en-US Mon, 28 Apr 2025 14:41:15 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 221179135 912 Robert Galbraith 0316586005 Deborah 0 to-read 4.50 2025
author: Robert Galbraith
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.50
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]]> 223889699
Robert Langdon, esteemed professor of symbology, travels to Prague to attend a groundbreaking lecture by Katherine Solomon—a prominent noetic scientist with whom he has recently begun a relationship. Katherine is on the verge of publishing an explosive book that contains startling discoveries about the nature of human consciousness and threatens to disrupt centuries of established belief. But a brutal murder catapults the trip into chaos, and Katherine suddenly disappears along with her manuscript. Langdon finds himself targeted by a powerful organization and hunted by a chilling assailant sprung from Prague’s most ancient mythology. As the plot expands into London and New York, Langdon desperately searches for Katherine . . . and for answers. In a thrilling race through the dual worlds of futuristic science and mystical lore, he uncovers a shocking truth about a secret project that will forever change the way we think about the human mind.]]> 688 Dan Brown 0385546890 Deborah 0 to-read 4.47 2025
author: Dan Brown
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.47
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]]> 219623252 Who's got time to think about murder when there's a wedding to plan?

It’s been a quiet year for the Thursday Murder Club. Joyce is busy with table plans and first dances. Elizabeth is grieving. Ron is dealing with family troubles, and Ibrahim is still providing therapy to his favourite criminal.

But when Elizabeth meets a wedding guest who’s in trouble, kidnap and death are hot on their heels once more. A villain wants access to an uncrackable code, and will stop at nothing to get it. Plunged back into action once more, can the gang solve the puzzle and a murder in time?]]> Richard Osman 1405975628 Deborah 0 to-read 4.46 2025
author: Richard Osman
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.46
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]]> 219430717 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.]]> 304 Charlotte Wood Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.89 2023
author: Charlotte Wood
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/23
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]]> 214208297 From Jess Kidd, the bestselling author of Things in Jars who “is so good it isn’t fair� (Erika Swyler, nationally bestselling author), the first in a cozy mystery series about a former nun who searches for answers in a small seaside town after her pen pal mysteriously disappears.

I believe every one of us at Gulls Nest is concealing some kind of secret.

1954: When her former novice’s dependable letters stop, Nora Breen asks to be released from her vows. Haunted by a line in Frieda’s letter, Nora arrives at Gulls Nest, a charming hotel in Gore-on-Sea in Kent.

A seaside town, a place of fresh air and relaxed constraints, is the perfect place for a new start. Nora hides her identity and pries into the lives of her fellow guests. But when a series of bizarre murders rattles the occupants of Gulls Nest it’s time to ask if a dark past can ever really be left behind.]]> 336 Jess Kidd 1668034050 Deborah 5
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced reader copy of this book.]]> 4.09 2025
author: Jess Kidd
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/23
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Jess Kidd has been on my radar to read for awhile and I loved Nora so much; but what's not to love about a nun turned sleuth? All of the characters were very well developed with a solid plot that kept the story going. I will definitely be reading more of Jess Kidd's work. I could not put this one down. 5 stars!!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced reader copy of this book.
]]> 212368741
When renowned painter Mira Novak arrives at Wadia hospital in Bombay after a miscarriage, she's expected to make a quick recovery, and Sona is excited to spend time with the worldly woman who shares her half-Indian identity, even if that's where their similarities end. Sona is enraptured by Mira's stories of her travels and shocked by accounts of the many lovers she's left scattered through Europe. Over the course of a week, Mira befriends Sona, seeing in her something bigger than the small life she's living with her mother. Mira is released from the hospital just in time to attend a lavish engagement party with all of Bombay society and invites Sona along. But the next day, Mira is readmitted to the hospital in worse condition than before, and when she dies under mysterious circumstances, Sona immediately falls under suspicion.

Before leaving the hospital in disgrace, Sona is given a note Mira left for her, along with her four favorite paintings. But how could she have known to leave a note if she didn't know she was going to die? The note sends Sona on a mission to deliver three of the paintings—the first to Petra, Mira's childhood friend and first love in Prague; the second to her art dealer Josephine in Paris; the third to her first painting tutor, Paolo, with whom both Mira and her mother had affairs. As Sona uncovers Mira's history, she learns that the charming facade she'd come to know was only one part of a complicated and sometimes cruel woman. But can she discover what really happened to Mira and exonerate herself?

Along the way, Sona also comes to terms with her own complex history and the English father who deserted her and her mother in India so many years ago. In the end, she'll discover that we are all made up of pieces, and only by seeing the world do we learn to see ourselves.]]> Alka Joshi Deborah 5
Six Days in Bombay is an adventurous coming-of-age story from the point-of-view of Sona, a half-British, half-English nurse who develops a friendship with a beautiful and sophisticated artist that she treats at the hospital where she works in Bombay. The plot is sweeping and develops around several mysteries resulting from the death of Mira, the artist. The book takes place in the 1930's so there are palpable political tensions globally, and in India; as well as the personal challenges that Rona faces as a woman who is neither all Indian, or all British.

Six Days in Bombay is a great read you liked Alka Joshi's previous novels, enjoy historical fiction, romance, and/or mystery novels. Thank you Net Galley and Harlequin Trade Publishing for the advanced reader copy of the novel. 5 Stars.]]> 4.23 2025
author: Alka Joshi
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/23
date added: 2025/04/23
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I loved Alka Joshi's Jaipur Trilogy, and was very excited to receive an ARC of Six Days in Bombay. If you loved the Henna Artist, you will find Joshi's writing to be sublimely familiar in this novel, but the book is completely unlike her previous novels in plot and storyline.

