stars

I found this near-future dystopian novel to be a little less captivating than Smith’s other recent novels (particularly the Seasons quartet), but her verbal playfulness and many of her major themes are here. Two siblings, Briar and Rose, 11 and 13 when the novel opens, are unexpectedly separated from their adults and left to fend for themselves in a totalitarian state that labels and hunts down the “invalidated,� subjecting them to reeducation, forced labour and worse. The two are on the run and hiding out when they encounter the horse that Rose names Gliff—a name fraught with meaning, as the novel spells out. I wonder if I might have appreciated this better if I’d read it rather than listening to the audiobook, as the timelines are quite fractured and the wordplay dense.
]]> 228237435
In September of 1892, Oscar Wilde and his family retreated to the idyllic Norfolk countryside for a holiday. His wife, Constance, has every reason to be happy: two beautiful sons, a stellar reputation as an advocate for progressive causes, and a delightfully charming and affectionate husband and father, who is perhaps the most famous man in England. But as an assortment of houseguests arrive, including an aristocratic young wannabe poet named Lord Alfred Douglas, Constance gradually—and then all at once—comes to see that her husband's heart is elsewhere and that the growing intensity between the two men threatens the whole foundation of their lives.

The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts revolves around that fateful summer: what happened, and what might have been. When it was exposed, Oscar's affair with Lord Alfred Douglas—Bosie, as he was known—led to Wilde's imprisonment for homosexuality, and the financial and emotional ruin of his family. In Act Two, Bayard reveals Constance and their sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, in exile, forced to sell their possessions, leave England, and hide their identities. Act Three, from the perspective of Cyril, brings readers into the French trenches of World War I, where Cyril must grapple with the kind of man he wants to become, while Act Four reveals Vyvyan in London, years after the war, searching for answers from those who knew his parents. And in a brilliant act of the imagination, Act Five brings the entire cast back together in a surprising, poignant, and tremendously satisfying tableau.

With Louis Bayard's trademark sparkling dialogue, paired with his deep insight into the lives and longings of all his characters—and based on real events—The Wildes could almost have been created by Oscar Wilde himself: lightly told but with hidden depths, it is an entertaining and dramatic story about the human condition.]]> 10 Louis Bayard Deborah 4
The story of Oscar Wilde’s catastrophic plunge from feted, wealthy playwright to impoverished, disgraced man following his sensational trial and imprisonment for homosexuality. That ground has been often covered, but this novel tells the story from the perspective of his wife, Constance, and their two sons, who, after the whole sorry mess, left the country and changed their family name to escape the notoriety. I was moved by the final part of this novel, a speculative “what if?� riff on the far happier way things might have gone for all concerned had Constance been able to react differently up front, but it would have required a very modern mindset that would surely have been out of reach for her in those times. But what if�.?]]> 4.00 2024
author: Louis Bayard
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves:
review:
3.75 stars

The story of Oscar Wilde’s catastrophic plunge from feted, wealthy playwright to impoverished, disgraced man following his sensational trial and imprisonment for homosexuality. That ground has been often covered, but this novel tells the story from the perspective of his wife, Constance, and their two sons, who, after the whole sorry mess, left the country and changed their family name to escape the notoriety. I was moved by the final part of this novel, a speculative “what if?� riff on the far happier way things might have gone for all concerned had Constance been able to react differently up front, but it would have required a very modern mindset that would surely have been out of reach for her in those times. But what if�.?
]]> 214152244 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781668076217.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo meets First Lie Wins in this electric, voice-driven debut novel about an elusive bestselling author who decides to finally confess her true identity after years of hiding from her past.

Cate Kay knows how to craft a story. As the creator of a bestselling book trilogy that struck box office gold as a film series, she’s one of the most successful authors of her generation. The thing is, Cate Kay doesn’t really exist. She’s never attended author events or granted any interviews. Her real identity had been a closely guarded secret, until now.

As a young adult, she and her best friend Amanda dreamed of escaping their difficult homes and moving to California to become movie stars. But the day before their grand adventure, a tragedy shattered their dreams and Cate has been on the run ever since, taking on different names and charting a new future. But after a shocking revelation, Cate understands that returning home is the only way she’ll be a whole person again.]]> 304 Kate Fagan Deborah 3 3.77 2025
author: Kate Fagan
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves:
review:
Soapy but sincere entertainment involving nested secret identities. Cate Kay is the author of a mega-hit book trilogy and its based-on film franchise, but that’s a pen name protecting the closely guarded identity of the writer behind it. Turns out, the real author is herself a false identity, hiding her earliest, true self, a small-town kid with a best friend sharing the dream of going to Hollywood to find fame and fortune.
]]> 223346502
After the murder of her best friend, a librarian’s search for answers leads back to her own dark secrets in this sweeping novel about a woman transformed by war, family, vengeance, and love, from award-winning writer Allen Eskens.

Hana Babic is a quiet, middle-aged librarian in Minnesota whoĚýwants nothing more than to be left alone. But when a detective arrives with the news that her best friend has been murdered, Hana knows that something evil has come for her, a dark remnant of the past she and her friend had shared.

Thirty years before, Hana was someone Nura Divjak, a teenager growing up in the mountains of war-torn Bosnia—until Serbian soldiers arrived to slaughter her entire family before her eyes. The events of that day thrust Nura into the war, leading her to join a band of militia fighters, where she became not only a fierce warrior but a legend—the deadly Night Mora. But a shattering final act forced Nura to flee to the United States with a bounty on her head.

Now, someone is hunting Hana, and her friend has paid the price, leaving her eight-year-old grandson in Hana’s care. To protect the child without revealing her secret, Hana must again become the Night Mora—and hope she can find the killer before the past comes for them, too.]]> Allen Eskens Deborah 4 3.88 2025
author: Allen Eskens
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves:
review:
Hana is a 50-ish woman who works as a librarian and lives as inconspicuously as she can in Minnesota until decades pass in this fashion. But the dark past and her deep-buried secrets come rushing back when a detective arrives to tell her that her best friend has been murdered by person or persons unknown. But Hana fears she knows who it is, and she is determined to protect the eight-year-old grandson that her friend has left to her to raise. The chapters alternate between the present-day and the war in Bosnia, when a young Hana watched Serb soldiers slaughter her family and launched her on a crusade of vengeance.
]]> 206549834 Two brothers in dire straits, living on the edge of Yellowstone, agree to a desperate act of survival.

In an aging timber house hand-built into the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains, two brothers are struggling to keep up with their debts. They live off the grid on the fringe of Yellowstone, surviving after the death of their father. Thad, the elder, is more capable of engaging with things like the truck registration and the medical bills from their father’s fatal illness and the tax lien on the cabin their grandfather built, while Hazen is... different, more instinctual, deeply attuned to the natural world. Desperate for money, they are approached by a shadowy out-of-towner with a proposition and agree to attempt a heist of natural resources from Yellowstone, a federal crime. Beartooth is a fast-paced tale set in the grandeur of the American West.]]> 256 Callan Wink 1954118023 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.72 2025
author: Callan Wink
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 218391613
An epic novel of determination, survival, and the limits of the human spirit. This is Tim Winton as you’ve never read him before.

Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place � middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They’re exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they’ve seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work.

Problem is, they’re not alone.