Six Days in Bombay is an adventurous coming-of-age story from the point-of-view of Sona, a half-British, half-English nurse who develops a friendship with a beautiful and sophisticated artist that she treats at the hospital where she works in Bombay. The plot is sweeping and develops around several mysteries resulting from the death of Mira, the artist. The book takes place in the 1930's so there are palpable political tensions globally, and in India; as well as the personal challenges that Rona faces as a woman who is neither all Indian, or all British.

Six Days in Bombay is a great read you liked Alka Joshi's previous novels, enjoy historical fiction, romance, and/or mystery novels. Thank you Net Galley and Harlequin Trade Publishing for the advanced reader copy of the novel. 5 Stars.
]]> 217937872 Step into the thrill and intrigue of Tudor England in the rich, compelling new novel from Sunday Times bestseller Alison Weir.

'Alison Weir makes history come alive as no one else' BARBARA ERSKINE

AN EXTRAORDINARY RISE TO POWER. A TRAGIC FALL FROM GRACE.

It begins with young Tom Wolsey, the bright and brilliant son of a Suffolk tradesman, sent to study at Oxford at just eleven years old.

It ends with a disgraced cardinal, cast from the King's side and estranged from the woman he loves.

The years in between tell the story of a scholar and a lover, a father and a priest. From the court of Henry VIII, Tom builds a powerful empire of church and state. At home in London, away from prying eyes, he finds joy in a secret second life.

But when King Henry, his cherished friend, demands the ultimate sacrifice, what will Wolsey choose?

Alison Weir's riveting new Tudor novel reveals the two lives of Cardinal Wolsey, a tale of power, passion and ambition.

PRAISE FOR ALISON WEIR'S TUDOR FICTION

'Alison Weir gives us her most compelling heroine yet... This is where the story of the Tudors begins' TRACY BORMAN

'History has the best stories and they should all be told like this' CONN IGGULDEN

'As always, Alison Weir is ahead of the curve - and at the top of her game' SARAH GRISTWOOD

'Weir is excellent on the little details that bring a world to life' GUARDIAN

'Profoundly moving... lingers long after the last page' ELIZABETH FREMANTLE]]> Alison Weir 1035416212 Deborah 0 to-read 4.48 2025
author: Alison Weir
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2025
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]]> 217260356 A tense, propulsiveĚýdrama setĚýin Shanghai, about a fractured American family, secret lives, and the unbreakable bond between two sisters, from theĚýNew York TimesĚýbestselling author ofĚýMercy Street
Ěý
Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared their 22-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit and run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.Ěý
Ěý
The accident unearths a deeper fissure in the the shocking event that ended the Litvaks� marriage and turned Lindsey against them. Estranged from her parents, she has confided only in her younger sister, Grace, adopted as an infant from China. As Claire and Aaron struggle to get their bearings in bustling, cosmopolitan Shanghai, the newly prosperous “miracle city,� they face troubling questions about Lindsey’s life there, in which nothing is quite as it seems.
Ěý
With Jennifer Haigh’s trademark psychological acuity, Rabbit Moon is a taut, suspenseful story about the ties of marriage that no divorce can sever, and the fabled red thread that pulls two sisters together across time and space. Haigh proves yet again that she is "an expertly nuanced storyteller…her work is gripping, real, and totally immersive" (New York Times).
Ěý]]> 273 Jennifer Haigh Deborah 0 currently-reading 3.40
author: Jennifer Haigh
name: Deborah
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]]> 210411871 A story of sisters separated by hundreds of years but bound together in more ways than they can imagine

2019: Lucy awakens in her ex-lover’s room in the middle of the night with her hands around his throat. Horrified, she flees to her sister’s house on the coast of New South Wales hoping Jess can help explain the vivid dreams that preceded the attack—but her sister is missing. As Lucy waits for her return, she starts to unearth strange rumours about Jess’s town—tales of numerous missing men, spread over decades. A baby abandoned in a sea-swept cave. Whispers of women’s voices on the waves. All the while, her dreams start to feel closer than ever.

1800: Mary and Eliza are torn from their loving home in Ireland and forced onto a convict ship heading for Australia. As the boat takes them farther and farther away from all they know, they begin to notice unexplainable changes in their bodies.

A breathtaking tale of female resilience, The Sirens is an extraordinary novel that captures the sheer power of sisterhood and the indefinable magic of the sea.]]> 337 Emilia Hart 1250280826 Deborah 2
Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for an Advanced Reader Copy of this book.]]> 3.81 2025
author: Emilia Hart
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/03
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I loved Emilia Hart's writing in Weyward and her first novel was a 5 star read for me in 2023. I am a big fan of Hart's atmospheric writing style and was super excited for The Sirens because I had loved Weyward so much. I love love a good gothic book and Hart's first novel delivered on sinister and dark without it being too much. The Sirens was too much for me and some of it left me feeling quite ick. I never really connected with any of these characters and I found the pace much slower than Weyward. Unfortunately, I couldn't wait for this one to be over. Read it if you like beautiful prose, despite a slow narrative, and a creepy atmosphere.

Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for an Advanced Reader Copy of this book.
]]> 199796715
Margo braucht Geld. Seit sie ungewollt von ihrem Collegeprofessor, der sie jetzt mit dem Kind alleinlässt, schwanger wurde, mehr denn je. Wie Margo es auch dreht und wendet, kein Job scheint passend zu sein, oder könnte auch nur ansatzweise ihr Leben mit einem Baby finanzieren. Durch einen Zufall wird sie auf die Plattform OnlyFans aufmerksam, und Margo ist fasziniert von dieser Welt, in der Frauen mit sich und ihrem Körper experimentieren, und offenbar gut dabei verdienen. Also beginnt auch sie, Inhalte zu produzieren. Dabei erhält sie Unterstützung von ihrer Mitbewohnerin Suzie, einem großen Cosplay-Fan, und auch von ihrem Vater Jinx, einem Ex-Wrestlingprofi. Ehe sie sich versieht, ist Margo ein Online-Phänomen. Könnte dies die Antwort auf all ihre Probleme sein, oder hat der Internet-Ruhm einen zu hohen Preis?]]> 368 Rufi Thorpe 0063356600 Deborah 3 3.93 2024
author: Rufi Thorpe
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> 2524702
A masterful portrait of a country wrestling with its past and of individuals eking out their futures, Walk the Blue Fields is a breathtaking collection from one of Ireland’s greatest talents, and a resounding articulation of all the yearnings of the human heart.]]> 168 Claire Keegan 0802170498 Deborah 0 to-read 4.02 2007
author: Claire Keegan
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2007
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]]> 217927456 From one of the most acclaimed Irish writers today, a new novel about smalltown Ireland that explores a community on the mend and the power of love and trauma to both bring people together and divide them

�I said it before. Madness comes circling around. Ten-year cycles, as true as the sun will rise…�

In a small town in rural Ireland, the local people have weathered the storm of economic collapse and now look to the the jobs are back, the dramas of the past seemingly lulled, and although the town bears the scars of its history, new stories have begun to unfold.

But a new, insidious menace creeps through back-alley shadows and into the lives of this community. Old grudges fester and new ones arise. Young people are lured by the promise of fast money while the generation above them tries to hold back the tide of an enemy beyond their control. And the peace of this small town is about to be shattered in an unimaginable way.

A stunning, lyrical novel told in twenty-one voices, Heart, be at Peace reveals a community that together looks to weather the storm of betrayals, secrets, and grudges that can divide families, towns, and entire generations.]]> 208 Donal Ryan 059383464X Deborah 0 to-read 4.08 2024
author: Donal Ryan
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.08
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]]> 15995144
The Spinning Heart speaks for contemporary Ireland like no other novel. Wry, vulnerable, all-too human, it captures the language and spirit of rural Ireland and with uncanny perception articulates the words and thoughts of a generation. Technically daring and evocative of Patrick McCabe and J.M. Synge, this novel of small-town life is witty, dark and sweetly poignant.]]> 160 Donal Ryan 1781620075 Deborah 0 to-read 3.94 2012
author: Donal Ryan
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2012
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]]> 3657 The Untouchable ("contemporary fiction gets no better than this"—Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory.

The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife's death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. The seductive mother; the imperious father; the twins—Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionless—in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of the "barely bearable raw immediacy" of his childhood memories.

Interwoven with this story are Morden's memories of his wife, Anna—of their life together, of her death—and the moments, both significant and mundane, that make up his life now: his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire, desperate to pull him from his grief; and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying, where the past beats inside him "like a second heart."

What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novel—among the finest we have had from this extraordinary writer.]]> 195 John Banville 0307263118 Deborah 0 to-read 3.49 2005
author: John Banville
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2005
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]]> 32191722

Gerry, once an architect, is forgetful and set in his ways. Stella is tired of his lifestyle and angry at his constant undermining of her religious faith. Things are not helped by memories that resurface of a troubled time in their native Ireland. As their vacation comes to an end, we understand how far apart they are—and can only watch as they struggle to save themselves.


Bernard MacLaverty is a master storyteller, and this is the essential MacLaverty novel: compassionate observation, elegant writing, and a heartrending story. It is also a profound examination of human love and how we live together—a chamber piece of resonance and power.]]> 243 Bernard MacLaverty 0393609626 Deborah 0 to-read 3.67 2017
author: Bernard MacLaverty
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2017
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]]> 33253215 real Avery or at least that’s what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn’t a real Avery, then who is he?

Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.

At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from � and over his three score years and ten, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country and much more.

In this, Boyne's most transcendent work to date, we are shown the story of Ireland from the 1940s to today through the eyes of one ordinary man. The Heart's Invisible Furies is a novel to make you laugh and cry while reminding us all of the redemptive power of the human spirit.]]> 582 John Boyne Deborah 0 to-read 4.51 2017
author: John Boyne
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2017
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]]> 7978859
Could it have something to do with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight genius who is determined to open a portal into a parallel universe using ten-dimensional string theory?

Could it involve Carl, the teenage drug dealer and borderline psychotic who is Skippy’s rival in love?

Or could “the Automator”—the ruthless, smooth-talking headmaster intent on modernizing the school—have something to hide?

Why Skippy dies and what happens next is the subject of this dazzling and uproarious novel, unraveling a mystery that links the boys of Seabrook College to their parents and teachers in ways nobody could have imagined. With a cast of characters that ranges from hip-hop-loving fourteen-year-old Eoin “MC Sexecutioner� Flynn to basketballplaying midget Philip Kilfether, packed with questions and answers on everything from Ritalin, to M-theory, to bungee jumping, to the hidden meaning of the poetry of Robert Frost, Skippy Dies is a heartfelt, hilarious portrait of the pain, joy, and occasional beauty of adolescence, and a tragic depiction of a world always happy to sacrifice its weakest members. As the twenty-first century enters its teenage years, this is a breathtaking novel from a young writer who will come to define his generation.]]> 661 Paul Murray 0865479437 Deborah 0 to-read 3.70 2010
author: Paul Murray
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2010
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]]> 181886115 In The End of the World is a Cul de Sac the political is intertwined with the personal, as Louise Kennedy reveals how ordinary lives can get caught up in a wider, national drama.

Sarah, abandoned by her partner, sits alone in their brand new house.

Orla, facing the strange revenge of her husband, is forced to judge a contest in the local fĂŞte.

Peter raises his daughter in rural seclusion, at what might as well be the end of the world.