So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism.]]> 15 Tim Winton 1761344935 Deborah 5 A totally gripping dystopic tale of an Australia, oh, a hundred or two hundred years in the future, when the heat and extreme weather events have rendered most of the continent uninhabitable. Specifics about the when are deliberately left vague, though there is admirable world-building here, as a grizzled old wanderer and his young charge, a little girl not his daughter (children are rare in this place), are taken prisoner while seeking shelter by a lone man who may or may not kill them. And so, to buy time and perhaps leniency, the grizzled veteran begins to regale their captor with the story of his life—and what a story it is. If you can, treat yourself to the audiobook version, because this tale seems designed to be read aloud, as the old guy is narrating it to save their lives. Nuances of The Road and Mad Max abound, and there are commando-style military raids aplenty in the old fella’s past. I’m doing the novel a disservice by suggesting it’s nothing but an adventure story; anyone who knows Tim Winton’s writing knows there’s lots more thoughtful stuff going on here (though, damn, the derring-do really got my heart thumping).]]> 3.46 2024
author: Tim Winton
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves:
review:

A totally gripping dystopic tale of an Australia, oh, a hundred or two hundred years in the future, when the heat and extreme weather events have rendered most of the continent uninhabitable. Specifics about the when are deliberately left vague, though there is admirable world-building here, as a grizzled old wanderer and his young charge, a little girl not his daughter (children are rare in this place), are taken prisoner while seeking shelter by a lone man who may or may not kill them. And so, to buy time and perhaps leniency, the grizzled veteran begins to regale their captor with the story of his life—and what a story it is. If you can, treat yourself to the audiobook version, because this tale seems designed to be read aloud, as the old guy is narrating it to save their lives. Nuances of The Road and Mad Max abound, and there are commando-style military raids aplenty in the old fella’s past. I’m doing the novel a disservice by suggesting it’s nothing but an adventure story; anyone who knows Tim Winton’s writing knows there’s lots more thoughtful stuff going on here (though, damn, the derring-do really got my heart thumping).
]]> 222006988
The #1 New York Times bestselling author, whose books so many love, brings us a fresh, contemporary story of a woman and her unruly blended family

“Nobody writes women the way Jojo Moyes does.”—Jodi Picoult

Lila Kennedy has a lot on her plate. A broken marriage, two wayward daughters, a house that is falling apart, and an elderly stepfather who seems to have quietly moved in. Her career is in freefall and her love life is . . . complicated. So when her real dad—a man she has barely seen since he ran off to Hollywood thirty-five years ago—suddenly appears on her doorstep, it feels like the final straw. But it turns out even the family you thought you could never forgive might have something to teach you: about love, and what it actually means to be family.]]> Jojo Moyes Deborah 3
I’m a latecomer to Jojo Moyes, having read only her most recent two novels (she’s written about 20), but I think I already recognize, not to mention enjoy, her voice. In this one, Lila, a 40-something writer, wife, and mother of two girls, one of them (shudder) a teenager, finds herself in the midst of a total life implosion. Her hitherto utterly reliable husband has left her for a younger woman, she’s still grieving her recently deceased mother, her writing career is stuttering to a halt, her elderly (but cherished) stepfather seems to have moved in with her and the girls, and now—the piece de la resistance—her biological father, whom she hasn’t seen in 30-plus years, shows up on the doorstep. Lots of enjoyable (joyous) stuff about Lila trying to make this wildly unconventional blended family work, while getting her writing back on track and trying to navigate the fraught waters of dating and romance as a newly single woman.]]> 3.64 2025
author: Jojo Moyes
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars

I’m a latecomer to Jojo Moyes, having read only her most recent two novels (she’s written about 20), but I think I already recognize, not to mention enjoy, her voice. In this one, Lila, a 40-something writer, wife, and mother of two girls, one of them (shudder) a teenager, finds herself in the midst of a total life implosion. Her hitherto utterly reliable husband has left her for a younger woman, she’s still grieving her recently deceased mother, her writing career is stuttering to a halt, her elderly (but cherished) stepfather seems to have moved in with her and the girls, and now—the piece de la resistance—her biological father, whom she hasn’t seen in 30-plus years, shows up on the doorstep. Lots of enjoyable (joyous) stuff about Lila trying to make this wildly unconventional blended family work, while getting her writing back on track and trying to navigate the fraught waters of dating and romance as a newly single woman.
]]> 212806636 A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in this epic saga of love, faith, and defiance from the bestselling author of Sam.

Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and volatile man—spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. Isolated and afraid, Marguerite befriends her guardian’s servant and the two develop an intense attraction. But when their relationship is discovered, they are brutally punished and abandoned on a small island with no hope for rescue.

Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed.

Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.]]> 368 Allegra Goodman 0593730089 Deborah 4 4.02 2025
author: Allegra Goodman
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves:
review:
A fictional treatment of the real-life tale of a French noblewoman (well, just a teenager) who displeased her guardian and was marooned with her lover on a small island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in 1572, during an exploratory trip to the New World. Against all the odds, she survived two full years before being picked up and returned to France. (Nota bene, that means two harsh Canadian winters. I’m not ashamed to admit I find the current Ontario winter very hard to get through, warm clothing, central heating, handy grocery store food and all.) Not much else is known of Marguerite’s story; in fact, the only two contemporary accounts that exist are quite contradictory. But the author does an excellent job of fully and empathetically imagining and fleshing out this almost unimaginable story.
]]> 58340692 256 Martha Wainwright 0306924684 Deborah 3
There’s not much to surprise here. The whole family is involved in music, including father Loudon Wainwright III, his partner after Kate, Suzzy Roche, and their daughter, Lucy, Rufus and Martha’s half-sister. So there was plenty about the music business. What drew my attention most, though, was the family stuff. Martha and Rufus are very attached, but there’s a broad streak of sibling rivalry—Martha is constantly measuring herself against him (he’s older by three years), even in silly stuff like who had the best wedding. The memoir is liberally peppered with snide, though affectionate, digs at her far more successful brother. Her parents split when she was very young, and she seems to have spent the years since then in a flailing hunt for love. She had a chaotic-sounding adolescence and young adulthood, involving lots of drugs and catting around and plenty of bungled opportunities in her career. Marriage and motherhood saw her settling some, but there was an acrimonious split and ongoing drama with raising her boys. One startling revelation was that mother Kate never seemed fully OK with Rufus being gay, even though it didn’t harm their relationship. Martha says the memoir was many years in the making, with many fits and starts (an early draft was used as evidence against her in her divorce, so that—no wonder—stopped the writing for a while), and it took the forced inactivity of the early pandemic for her to get it down. Entertaining enough, but you probably need to be a fan of the music to really get into it.]]> 3.97
author: Martha Wainwright
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.97
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2022/08/09
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves:
review:
I admit that curiosity drove me to listen to this memoir from Martha Wainwright. I have one of her albums, most of brother Rufus’s albums, and am very familiar with the music, especially the songwriting, of Canadian folk legends Kate and Anna McGarrigle (Kate was Martha and Rufus’s mother.) Martha narrated the memoir herself, and I’ll start by saying her voice is evidence that she really ought to quit smoking, especially because she’s a singer and because her mother died a drawn-out, miserable death of cancer. OK, preaching done.

There’s not much to surprise here. The whole family is involved in music, including father Loudon Wainwright III, his partner after Kate, Suzzy Roche, and their daughter, Lucy, Rufus and Martha’s half-sister. So there was plenty about the music business. What drew my attention most, though, was the family stuff. Martha and Rufus are very attached, but there’s a broad streak of sibling rivalry—Martha is constantly measuring herself against him (he’s older by three years), even in silly stuff like who had the best wedding. The memoir is liberally peppered with snide, though affectionate, digs at her far more successful brother. Her parents split when she was very young, and she seems to have spent the years since then in a flailing hunt for love. She had a chaotic-sounding adolescence and young adulthood, involving lots of drugs and catting around and plenty of bungled opportunities in her career. Marriage and motherhood saw her settling some, but there was an acrimonious split and ongoing drama with raising her boys. One startling revelation was that mother Kate never seemed fully OK with Rufus being gay, even though it didn’t harm their relationship. Martha says the memoir was many years in the making, with many fits and starts (an early draft was used as evidence against her in her divorce, so that—no wonder—stopped the writing for a while), and it took the forced inactivity of the early pandemic for her to get it down. Entertaining enough, but you probably need to be a fan of the music to really get into it.
]]> 199793444
While confined to a series of hospital wards, he felt compelled to write, but being unable to type or to hold a pen, he began to dictate to family members the words which formed in his head. The result was an extraordinary series of dispatches from his hospital bed � a diary of a life in pieces, recorded with rare honesty, clarity and courage.

As Hanif wrote, early on: �A few days ago, a bomb went off in my life, but this bomb has also shattered the lives of those around me. My partner, my children, my friends.�

This book takes these hospital dispatches � edited, expanded and meticulously interwoven with new writing � and charts both a shattering and a a new life born of pain and loss, but animated by new feelings � of gratitude, humility and love.]]> 336 Hanif Kureishi 0063360500 Deborah 4 4.01 2025
author: Hanif Kureishi
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves:
review:
They say most accidents happen in the home, and this one has my skin crawling over how such a seemingly innocuous event can have such a devastating outcome. Writer Hanif Kureishi was sitting in a chair at a table, felt suddenly lightheaded, put his head between his knees, passed out and fell onto his head and neck in such a way that he damaged his spinal column and was left a quadriplegic. Sitting. In a Chair. Not climbing, or doing anything risky. Sitting down, fer gawd’s sake. This is Kureishi’s account of the year following the accident, written as a series of weekly dispatches to the Guardian, I think it was (a UK broadsheet, in any event) as dictated to one of his sons. He spent the entire year in a series of three hospitals, being assessed, cared for, and getting therapy/rehab to prepare him to be sent home. His account is so candid, lucid, goes into his thoughts about his grossly changed life circumstances. The wonder is that he was able to do it at all, but he explains that he’d never thought of himself as anything but a writer since he was a kid, and that this terrible circumstance may have taken away everything else from him, but it was damn well not going to strip him of his identity as a writer.
]]> 213558038 From one of the most beloved comedic writers of our time comes a charming, laugh-out-loud tale of love and criminality, a pitch-perfect romantic comedy from the author of Ms. Demeanor.

Taking over her parents� estate sale business is more than Emma Lewis bargained for. Coming from a long line of estate liquidators has its challenges but Emma was completely unprepared for the people she would meet. Pimps, prostitutes, crooked cops, art thieves? Should she turn down potential clients in need of decluttering just because they are shady and proud of it?

No.

A girl must make a living—and it could be more fortuitous than she ever imagined . . .Ěý]]> 312 Elinor Lipman 0063322250 Deborah 3
A mildly charming rom-com, comedy of manners in which Emma, 32, with a couple of graduate degrees under her belt, is experiencing something of a failure to launch. She’s moved back to her small Massachusetts hometown, back into the house she grew up in (though at least her parents have retired and decamped to a condo on the coast) and taken over her folks� downsizing/estate sale business. She’s not crazy about the biz but thinks she stands to make a bundle when she gets the contract to run the estate sale to empty out the very grand manse in the toniest neighbourhood in town—which just happens to be the site of an “escort agency� that everyone in town knew was a high-end bordello. Complications ensue, most of which are a big headache, but there is an upside: the dishy single police chief shows up on her doorstep, and the sparks fly.]]> 3.38 2025
author: Elinor Lipman
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars

A mildly charming rom-com, comedy of manners in which Emma, 32, with a couple of graduate degrees under her belt, is experiencing something of a failure to launch. She’s moved back to her small Massachusetts hometown, back into the house she grew up in (though at least her parents have retired and decamped to a condo on the coast) and taken over her folks� downsizing/estate sale business. She’s not crazy about the biz but thinks she stands to make a bundle when she gets the contract to run the estate sale to empty out the very grand manse in the toniest neighbourhood in town—which just happens to be the site of an “escort agency� that everyone in town knew was a high-end bordello. Complications ensue, most of which are a big headache, but there is an upside: the dishy single police chief shows up on her doorstep, and the sparks fly.
]]> 56786485 In this deliciously noir novel from the creator of HBO's Bored to Death, idiosyncratic private detective Happy Doll embarks on a quest to help a dying friend in a sun-blinded Los AngelesĚý as "quirky, edgy, charming, funny and serious" as its protagonistĚý(Lee Child).Ěý

Happy Doll is a charming, if occasionally inexpert, private detective living just one sheer cliff drop beneath the Hollywood sign with his beloved half-Chihuahua half-Terrier, George. A veteran of both the Navy and LAPD, Doll supplements his meager income as a P.I. by working through the night at a local Thai spa that offers its clients a number of special services. Armed with his sixteen-inch steel telescopic baton, biting dry humor, and just a bit of a hero complex, the ex-cop sets out to protect the women who work there from clients who have trouble understanding the word "no." Ěý Doll gets by just fine following his two basic bark loudly and act first. But when things get out-of-hand with one particularly violent patron, even he finds himself wildly out of his depth, and then things take an even more dangerous twist when an old friend from his days as a cop shows up at his door with a bullet in his gut. ĚýA Man Named DollĚýis more than just a fascinating introduction to one truly singular character, it is a highly addictive and completely unpredictable joyride through the sensuous and violent streets of LA.]]> 225 Jonathan Ames 0316703648 Deborah 4
Entertaining L.A. Noir featuring likeable PI protagonist Happy Doll. The author is a TV writer in addition to being a novelist, and it shows in the pacing and camera-ready scenes. Hank (as he prefers to be known; only close friends know his legal name is Happy) is contacted by a dying friend who needs a massive favour. By the time Hank thinks it over and decides he’s ready to help, all hell has broken loose—the bodies rapidly pile up and Hank encounters a gang of bad guys who raise their money in a baroquely awful fashion.
]]> 3.89 2021
author: Jonathan Ames
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/19
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars

Entertaining L.A. Noir featuring likeable PI protagonist Happy Doll. The author is a TV writer in addition to being a novelist, and it shows in the pacing and camera-ready scenes. Hank (as he prefers to be known; only close friends know his legal name is Happy) is contacted by a dying friend who needs a massive favour. By the time Hank thinks it over and decides he’s ready to help, all hell has broken loose—the bodies rapidly pile up and Hank encounters a gang of bad guys who raise their money in a baroquely awful fashion.

]]> 213243955 An unforgettable dark fairy tale that asks, Can love save us from ourselves?