Louise Kennedy started writing at the age of forty-seven, and her prose is instilled with a clarity and wisdom born of her own experience. This collection announces a major new voice in literary fiction for the twenty-first century.]]> 304 Louise Kennedy 0593540921 Deborah 0 to-read 3.56 2021
author: Louise Kennedy
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2021
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]]> 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 to-read 4.02 2025
author: Karen Russell
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/25
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]]> 129203029 462 Paul Scott Deborah 0 to-read 1.00 1966
author: Paul Scott
name: Deborah
average rating: 1.00
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
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]]> 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 5 4.28 2025
author: Roisín O’Donnell
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/18
date added: 2025/03/18
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]]> 19181926
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.]]> 288 John Williams 0099595168 Deborah 0 to-read 4.33 1965
author: John Williams
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1965
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/18
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]]> 227860380 No one is going to convince her to fall in love again...

Ryder Colburn has his hands full running the family business and caring for the ailing father who’s a virtual stranger from the cold, heavy-handed man he used to be. He’s got zero free time for hobbies or women. Or so he thinks until one walks into his life� and the path of an oncoming car.

Ryder doesn’t mind playing the hero for the skittish, scarred chef Penny. Maybe it’s the secrets in her eyes or the scar on her chin. Whatever the reason, he’s compelled to get closer.

Penny’s learned her lesson and now she’s paying the price. That’s why she’s sharing a dilapidated house in a tiny California town with her feisty grandmother and tween brother living off the leftovers from her catering job. It’s a far cry from her dream life. But who needs dreams� or love� or sex when there’s amateur plumbing projects to tackle and breakfast casseroles to bake?

One thing’s for sure, she’s never falling in love again. Not even with the sexy, snarky contractor who keeps testing the walls she’s built.]]> 352 Jill Shalvis Deborah 0 to-read 0.0 2025
author: Jill Shalvis
name: Deborah
average rating: 0.0
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]]> 269795 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

This funky, rude, unpretentious first novel traces the short, funny, and furious career of a group of working-class Irish kids who form a band, The Commitments. Their mission: to bring soul to Dublin!]]> 176 Roddy Doyle 0749391685 Deborah 0 to-read 3.94 1987
author: Roddy Doyle
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> 29496196
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more members of the tribe began to die under mysterious circumstances.

In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen such as J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes such as Al Spencer, the “Phantom Terror,� roamed—many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll climbed to more than twenty-four, the relatively new FBI took over. It was one of the organization’s first major homicide cases but the bureau badly bungled the investigation. In desperation, the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including an American Indian agents in the bureau. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.

In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. Based on years of research and startling new evidence, the book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, as each step in the investigation reveals a series of sinister secrets and reversals. But more than that, it is a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward American Indians that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly compelling, but also emotionally devastating.]]> 338 David Grann 0385534248 Deborah 0 to-read 4.20 2017
author: David Grann
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/09
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]]> 23363349
There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe's life is ever the same. Carl is a dying Vietnam veteran--and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been medically paroled to a nursing home, after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder.

As Joe writes about Carl's life, especially Carl's valor in Vietnam, he cannot reconcile the heroism of the soldier with the despicable acts of the convict. Joe, along with his skeptical female neighbor, throws himself into uncovering the truth, but he is hamstrung in his efforts by having to deal with his dangerously dysfunctional mother, the guilt of leaving his autistic brother vulnerable, and a haunting childhood memory.

Thread by thread, Joe unravels the tapestry of Carl’s conviction. But as he and Lila dig deeper into the circumstances of the crime, the stakes grow higher. Will Joe discover the truth before it’s too late to escape the fallout?]]> 306 Allen Eskens Deborah 0 to-read 4.18 2014
author: Allen Eskens
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/09
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]]> 61111300 From the multi-award-winning and internationally bestselling author Donal Ryan, a searing, jubilant story about four generations of women and fierce love

The Aylward women of Nenagh, Tipperary, are mad about each other, but you wouldn't always think it. You'd have to know them to know that--in spite of what the neighbors might say about raised voices and dramatic scenes--their house is a place of peace, filled with love, a refuge from the sadness and cruelty of the world.

Their story begins at an end and ends at a beginning. It involves wives and widows, gunrunners and gougers, sinners and saints. It's a story of terrible betrayals and fierce loyalties, of isolation and togetherness, of transgression, forgiveness, desire, and love. Of all the things family can be and all the things it sometimes isn't. The Queen of Dirt Island is an uplifting celebration of fierce, loyal love and the powerful stories that bind generations together.
]]> 256 Donal Ryan 0593652932 Deborah 5 3.98 2022
author: Donal Ryan
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
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]]> 16148750
Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of the Château d’If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape but to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration.

A huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s, Dumas was inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment when writing his epic tale of suffering and retribution.]]> 1276 Alexandre Dumas 0141392460 Deborah 0 currently-reading 4.56 1846
author: Alexandre Dumas
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.56
book published: 1846
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/02
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]]> 24212581
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
THE NEW YORK TIMES - ESQUIRE - THE CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY

"Victoria the Queen, Julia Baird's exquisitely wrought and meticulously researched biography, brushes the dusty myth off this extraordinary monarch."--The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

When Victoria was born, in 1819, the world was a very different place. Revolution would threaten many of Europe's monarchies in the coming decades. In Britain, a generation of royals had indulged their whims at the public's expense, and republican sentiment was growing. The Industrial Revolution was transforming the landscape, and the British Empire was commanding ever larger tracts of the globe. In a world where women were often powerless, during a century roiling with change, Victoria went on to rule the most powerful country on earth with a decisive hand. Fifth in line to the throne at the time of her birth, Victoria was an ordinary woman thrust into an extraordinary role. As a girl, she defied her mother's meddling and an adviser's bullying, forging an iron will of her own. As a teenage queen, she eagerly grasped the crown and relished the freedom it brought her. At twenty, she fell passionately in love with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, eventually giving birth to nine children. She loved sex and delighted in power. She was outspoken with her ministers, overstepping conventional boundaries and asserting her opinions. After the death of her adored Albert, she began a controversial, intimate relationship with her servant John Brown. She survived eight assassination attempts over the course of her lifetime. And as science, technology, and democracy were dramatically reshaping the world, Victoria was a symbol of steadfastness and security--queen of a quarter of the world's population at the height of the British Empire's reach. Drawing on sources that include fresh revelations about Victoria's relationship with John Brown, Julia Baird brings vividly to life the fascinating story of a woman who struggled with so many of the things we do today: balancing work and family, raising children, navigating marital strife, losing parents, combating anxiety and self-doubt, finding an identity, searching for meaning.]]> 696 Julia Baird 1400069882 Deborah 0 to-read 4.19 2016
author: Julia Baird
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/25
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]]> 54503472 They were the closest of sisters and the best of friends.