Birdie’s keeping it together; of course she is. So she’s a little hungover sometimes, and she has to bring her daughter, Emaleen, to her job waiting tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but she’s getting by as a single mother in a tough town. Still, Birdie can remember happier times from her youth, when she was free in the wilds of nature.

Arthur Neilsen, a soft-spoken and scarred recluse who appears in town only at the change of seasons, brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods. Most people avoid him, but to Birdie he represents everything she’s ever longed for. She finds herself falling for Arthur and the land he knows so well. Against the warnings of those who care about them, Birdie and Emaleen move to his isolated cabin in the mountains on the far side of the Wolverine River.

It’s just the three of them in the vast black woods, far from roads, telephones, electricity, and outside contact, but Birdie believes she has come prepared. At first, it’s idyllic, but soon Birdie discovers that Arthur is something much more mysterious and dangerous than she could have imagined, and that like the Alaska wilderness, a fairy tale can be as dark as it is beautiful.]]> 306 Eowyn Ivey 0593231023 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.72 2025
author: Eowyn Ivey
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 56179364 The English language debut of the bestselling Dutch novel, Hex, from Thomas Olde Heuvelt--a Hugo and World Fantasy award nominated talent to watch

Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay 'til death. Whoever settles, never leaves.

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children's bed for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened or the consequences will be too terrible to bear.

The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using high-tech surveillance to prevent their curse from spreading. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town's teenagers decide to break their strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into dark, medieval practices of the distant past.

This chilling novel heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice in mainstream horror and dark fantasy.]]> 384 Thomas Olde Heuvelt 1250780934 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.71 2013
author: Thomas Olde Heuvelt
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 220152313 Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, a novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be good, from the award-winning author of The Weekend.

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.

But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past.

Meditative, moving, and finely observed, Stone Yard Devotional is a seminal novel from a writer of rare power, exploring what it means to retreat from the world, the true nature of forgiveness, and the sustained effect of grief on the human soul.]]> 302 Charlotte Wood Deborah 0 currently-reading 4.09 2023
author: Charlotte Wood
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 203579073 Finding a dead body is not normal. But Ava is not a normal teenager. In this chillingly beautiful mystery, only the obsessive spirit of youth can save a desperate town from the savagery within.

Ava Bonney is a compassionate and studious fourteen-year-old girl with a dark secret: she has an obsessive interest in the macabre. She is fascinated by the rate at which dead animals decompose. The highway she lives by regularly offers up gifts of roadkill, and in the dead of night Ava loves nothing more than to pull her latest discovery into her roadside den and record her findings.

One night, she stumbles across the body of her classmate and, fearing that her secret ritual could be revealed, she makes an anonymous call to the police. But when Detective Seth Delahaye is given the case, Ava won’t step back—not while teenagers continue to go missing.

Racing alongside the police or against them, Ava is determined to figure out who is hunting her classmates before she becomes the next prey. How hard can it be to track a killer?]]> 354 Marie Tierney 1250357594 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.79 2024
author: Marie Tierney
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 201608156
Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from the town. His eldest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father's shadow, and remains there, having missed one chance at love � and passed up another offer of marriage from an unsuitable man.

But in the Advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy's lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. As the winter passes, father and daughter's lives, the understanding of their family, and their role in their community are changed forever.

Set over the course of one December in the same village as Williams' beloved This Is Happiness, Time of the Child is a tender return to Faha for readers who know its charms, and a heartwarming welcome to new readers entering for the very first time.]]> 304 Niall Williams 1639734201 Deborah 5 4.17 2024
author: Niall Williams
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves:
review:
Niall Williams is one of my favourite writers, and this, his latest, did not disappoint. If you’re familiar with, let’s call it Williams World, you’ll immediately delight in being back in the tiny, exceedingly wet Irish village of Faha, as far west as it’s possible to be. This book starts slowly, gently, full of winces and wry chuckles and many small felicities in setting the scene carefully and thoroughly for the waves of emotion to come. It’s the season running up to Christmas in 1962, and the small, browbeaten son of a ne’er-do-well sot finds a baby abandoned on a church doorstep and contrives to get her to the village doctor and his adult daughter, where she’s instantly, deeply cherished. Ah, there’s the rub. No single woman, even one living with a respectable father, in the Ireland of 1962 will be allowed to keep a baby, thank you very much indeed. So what’s to be done? And that’s the plot. But it delves so profoundly into the taciturn doctor’s heart and mind, into the communal life of a village and its idiosyncratic denizens, and is so full of gentle humour and sorrow both, wonderful set pieces, beautiful prose and gorgeous turns of phrase that it’s simply a marvel. I was profoundly moved and left with the lingering sensation that this is not such a bad old world after all, and the people in it are on the whole a decent lot. Highly recommended.
]]> 213618132 The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom in this moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake, a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick

When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well.

The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England—the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby's high profile romance falls apart without any explanation, that's exactly what they get.

So Ebby flees to France, only for her past to follow her there. And as she tries to process what's happened, she begins to think about the other loss her family suffered on that day eighteen years ago—the stoneware jar that had been in their family for generations, brought North by an enslaved ancestor. But little does she know that the handcrafted piece of pottery held more than just her family's history—it might also hold the key to unlocking her own future.

In this sweeping, evocative novel, Charmaine Wilkerson brings to life a multi-generational epic that examines how the past informs our present.]]> 368 Charmaine Wilkerson 0593358368 Deborah 0 currently-reading 4.07 2025
author: Charmaine Wilkerson
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 211953309 A dazzling debut novel set in 1980s New York, when cocaine is as easy to get as ice cream, about one young woman’s summer of infinite possibility—and looming danger.

It was the summer of 1986, when the girl was found dead in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum—half-naked, legs splayed, arms flung over her head. Larynx crushed.

There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother’s depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible—when her mother isn’t lying in bed for days, she’s lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan’s, the Upper East Side bar where young Manhattan society congregates. It doesn’t help that she’s Jewish, an outsider among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarified world. She can fit in, kind of, with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents� medicine cabinet.

Flanagan’s is where she pines for the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed, whom every girl wants to sleep with and every guy wants to be. After she’s introduced to cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, oblivious to the warning signs. When a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and Gardner grow closer, it seems like Nina might finally get what she wants. But at what cost?

Freud called cocaine “a gorgeous excitement,� but a gorgeous excitement for the wrong guy can be lethal.]]> 368 Cynthia Weiner 0593798848 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.71
author: Cynthia Weiner
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.71
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
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]]> 211004897 Head Cases follows an enigmatic group of FBI agents as they hunt down a murderer seeking his own justice in this electrifying—and commercial—series debut.

FBI Agent Gardner Camden is an analytical genius with an affinity for puzzles. He also has a blind spot on the human side of investigations, a blindness that sometimes even includes people in his own life, like his beloved seven-year-old daughter Camila. Gardner and his squad of brilliant yet quirky agents make up the Patterns and Recognition (PAR) unit, the FBI’s hidden edge, brought in for cases that no one else can solve.

When DNA links a murder victim to a serial killer long presumed dead, the team springs into action. A second victim establishes a pattern, and the murderer begins leaving a trail of clues and riddles especially for Gardner. And while the PAR team is usually relegated to working cold cases from behind a desk, the investigation puts them on the road and into the public eye, following in the footsteps of a killer.

Along with Gardner, PAR consists of a mathematician, a weapons expert, a computer analyst, and their leader, a career agent. Each of them must use every skill they have to solve the riddle of the killer’s identity. But with the perpetrator somehow learning more and more about the team at PAR, can they protect themselves and their families…before it’s too late?

With an enigmatic case that will keep readers on the edge of their seats and a thoroughly engaging ensemble cast, John McMahon’s Head Cases is a triumph.]]> 341 John McMahon 1250348293 Deborah 0 currently-reading 4.00 2025
author: John McMahon
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
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]]> 59364113 A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard.

Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew.

To his surprise and the reader’s delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley’s home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards—a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns.

In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All The Beauty in the World is a surprising, inspiring portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.]]> 240 Patrick Bringley 1982163321 Deborah 4
A lovely book about the 10 years Patrick Bringley spent working as a security guard at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which he philosophically and movingly contemplates how his relationship with the beauty of the many magnificent treasures within gradually released him from the bonds of profound grief. Bringley was a young man working in The New Yorker’s events department when he lost his beloved brother, Tom, to cancer and in the aftermath made the decision to turn to the Met. In this book, he describes how he gradually unfolded from his cocoon of sorrow in his contemplation of the many man-made objects around him, from all over the world and some many thousands of years old. Full of interesting facts about the Met behind-the-scenes, but more remarkable for the emotional, philosophical bent Bringley brings to his consideration of man and the art he makes.]]> 4.01 2023
author: Patrick Bringley
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/30
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves:
review:
4.5 stars

A lovely book about the 10 years Patrick Bringley spent working as a security guard at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which he philosophically and movingly contemplates how his relationship with the beauty of the many magnificent treasures within gradually released him from the bonds of profound grief. Bringley was a young man working in The New Yorker’s events department when he lost his beloved brother, Tom, to cancer and in the aftermath made the decision to turn to the Met. In this book, he describes how he gradually unfolded from his cocoon of sorrow in his contemplation of the many man-made objects around him, from all over the world and some many thousands of years old. Full of interesting facts about the Met behind-the-scenes, but more remarkable for the emotional, philosophical bent Bringley brings to his consideration of man and the art he makes.
]]> 212924044 In the latest from “mystery master� Walter Mosley, a family member’s terminal illness leads P.I. Joe King Oliver to the investigation of his tracking down his long-lost father, and meanwhile, a new case pits King’s professional responsibility against his own moral code. (TheWashington Post)
Ěý
Praise for the novels of Walter
Ěý
“A master of the genre…Mosley’s writing is so rich, and his characters are not like anyone else’s, anywhere. It’s noir with a social conscience, noir with its thinking cap on� revelatory.� � Tracy Clark, Washington Post
Ěý
"Skitters across the spectrum between orthodox and radical like a polygraph needle wired to a nervy accomplice. . . deliciously gritty noir."�Daniel Nieh , New York Times Book Review
Ěý
“The evocative prose and astute observations about human nature, race relations and family bonds that have distinguished Mosley's writing for some 30 years."�Paula Woods , Los Angeles Times
Ěý
“As knotty as the plot can get, the book is consistently lifted by the intelligence of its characters…Mosley is in top form as a social Absolute poverty, muses his protagonist, is being �the experience of being slowly murdered by a state of being.� Mosley's reportorial eye is equally sharp in making details count…”� Kirkus Reviews
Ěý
“a modern master of the noir form, ... Mosley knows exactly how to craft a mystery that keeps you at the edge of your seat all the while forcing you to reckon with sinister forces at the heart of American society." � Dwyer Murphy , CrimeReads
Ěý
“Mosley is a master of craft and narrative, and through his incredibly vibrant and diverse body of work, our literary heritage has truly been enriched.”�National Book Foundation
Ěý
"Few mystery writers can examine issues of race—how it divides and binds people—as clearly and unflinchingly as Walter Mosley."�Oline Cogdill, Associated Press ]]> 336 Walter Mosley 0316573264 Deborah 0 currently-reading 4.00
author: Walter Mosley
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> 24040544
When Bruno is invited to the lavish birthday celebration of World War II flying ace and national icon Marco “the Patriarch� Desaix, it’s the fulfillment of a boyhood dream. But when the party ends in the death of Gilbert, Marco’s longtime friend, it’s another day on the job for the chef de police . All signs point to a tragic accident, but Bruno isn’t so sure. There is more to the Desaix family’s lives and loyalties than meets the eye. There is Victor, the Patriarch’s son, Gilbert’s old comrade-in-arms and sometime rival; Victor’s seductive wife, Madeleine, whose roving eye intrigues Bruno even more than her fierce political ambitions; Yevgeny, another son, an artist whose paintings seem to hold keys to the past; and the Patriarch himself, whose postwar Soviet ties may have intersected all too closely with Gilbert’s career in Cold War intelligence.

Bruno is diverted by a dangerous conflict between a local animal rights activist and outraged hunters � as well as meals to cook, wine to share, and an ever more complicated romantic situation. But as his entanglement with the Desaix family grows and his suspicions heighten, Bruno’s inquiries into Gilbert’s life become a deadly threat to his own.]]> 321 Martin Walker 0385354177 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.80 2015
author: Martin Walker
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 101160801 The “shocking� (The Wall Street Journal), must-read story of Charlie Chaplin’s years of exile from the United States during the postwar Red Scare, and how it ruined his film career, from bestselling biographer Scott Eyman.

Bestselling Hollywood biographer and film historian Scott Eyman tells the story of Charlie Chaplin’s fall from grace. In the aftermath of World War II, Chaplin was criticized for being politically liberal and internationalist in outlook. He had never become a US citizen, something that would be held against him as xenophobia set in when the postwar Red Scare took hold.

Politics aside, Chaplin had another his sexual interest in young women. He had been married three times and had had numerous affairs. In the 1940s, he was the subject of a paternity suit, which he lost, despite blood tests that proved he was not the father. His sexuality became a convenient way for those who opposed his politics to condemn him. Refused permission to return to the US after a trip abroad, he settled in Switzerland and made his last two films in London.