But when, in a quixotic twist of fate, their uncle Edward VIII decided to abdicate the throne, the dynamic between Elizabeth and Margaret was dramatically altered. Forever more, Margaret would have to curtsey to the sister she called �Lillibet�. And bow to her wishes.

Elizabeth would always look upon her younger sister’s antics with a kind of stoical amusement but Margaret’s struggle to find a place and position inside the royal system � and her fraught relationship with its expectations � was often a source of tension. Famously, the Queen had to inform Margaret that the Church and government would not countenance her marrying a divorcee, Group Captain Peter Townsend, forcing Margaret to choose between keeping her title and royal allowances or her divorcee lover.

From the idyll of their cloistered early life, through their hidden wartime lives, into the divergent paths they took following their father’s death and Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne, this book explores their relationship over the years. Andrew Morton, renowned bestselling author of Diana: Her True Story, offers unique insight into these two drastically different sisters � one resigned to duty and responsibility, the other resistant to it � and the lasting impact they have had on the Crown, the royal family and the way it has adapted to the changing mores of the twentieth century.]]> 384 Andrew Morton 1538700468 Deborah 0 to-read 3.81 2021
author: Andrew Morton
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/25
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]]> 36676536
This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that.

Ellis and Michael are twelve-year-old boys when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of overbearing fathers. And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more.

But then we fast forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question, what happened in the years between?

Tin Man is a love letter to human kindness and friendship, and to loss and living.]]> 214 Sarah Winman 0735218722 Deborah 5 3.99 2017
author: Sarah Winman
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
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]]> 61443719 Little Clothbound irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.Dorothy Parker was the most talked-about woman of the decadent 1920s, notorious as a hard-drinking bad girl with a talent for endlessly quotable one-liners. In the stories collected here, she brilliantly captures the spirit of the decadent Jazz Age in New York, exposing both the dazzle and the darkness. This selection includes among others 'The Standard of Living', 'Mr Durant' and her masterpiece, 'Big Blonde'.'She has fascinated generations with her wit, flair and talent' The New York Review of Books]]> 152 Dorothy Parker 0241609933 Deborah 0 to-read 3.71 1929
author: Dorothy Parker
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1929
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/23
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]]> 29430788
What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor, filled with emotion—from dark suffering to true happiness—a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world. A fan of Chinese food, dogs, bookstores, and men she should stay away from, Shelby has to fight her way back to her own future. In New York City she finds a circle of lost and found souls—including an angel who’s been watching over her ever since that fateful icy night.

Here is a character you will fall in love with, so believable and real and endearing, that she captures both the ache of loneliness and the joy of finding yourself at last. For anyone who’s ever been a hurt teenager, for every mother of a daughter who has lost her way, Faithful is a roadmap.]]> 258 Alice Hoffman 1476799202 Deborah 4 3.96 2017
author: Alice Hoffman
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
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]]> 61883104 354 Donna Leon Deborah 4 4.27 1992
author: Donna Leon
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/18
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]]> 1412054 Also see: Alternate Cover Editions for this ISBN [ACE]
ACE #1

The Stone Diaries is one ordinary woman’s story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography.

Her life is vivid with incident, and yet she feels a sense of powerlessness. She listens, she observes, and through sheer force of imagination she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling misconnections she discovers between. Daisy’s struggle to find a place for herself in her own life is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era.

A witty and compassionate anatomist of the human heart, Carol Shields has made distinctively her own that place where the domestic collides with the elemental. With irony and humor she weaves the strands of The Stone Diaries together in this, her richest and most poignant novel to date.

]]> 361 Carol Shields 0670853097 Deborah 0 to-read 3.77 1993
author: Carol Shields
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> 220273379 New York Times bestselling author Sarah MacLean’s first foray into contemporary fiction, with a sharp, sexy novel about a wealthy New England family's long-overdue reckoning with hidden desires, destructive secrets…and one week that threatens to tear them apart

Alice isn't like the other Storm siblings. While the rest stayed to battle for their parents' approval, attention, and untold billions, she left, building her own life beyond the family’s name and influence. Nothing could induce her to come back, except the shocking death of her larger-than-life father. Now back on the family’s private island off the Rhode Island coast, she plans to keep her head down, pay the last of her respects, and leave the minute the funeral is over.

Unfortunately, her father had other plans. The eccentric, manipulative patriarch left his widow and their grown children a final challenge--an inheritance game designed to humiliate, devastate, and unravel the Storm family in ways both petty and life-altering. The rules of the game are clear: stay on the island for one week, complete the tasks, receive the inheritance.

One week on Storm Island is an impossible task for Alice. Every corner of the sprawling old house is bursting dysfunctional chaos: Her older sister’s secret love affair. Her brother’s incessant mansplaining. Her sister-in-law’s unapologetic greed. Her younger sister’s obsession with "vibes". Her mother’s penchant for stirring up competition between her children. And all under the stern, watchful gaze of Jack Dean, her father’s enigmatic, unfairly good-looking, second-in-command. It will be a miracle if Alice manages to escape the week unscathed.