In Charlie Chaplin vs. America, Scott Eyman explores the life and times of the movie genius who brought us such masterpieces as City Lights and Modern Times. “One of the finest surveys of the man and the artist ever written� (Leonard Maltin) this book is “a sobering account of cancel culture in action.� (The Economist).]]> 428 Scott Eyman 1982176350 Deborah 3
I could go on, perhaps to add that Chaplin’s childhood was beyond Dickensian, with dire poverty, his parents� marriage breakdown, his father’s early death due to out-of-control alcoholism, his mother repeatedly institutionalized in a mental hospital, Charlie forced to labour in a workhome, his formal education ending at about a grade 4 level—it beggars belief that he not only survived that but went on to thrive and succeed. Anyway, it’s all fascinating stuff, though author Eynman sometimes gives almost too much detail, maybe to use as much of his research as possible and provide a definitive account?]]> 4.11 2023
author: Scott Eyman
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves:
review:
I have watched most of Chaplin’s feature films, silent and beyond, starting when I was a library page as a teenager and would lug home a borrowed projector and cans of film, thread the reels and screen the movies for my kid brothers and sisters. (A very far cry from today’s streaming technology, but I do pride myself on being an early adopter of home viewing!) I knew relatively little about Chaplin’s private life, other than having a hazy notion about his predilection for teenage girls and some sort of scandal, and his having spent the last decades of his life exiled in Switzerland. Well, I know a whole lot more now. This was yet another shameful episode of the Red Scare witch-hunt of 1950s America. By the 50s, Chaplin was no longer at the peak of his popularity, which started in the 1910s and continued for decades, but he was still arguably the world’s most recognized man in his guise as the much-loved Little Tramp. Yet a single speech he made during WWII about opening a second front to lend support to the Russians, who were then allies and suffering an appalling death toll (I’ll just say “siege of Leningrad�), turned the fury of the American powers-that-be against Chaplin as a Commie. Of course he never was, but the might of the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the INS and other investigative agencies combined against him, and almost all the Hollywood columnists, chiefly Hedda Hopper and Ed Sullivan, inveighed against him unceasingly with the rumours and lies they were spoonfed by J. Edgar Hoover. And a young Senator named Richard Nixon piled on as part of the House Unamerican Activities Committee. After years of investigation and mud-slinging but unable to make a claim of Chaplin’s communist sympathies stick, they took another tack and tried him under the Mann Act, that is, he was charged with transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. Well, never was there a less pure lily than the woman accusing Chaplin, but no matter. When Chaplin and family sailed to Europe in 1953 to promote the release of Limelight, his re-entry permit was rescinded on the grounds of moral turpitude. (He was a Brit, and though he’d been in the States for about 40 years, he’d never become a US citizen, one of the many things that had his US critics foaming at the mouth.)

I could go on, perhaps to add that Chaplin’s childhood was beyond Dickensian, with dire poverty, his parents� marriage breakdown, his father’s early death due to out-of-control alcoholism, his mother repeatedly institutionalized in a mental hospital, Charlie forced to labour in a workhome, his formal education ending at about a grade 4 level—it beggars belief that he not only survived that but went on to thrive and succeed. Anyway, it’s all fascinating stuff, though author Eynman sometimes gives almost too much detail, maybe to use as much of his research as possible and provide a definitive account?
]]> 209118098 Succession meets Megan Abbott in this seductive Gothic suspense novel about the dramatic downfall of one of America’s most affluent families.

The old-money Wieland family has it all—wealth, status, power. They’re also famously cursed. Clara and her brother Teddy grew up on a small island in Maine in the shadow of their parents� tragic deaths, haunted by rumors and paparazzi. Fourteen years later they’ve mostly put their turbulent past to rest. Teddy has married Clara’s best friend, Jess, and the three of them have moved back home to take over the sprawling, remote family mansion known as Vantage Point. Then Teddy decides to run for the Senate—an unnerving prospect made much worse when intimate videos of Clara are leaked online. The most frightening part is that she doesn't remember filming any of them. Are the videos real? Or are they deepfakes? Is someone trying to take down the Wielands once and for all?

Everyone thinks Clara is losing her grip on reality, but she knows the videos are only the beginning. Years ago the curse destroyed her parents. Now it’s coming for her. Brimming with palpable tension, Vantage Point reveals a twisted web of family secrets and political ambition that raises questions about the blurred lines between public and private personas and the nature of truth in the digital age.]]> 9 Sara Sligar Deborah 3
A twisty suspenser told from the alternating viewpoints of Clara and Jess, who’ve been besties since grade school and, as this book opens, are 30-something sisters-in-law. Clara is a member of the filthy-rich, old money Weiland family—a family with a fabled curse that dooms them to die in often colourful ways during the month of April—and Jess is married to Clara’s handsome older brother, Teddy. They’re all currently residing at Vantage Point, the palatial family estate in Maine. Clara’s feeling a little fragile, just off her latest bout in rehab. Teddy’s running for the Senate. And it’s April! What could possibly go wrong? Plenty, it turns out. A hideously embarrassing sex video featuring Clara is anonymously released and goes viral, and Teddy’s campaign scrambles to manage the fallout. Problem is, Clara cannot remember—at all—who the dude was or imagine who might have posted the video. And then she starts having—visions? hallucinations? Is she losing her mind? Is this the Weiland curse showing itself? ]]> 3.96 2025
author: Sara Sligar
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars

A twisty suspenser told from the alternating viewpoints of Clara and Jess, who’ve been besties since grade school and, as this book opens, are 30-something sisters-in-law. Clara is a member of the filthy-rich, old money Weiland family—a family with a fabled curse that dooms them to die in often colourful ways during the month of April—and Jess is married to Clara’s handsome older brother, Teddy. They’re all currently residing at Vantage Point, the palatial family estate in Maine. Clara’s feeling a little fragile, just off her latest bout in rehab. Teddy’s running for the Senate. And it’s April! What could possibly go wrong? Plenty, it turns out. A hideously embarrassing sex video featuring Clara is anonymously released and goes viral, and Teddy’s campaign scrambles to manage the fallout. Problem is, Clara cannot remember—at all—who the dude was or imagine who might have posted the video. And then she starts having—visions? hallucinations? Is she losing her mind? Is this the Weiland curse showing itself?
]]> 213395510 An exuberant, deeply moving novel by the National Book Award–nominated author of Fieldwork.


Celebrated stage actress Mona Zahid wakes up on Thanksgiving morning to the clamor of guests packed into her Manhattan apartment and to a wave of her in-laws are lurking on the other side of the bedroom door; she’s still fighting with her husband; and in just a few weeks she will begin rehearsals as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, the hardest role in theater. In an impulsive burst, Mona bounds out the door with the family dog in tow (“I forgot the parsley!� is her lame excuse) to find her estranged mentor, Milton Katz, who was recently forced out of the legendary theater company he founded amid accusations of sexual misconduct. Mona’s escape turns into an overnight adventure that brings her face-to-face with her past, with her creative power and its limitations, and ultimately, with all the people she has ever loved.


Beguilingly approachable and intricately constructed, at once funny and sad and wise, Mona Acts Out is a novel about acting and telling the truth, about how we play roles to get through our days, and how the great roles teach us how to live.]]> 320 Mischa Berlinski 1324095202 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.21 2025
author: Mischa Berlinski
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> 214175247 An unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary life—one forged through a poverty-stricken childhood in “slummy, one-horse townsâ€�; obsessive desire; bursts of comedy; and indispensable friendships, reflecting on the way art, music, and a deep connection to nature helped her on a singular journeyĚýto become a beloved, Grammy-nominated artist.

Neko Case has long been revered as one of music’s most influential artists, whose authenticity, lyrical storytelling, and sly wit have endeared her to a legion of critics, musicians, and lifelong fans.ĚýInĚýThe Harder I Fight, the More I Love You,ĚýCaseĚýbrings her trademarkĚýcandor andĚýprecisionĚýto a memoir that traces her evolution from an invisibleĚýgirl “raised by two dogs and a space heaterâ€� in rural Washington state toĚýher improbable emergence as an internationally-acclaimed talent. In luminous, sharp-edged prose, CaseĚýshows readers what it’s like to be left alone for hours and hours as a child, to take refuge in the woods around her home, and to channel theĚýmonotony and loneliness and joy that comes from music, camaraderie, and shared experience into art.

The Harder I Fight, the More I Love YouĚýis a rebellious meditation on identity and corruption, and a manifesto on how to make space for ourselves in this world, despite the obstacles we face.


Ěý]]> 288 Neko Case 1538710501 Deborah 0 currently-reading 4.10 2025
author: Neko Case
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> 208433102 A collection of over thirty short stories by one of the greatest fiction writers in American history, now available in a single volume for the first time ever.The immensity of Gallant's achievement still seems insufficiently recognized. Alice Munro's Nobel notwithstanding, Gallant may in fact have been the best pure story writer since the early-1950s prime of Cheever, Welty, and Flannery O'Connor, and even in such august company, Gallant's stories are sui generis. They do something different than perfecting the tradition or stretching the boundaries of what the form can do. For all their expansiveness, Gallant's stories constitute a striking and almost avant-garde in reading her, one feels like they discover something about what a short story really is and isn't - about what is necessary, and what is sufficient.ĚýThe Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant includes over thirty stories never before collected in one volume, includingĚý"The Accident" and "His Mother" and "An Autobiography" and "DedĂ©." With the publication of this book, finally all of this modern master's fiction will be in print.]]> 624 Mavis Gallant 1681378744 Deborah 0 to-read 4.43
author: Mavis Gallant
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.43
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 217388223 A controversial wild horse round-up in the high desert of Nevada results in two murders and too many suspects for Sheriff Porter Beck to deal with.

A helicopter driving a controversial round-up of wild horses suddenly crashes and the pilot is found to have been shot. Then the person coordinating the round-up for the Bureau of Land Management is savagely murdered, buried up to her neck and then trampled to death by the very same wild horses. And there's no lack of suspects—with the wild horse advocacy group having sworn to protect the horse At Any Cost! Now the state and federal agencies are showing up looking for answers or at least a scapegoat.

Sheriff Porter Beck has had better days.

Porter Beck's new girlfriend, Detective Charlie Blue Horse, arrives to help with the investigation, which leads them to Canadian Lithium mining operation near the round-up area that sets off Beck's mental alarm bells. Brinley, Beck's sister, is leading a group of troubled kids in a wilderness program, when one of them, Rafa, bolts one night. When Brinley catches up to him, they're just outside the mine—in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

With his personal life in turmoil, too many suspects and too many secrets, the feds pushing for a quick resolution, and his impetuous (if skilled) sister in the mix, one wrong step could be deadly for Porter Beck.]]> 368 Bruce Borgos 1250373905 Deborah 0 to-read 4.60 2025
author: Bruce Borgos
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/01
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]]> 2320878 The basis for the hit series "Shetland" now airing on PBS

Winner of Britain's coveted Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award, Ann Cleeves introduces a dazzling new suspense series to U.S. mystery readers.

Raven Black begins on New Year's Eve with a lonely outcast named Magnus Tait, who stays home waiting for visitors who never come. But the next morning the body of a murdered teenage girl is discovered nearby, and suspicion falls on Magnus. Inspector Jimmy Perez enters an investigative maze that leads deeper into the past of the Shetland Islands than anyone wants to go.]]> 376 Ann Cleeves 0312359675 Deborah 0 to-read 3.85 2006
author: Ann Cleeves
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 205673168 Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter of Korean history.

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama.

A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend's house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering,it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.]]> 272 Han Kang 0593595475 Deborah 5 3.96 2021
author: Han Kang
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/02/01
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It’s difficult for me to describe the delicacy with which author Kang powerfully and emotionally conveys events of such breathtaking brutality. We’re in contemporary Seoul, Korea, and a journalist is dispatched urgently by her injured and incapacitated long-time friend to her Jeju Island home to rescue her beloved companion bird, who will surely die without food and water. There’s a harrowing journey to the remote destination through a sudden blizzard, with the woman’s very life at risk, but she emerges through it to a liminal space in which the veil between the living and the dead thins to non-existence. The injured woman mysteriously appears and conducts her friend on a tour into the past, where her mother’s family members were part of the dreadful events of the late 1940s, which saw hundreds of thousands of Koreans suspected of being Communist sympathizers—and their families: women, children, infants, the elderly—slaughtered and dumped into mass graves by the military dictatorship of the time. Are the two friends alive? Are they both dead? There’s great mystery and sorrow both, as Kang draws back the curtain on the slaughter, knowledge of which was deliberately suppressed by the government for decades and is still not widely known. Beautiful, poetic prose and metaphors of grace: birds, clouds, falling snow. I was very moved.
]]> 223171022 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.]]> 9 Eiren Caffall 1250381320 Deborah 3 3.44 2025
author: Eiren Caffall
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/02/01
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Set in a near future in which extreme high water caused by global warming has greatly inundated New York, the young narrator and her family (her parents are scientists) are living in a small community on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. Then a major weather event (a “hypercane�) surges over the flood barriers, destroying what’s left of the city, and it’s a mad scramble to get into the boat (a canoe taken from an indigenous peoples diorama) to try to make their way to higher land on the mother’s upstate family farm. This didn’t have much new to say in the apocalyptic-future genre, but I did enjoy the characters of the young sisters and the whole notion of living on the AMNH roof.
]]> 127306444
IĂ°unn is in yet another doctor's office. She knows her constant fatigue is a sign that something's not right, but practitioners dismiss her symptoms and blood tests haven't revealed any cause.

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

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

What is happening when she’s asleep? Why is she waking up with increasingly disturbing injuries? And why won’t anyone believe her?]]> 197 Hildur Knútsdóttir 1250322049 Deborah 3 3.30 2021
author: Hildur KnĂştsdĂłttir
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/27
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves:
review:
An eerie single-sitting read set in contemporary Iceland, in which a young woman cannot discover the root of her extreme ongoing exhaustion. None of the medical help she enlists discover the cause and none of the treatments help. And then she gets a Fitbit-type step counter and discovers one morning that she’s added 40,000 steps overnight, with no memory whatsoever of how that might have happened. Then we’re into strange, spooky territory: is she losing her mind, or is she being taken over while she sleeps by her dead sister?
]]> 222086933 What if you thought you murdered your best friend? And if everyone else thought so too? And what if the truth doesn't matter?

After Lucy is found wandering the streets, covered in her best friend Savvy’s blood, everyone thinks she is a murderer. Lucy and Savvy were the golden girls of their small Texas town: pretty, smart, and enviable. Lucy married a dream guy with a big ring and an even bigger new home. Savvy was the social butterfly loved by all, and if you believe the rumors, especially popular with the men in town. It’s been years since that horrible night, a night Lucy can’t remember anything about, and she has since moved to LA and started a new life.