A story about the transformative power of grief, love, and family, this luscious novel is at once deliciously clever and surprisingly tender, exploring past secrets, present truths, and futures forged in the wake of wild summer storms.]]> 400 Sarah MacLean 0593972260 Deborah 0 to-read 4.35 2025
author: Sarah MacLean
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> 1292354
Virginia Miner, a fifty-something, unmarried tenured professor, is in London to work on her new book about children’s folk rhymes. Despite carrying a U.S. passport, Vinnie feels essentially English and rather looks down on her fellow Americans. But in spite of that, she is drawn into a mortifying and oddly satisfying affair with an Oklahoman tourist who dresses more Bronco Billy than Beau Brummel.

Also in London is Vinnie’s colleague Fred Turner, a handsome, flat broke, newly separated, and thoroughly miserable young man trying to focus on his own research. Instead, he is distracted by a beautiful and unpredictable English actress and the world she belongs to.

Both American, both abroad, and both achingly lonely, Vinnie and Fred play out their confused alienation and dizzying romantic liaisons in Alison Lurie’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Smartly written, poignant, and witty, Foreign Affairs remains an enduring comic masterpiece.

“A splendid comedy, very bright, brilliantly written in a confident and original manner. The best book by one of our finest writers.�
–Elizabeth Hardwick

“There is no American writer I have read with more constant pleasure and sympathy. . . . Foreign Affairs earns the same shelf as Henry James and Edith Wharton.�
–John Fowles

“If you manage to read only a few good novels a year, make this one of them.�
� USA Today

“An ingenious, touching book.�
� Newsweek

“A flawless jewel.�
� Philadelphia Inquirer


From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 291 Alison Lurie 039454076X Deborah 0 to-read 3.98 1984
author: Alison Lurie
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> 18750496
But the deeper history of Amsterdam, what makes it one of the most fascinating places on earth, is bound up in its unique geography-the constant battle of its citizens to keep the sea at bay and the democratic philosophy that this enduring struggle fostered. Amsterdam is the font of liberalism, in both its senses. Tolerance for free thinking and free love make it a place where, in the words of one of its mayors, "craziness is a value." But the city also fostered the deeper meaning of liberalism, one that profoundly influenced America: political and economic freedom. Amsterdam was home not only to religious dissidents and radical thinkers but to the world's first great global corporation.

In this effortlessly erudite account, Russell Shorto traces the idiosyncratic evolution of Amsterdam, showing how such disparate elements as herring anatomy, naked Anabaptists parading through the streets, and an intimate gathering in a sixteenth-century wine-tasting room had a profound effect on Dutch-and world-history. Weaving in his own experiences of his adopted home, Shorto provides an ever-surprising, intellectually engaging story of Amsterdam from the building of its first canals in the 1300s, through its brutal struggle for independence, its golden age as a vast empire, to its complex present in which its cherished ideals of liberalism are under siege.]]> 394 Russell Shorto 0385534582 Deborah 0 to-read 4.30 2013
author: Russell Shorto
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> 210134232 *Gorgeously illustrated with 70 colour images*


You wish to teach me what is within learn first what is within you . . . I believe life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will.

Paul Gauguin is chiefly known as the giant of post-Impressionist painting whose bold colours and compositions rocked the Western art world. It is less well known that he was a stockbroker in Paris and that after the 1882 financial crash he struggled to sustain his artistry, and worked as a tarpaulin salesman in Copenhagen, a canal digger in Panama City, and a journalist exposing the injustices of French colonial rule in Tahiti.

In Wild Thing, the award-winning biographer Sue Prideaux re-examines the adventurous and complicated life of the artist. She illuminates the people, places and ideas that shaped his his privileged upbringing in Peru and rebellious youth in France; the galvanising energy of the Paris art scene; meeting Mette, the woman who he would marry; formative encounters with Vincent van Gogh and August Strindberg; and the ceaseless draw of French Polynesia.

Prideaux conjures Gauguin's visual exuberance, his creative epiphanies, his fierce words and his flaws with acuity and sensitivity. Drawing from a wealth of new material and access to the artist's family, this myth-busting work invites us to see Gauguin anew.]]> 0 Sue Prideaux 0571365957 Deborah 0 to-read 4.45 2024
author: Sue Prideaux
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> 213243949 A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.

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

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

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

]]> 165 Anne Tyler 0593803485 Deborah 5
Anne Tyler accomplishes so much in this short book. Gail is the best kind of character, quirky and outspoken with a side of slightly awkward. Women of a certain age will find comradery with her, as did I, and identify with her struggles. 5-Stars.


Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC of this book.]]> 3.61 2025
author: Anne Tyler
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2025/02/13
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Gail Baines has just lost her job, her daughter is getting married, and her ex-husband turns up on her doorstep with a cat. Three Days in June explores Gail's life in the days surrounding the wedding of her daughter, Debbie. As with the previous Anne Tyler novels I have read this one is character-driven with nuanced story-telling. When Debbie confides a secret, before her wedding, to her parents Gail is forced to confront feelings from her own past and come to terms with both Debbie's choices and her own.

Anne Tyler accomplishes so much in this short book. Gail is the best kind of character, quirky and outspoken with a side of slightly awkward. Women of a certain age will find comradery with her, as did I, and identify with her struggles. 5-Stars.


Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC of this book.
]]> 219520756 Family is everything, even when it falls apart.