But now the phenomenally huge hit true crime podcast "Listen for the Lie," and its too-good looking host Ben Owens, have decided to investigate Savvy’s murder for the show’s second season. Lucy is forced to return to the place she vowed never to set foot in again to solve her friend’s murder, even if she is the one that did it.]]> Amy Tintera 1250332109 Deborah 3 3.89 2024
author: Amy Tintera
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves:
review:
An entertaining whodunnit set in a small Texas town, in which the five-year-old unsolved bludgeoning death of a popular young local woman is almost universally attributed to her best friend, Lucy, who was found wandering out of the woods covered in her friend’s blood and holding the murder weapon, but with her own severe head injury erasing all memory of the events of that night. Without sufficient evidence, no charges were ever laid, but with almost everyone in town—even her own parents—sure she did it, Lucy flees to L.A. for a new life. But five years later, Lucy’s back in town for her beloved (and colourful!) gran’s 80th birthday. And who else should be there but the host of the smash-hit true crime podcast Listen for the Lie, who’s made the unsolved murder the subject of his new season and is determined to get to the bottom of things. The narrative is interspersed with episodes of the podcast, a fun device, for sure.
]]> 201626978
A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most is an epic story in one single day, masterly breaching the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath.]]> 144 Jessica Anthony 0316576379 Deborah 4
This very slender volume examines the state of a mid-century American marriage, in which husband and wife each conceal major, shattering secrets. On this particular day in 1957, on an unseasonably warm November day in Newark, Delaware, the wife gets into their apartment complex pool and spends the next eight hours contemplating her marriage and refusing to climb out of the water. The story is told in alternating chapters from each spouse’s point of view, and information is carefully layered on as we gradually learn everything we need to know to understand the point this couple has come to. Masterful.]]> 3.32 2024
author: Jessica Anthony
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves:
review:
4.5 stars

This very slender volume examines the state of a mid-century American marriage, in which husband and wife each conceal major, shattering secrets. On this particular day in 1957, on an unseasonably warm November day in Newark, Delaware, the wife gets into their apartment complex pool and spends the next eight hours contemplating her marriage and refusing to climb out of the water. The story is told in alternating chapters from each spouse’s point of view, and information is carefully layered on as we gradually learn everything we need to know to understand the point this couple has come to. Masterful.
]]> 103512065 By the New York Times bestselling author of Descent and The Current, an absorbing new work of literary suspense about two young working men who forge a friendship despite secrets in their past, and whose actions ignite the passions and violence of a small Wisconsin town still haunted by the unsolved disappearance of three boys in the 1970s. For readers of Peter Heller, Liz Moore, andĚýCormac McCarthy.

What if?
What if Sean Courtland’s old Chevy truck had broken down somewhere else? What if he’d never met Denise Givens, a waitress at a local tavern in the Wisconsin town where he lands? Or Dan Young, another young man like Sean drifting through, having fled Minnesota for reasons unknown? Instead, together Sean and Dan pick up carpentry and plumbing work for an old man named Marion Devereaux, and Sean gets drawn into the lives of Denise and her father—and of the townspeople, all haunted by the disappearance of three young boys decades ago, in the 1970s.

As the paths of these characters converge, observing them allĚýis Detective Corinne Viegas, a woman whose drive to seek justice comes from her father's own failure to find those boys and the violence once done to her sister. And over the course of just a few weeks, an irreversible chain of events is set in motion that culminates in shattering violence, and the revelation of long-buried truths.

Evocative, gritty, with indelible characters and setting, Distant SonsĚýis another immersive, gripping suspense novel by Johnston about how the most random intersection of lives can have consequences both devastating and beautiful.]]> 400 Tim Johnston 1643753592 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.84 2023
author: Tim Johnston
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 211004087 Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez reveals her experience as the U.S. born daughter of immigrants and what happened when, at fifteen, her parents were forced back to Mexico in this galvanizing yet tender memoir.

Born to Mexican immigrants south of the Rillito River in Tucson, Arizona, Elizabeth had the world at her fingertips as she entered her freshman year of high school as the number one student. But suddenly, Elizabeth's own country took away the most important right a child has: a right to have a family.

As her parents� visas expired, they were forced to return to Mexico, leaving Elizabeth responsible for her younger brother, as well as her education. Determined to break the cycle of being “a statistic,� she knew that even though her parents couldn’t stay, there was no way she could let go of the opportunities the U.S. could provide.

Armed with only her passport and sheer teenage determination, Elizabeth became what her school would eventually describe as an unaccompanied, homeless youth, one of thousands of underage victims affected by family separation due to broken immigration laws. For fans of Educated by Tara Westover and The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande, My Side of the River explores separation, generational trauma, and the toll of the American dream. It’s also, at its core, a love story between a brother and a sister who, no matter the cost, is determined to make the pursuit of his own dreams easier than it was for her.]]> 272 Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez 1250817420 Deborah 0 to-read 3.90 2024
author: Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211399769
Except, underneath the surface, not much has changed at all. He's still the boy seeking his father's approval; the young man playing late-night poker with his best friend, unreliable, infuriating Ben Mossam; the one still desperately in love with the enigmatic Lia.

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

When the unthinkable happens, Joel finds himself at the centre of a strange constellation of men - TĂ©o, Vic, Ben - none of whom is fully equipped to look after him, but whose strange, tentative attempts at love might just be enough to offer him a new place to call home.]]> 304 Tom Lamont 0593803248 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.77 2024
author: Tom Lamont
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 195391623 From New York Times bestselling author Tracey Lange, a poignant story about the resilience of family, the importance of community, and the magic of middle school hockey

When Kyle McCray gets word his father has suffered a debilitating stroke, he returns to his hometown of Potsdam, New York, where he doesn’t expect a warm welcome. Kyle left suddenly two and a half years ago, abandoning people who depended on him: his father, his employees, his friends—not to mention Casey, his wife of sixteen years and a beloved teacher in town. He plans to lie low and help his dad recuperate until he can leave again, especially after Casey makes it clear she wants him gone.

The longer he’s home, the more Kyle understands the impact his departure has had on the people he left behind. When he’s presented with an opportunity for redemption as the coach of the floundering middle school hockey team, he begins to find compassion in unexpected places. Kyle even considers staying in Potsdam, but that’s only possible if he and Casey can come to some kind of peace with each other.

Full of love and hope, What Happened to the McCrays? takes an intimate look at both sides of a failed marriage and two people who must finally confront the awful pain of their past or risk being consumed by it.]]> 352 Tracey Lange 1250328438 Deborah 0 currently-reading 4.10 2025
author: Tracey Lange
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 208430621
In this fresh take on love and trouble in America, Brock Hobson, an insurance salesman and Sunday-school teacher, finds his equilibrium disturbed by the results of a predictive blood test. Baxter, a master storyteller, brings us a gradually building rollercoaster narrative, and a protagonist who is impertinent, searching, and hilariously relatable. From his good-as-gold, gentle girlfriend to the excessively macho subcontractor guy his ex-wife left him for, not to mention his well-raised teenage kids, now exploring sex and sexuality, the secondary characters in Brock's life all contribute meaningfully to the drama, as increasing challenges to his sense of self and purpose crash over him. The final battle—no spoilers, but there is one—couldn't be more delightful, as this quick and bracing novel reminds us to choose the best people to love, accept the ones we love even if we didn’t choose them, and love them all well.]]> 224 Charles Baxter 0593700856 Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.07 2024
author: Charles Baxter
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 208425024 A story of family, I'll Come to You chronicles intersecting lives over the course of 1995, anchored by the anticipation and arrival of a child.

With empathy, insight, and humor, Rebecca Kauffman explores overlapping narratives involving a couple whose struggle to become pregnant has both softened and hardened them; a woman whose husband of forty years has left her for reasons he’s unwilling to share and the man who is now disastrously attempting to woo her; a couple in denial about a looming health crisis, and their son who is fumbling toward middle age and can’t stop lying. These storylines converge into a dramatic and harrowing turn of events.]]> 224 Rebecca Kauffman 164009671X Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.68 2025
author: Rebecca Kauffman
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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