After the sudden death of a renowned artist, his four adult children travel to Italy to sort out his affairs with his much-younger wife, in this moving novel from the bestselling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

World-famous artist Vic Kemp has relied on his four children ever since their mother died when they were young. Netta, the oldest, is a litigator who often serves as co-parent to her siblings; Susan, a housewife who cooks and cleans for both her husband and her father; Goose's own thwarted artistic ambitions have left him resigned to a job in Vic's studio; and Iris, the baby, drops everything the moment her father calls.Ěý

When Vic summons the siblings with the promise of big news, they hope their father is about to tell them he has finished the mysterious masterpiece he claims will be the capstone to his career. Instead, he announces he’s getting remarried.ĚýBella-Mae, his wife to be,Ěýis apparently beautiful, a fellow artist—and twenty-seven to his seventy-six years. When his children dare to express concern, Vic decamps with Bella-Mae to his summer home in Italy. Six weeks later, he is found dead. There is no sign of his will, or his promised final painting.Ěý

Netta, Susan, Goose, and Iris gather at the house on Lake Orta to piece together what happened and prepare to bring their father’s body home. They spend the summer in a waiting game, living under the same roof as Bella-Mae, and forced to confront Vic's legacy and the buried wounds they have incurred as his children. So who is Bella-Mae? Is she the woman their father believed her to be? Or is she the force that will destroy the family for good? How long can their old bonds hold?Ěý

With sparkling wit, compassion and tender insight, The Homemade God explores memory, identity, grief, healing, and the bonds of siblinghood—what happens when they splinter, and what it might take to find a new way forward.]]> 336 Rachel Joyce 0593448294 Deborah 0 to-read 3.98
author: Rachel Joyce
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.98
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> 77264775 From an acclaimed historian and author comes an epic the dual biography of Richard II and Henry IV, two cousins whose lives played out in extraordinary parallel, until Henry deposed the tyrant Richard and declared himself King of England. Richard of Bordeaux and Henry of Bolingbroke, cousins born just three months apart, were ten years old when Richard became king of England. They were thirty-two when Henry deposed him and became king in his place. Now, the story behind one of the strangest and most fateful events in English history (and the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s most celebrated history plays) is brought to vivid life by the acclaimed author of Blood and Roses, Helen Castor. Richard had birthright on his side, and a profound belief in his own God-given majesty. But beyond that, he lacked all qualities of leadership. A narcissist who did not understand or accept the principles that underpinned his rule, he was neither a warrior defending his kingdom, nor a lawgiver whose justice protected his people. Instead, he declared that “his laws were in his own mouth,� and acted accordingly. He sought to define as treason any resistance to his will and recruited a private army loyal to himself rather than the realm—and he intended to destroy those who tried to restrain him. Henry was everything Richard was a leader who inspired both loyalty and friendship, a soldier and a chivalric hero, dutiful, responsible, principled. After years of tension and conflict, Richard banished him and seized his vast inheritance. Richard had been crowned a king but he had become a tyrant, and as a tyrant—ruling by arbitrary will rather than established law—he was deposed by his cousin Henry, the only possible candidate to take his place. Henry was welcomed as a liberator, a champion of the people against his predecessor’s paranoid despotism. But within months he too was facing rebellion. Men knew that a deposer could in turn be deposed, and the new king found himself buffeted by unrest and by chronic ill-health until he seemed a shadow of his former self, trapped by political uncertainty and troubled by these signs that God might not, after all, endorse his actions. Captivating, immersive, and highly relevant to today’s times, The Eagle and the Hart is a story about what happens when a ruler prioritizes power over the interests of his own people. When a ruler demands loyalty to himself as an individual, rather than duty to the established constitution, and when he seeks to reshape reality rather than concede the force of verifiable truths. Above all, it is a story about how a nation was brought to the brink of catastrophe and disintegration—and, in the end, how it was brought back.]]> 528 Helen Castor 0241419328 Deborah 0 to-read 4.38 2024
author: Helen Castor
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> 212700035 'Once more, Kate Summerscale shatters our preconceptions of a classic crime' Val McDermid

From Britain's top-selling true crime writer and author of Sunday Times #1 bestseller THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER...

London, 1953. Police discover the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy terrace house in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they find another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. But they have already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place, three years ago, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man?

A nationwide manhunt is launched for the tenant of the ground-floor flat, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. Star reporter Harry Procter chases after the scoop. Celebrated crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse begs to be assigned to the case. The story becomes an instant sensation, and with the relentless rise of the tabloid press the public watches on like never before. Who is Christie? Why did he choose to kill women, and to keep their bodies near him? As Harry and Fryn start to learn the full horror of what went on at Rillington Place, they realise that Christie might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice in plain sight.

In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie's victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house.

'A forensic reappraisal of a grimy episode in postwar British history ... Shocking, impeccably researched, lucidly written and always utterly compelling' Graeme Macrae Burnet]]> 317 Kate Summerscale 1526660490 Deborah 0 to-read 3.86 2024
author: Kate Summerscale
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> 223736659
In 12 stories set in 12 locations around the globe, Jim Barger Jr. and Hicks recount how President Carter and his lifelong friends changed the course of world history, all while casting flies and pursuing the perfect strike.

To publish this book, with a foreword by President Jimmy Carter himself, is one of the great honors of our lives, and we believe these never-before-told true tales will soon become the stuff of legend.]]> 288 Jim Barger Jr. Deborah 0 currently-reading 4.52
author: Jim Barger Jr.
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.52
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> 71872930
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire.ĚýA crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?]]> 372 Daniel Mason 0593597036 Deborah 4 4.11 2023
author: Daniel Mason
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> 221179055 From the brilliant and hilarious author of The Rook, a delightful new supernatural When the heir to the British throne suddenly dies under mysterious circumstances, Checquy operative and reluctant aristocrat Alix is assigned to be lady-in-waiting/personal bodyguard to the new Crown Princess, and must navigate the halls of power and privilege while investigating the supernatural murder of the Prince of Wales.
Ěý
Alexandra "Alix" Dennis-Palmer-Hudson-Gilmore-Garnsey, the twelfth Lady Mondegreen, has never had any control of her life. Her supernatural ability to shatter bones with a touch made her the automatic property of the Checquy, the secret British government agency that deals with the supernatural. Her aristocratic ancestry made Alix the perfect asset for the Checquy to deploy close to the royal family. Since childhood, Alix has been coached to befriend Princess Louise, second in line to the throne, but despite all machinations, the two have never been close. Now an adult and a full Pawn of the Checquy, Alix is a skilled investigator unravelling supernatural manifestations for the security of the nation.
Ěý
Everything changes when Louise's brother, the Prince of Wales, dies abruptly, and all signs point to an unnatural assassination. To protect Louise, the new and unwilling heir apparent, Alix is assigned to be her lady-in-waiting. Thrust into the limelight overnight—both in the everyday world and in the underground world of the Checquy—Alix must juggle her responsibilities and her loyalties as she attempts to unravel the murder, keep Louise safe, and learn how to smile graciously while eerie threats loom around every corner.]]> 416 Daniel O'Malley 0316568104 Deborah 0 to-read 4.10 2025
author: Daniel O'Malley
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/10
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]]> 218695923 Mary Russell’s allegiances are tested by the reappearance of her long-lost uncle—and a tantalizing case not even Sherlock Holmes could solve.

When Mary Russell was a child, she adored her black-sheep Uncle Jake. But she hasn’t heard from him in many years, and she's assumed that his ne’er-do-well ways had brought him to a bad end somewhere—until he presents himself at her Sussex door. Yes, Jake is back, and with a load of problems for his clever niece. Not the least of which is the reason the family rejected him in the first he was involved—somehow—in the infamous disappearance of the Irish Crown Jewels from a secure safe in Dublin Castle.

It was a theft that shook a government, enraged a King, threatened the English establishment—and baffled not only the Dublin police and Scotland Yard, but Sherlock Holmes himself. And now, Jake expects Russell to step into the middle of it all? To slip away with him, not telling Homes what she’s up to? Knowing that the theft—unsolved, hushed-up, scandalous—must have involved Mycroft Holmes as well?

Naturally, she can do nothing of the sort. Siding with her Uncle Jake, even briefly, could only place her in opposition to both her husband-partner, and to his secretive and powerful brother. She has to tell Jake no.

On the other hand, this is Jake—her father’s kid brother, her childhood hero, beloved and long-lost survivor of a diminished family.

Conflicting loyalties and international secrets, blatant lies and blithe sounds like another case for Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes.]]> 336 Laurie R. King 059387398X Deborah 0 to-read 4.50 2025
author: Laurie R. King
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/10
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]]> 1052774
The Sunne in Splendour reverberates with the sound of truth as it re-creates the life of this most complex and compelling man.

Five hundred years after he died, Richard is still a figure of controversy and his story still fascinates and casts a spell.

Filled with the sights and sounds of battle, the customs and lore of daily life, the rigors and risks of Court politics, the passions and infidelities of the high born, and the touching concerns of very real men and women, The Sunne in Splendour brings to life this gifted man whose greatest sin, perhaps, was that he held principles too firm for the times he lived in and loved too deeply to survive love's loss.

Combining the accuracy of the historian, the logic of the lawyer, and the insight of the novelist--all of which she is--Sharon Kay Penman resolves the mystery of Richard III and provides absorbing drama.]]> 936 Sharon Kay Penman 003061368X Deborah 0 to-read 4.42 1982
author: Sharon Kay Penman
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> 48595115
Leonard and Hungry Paul is the story of two friends trying to find their place in the world. It is about the uncelebrated people of this world. And it asks a surprisingly enthralling question: Can kind people change the world?]]> 252 Ronan Hession 161219849X Deborah 4 4.14 2019
author: Ronan Hession
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> 45451999
This is the story of the secret plot and how it was revealed. It is a story of leaders, liars, counterfeiters, and jailhouse confessors. It also shows just how hard the battle was for George Washington—and how close America was to losing the Revolutionary War.

Taking place during the most critical period of our nation’s birth, The First Conspiracy tells a remarkable and previously untold piece of American history that not only reveals George Washington’s character, but also illuminates the origins of America’s counterintelligence movement that led to the modern day CIA.]]> 413 Brad Meltzer 1250231167 Deborah 0 to-read 3.99 2019
author: Brad Meltzer
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 8255917
Despite the reverence his name inspires Washington remains a waxwork to many readers, worthy but dull, a laconic man of remarkable self-control. But in this groundbreaking work Chernow revises forever the uninspiring stereotype. He portrays Washington as a strapping, celebrated horseman, elegant dancer and tireless hunter, who guarded his emotional life with intriguing ferocity. Not only did Washington gather around himself the foremost figures of the age, including James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, he orchestrated their actions to help realise his vision for the new federal government, define the separation of powers, and establish the office of the presidency.

Ron Chernow takes us on a page-turning journey through all the formative events of America's founding. This is a magisterial work from one of America's foremost writers and historians.]]> 904 Ron Chernow 1594202664 Deborah 0 to-read 4.14 2010
author: Ron Chernow
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 795923
Drawing from the newly catalogued Washington papers at the University of Virginia, Joseph Ellis paints a full portrait of George Washington’s life and career–from his military years through his two terms as president. Ellis illuminates the difficulties the first executive confronted as he worked to keep the emerging country united in the face of adversarial factions. He richly details Washington’s private life and illustrates the ways in which it influenced his public persona. Through Ellis’s artful narration, we look inside Washington’s marriage and his subsequent entrance into the upper echelons of Virginia’s plantation society. We come to understand that it was by managing his own large debts to British merchants that he experienced firsthand the imperiousness of the British Empire. And we watch the evolution of his attitude toward slavery, which led to his emancipating his own slaves in his will. Throughout, Ellis peels back the layers of myth and uncovers for us Washington in the context of eighteenth-century America, allowing us to comprehend the magnitude of his accomplishments and the character of his spirit and mind.

When Washington died in 1799, Ellis tells us, he was eulogized as “first in the hearts of his countrymen.� Since then, however, his image has been chisled onto Mount Rushmore and printed on the dollar bill. He is on our landscape and in our wallets but not, Ellis argues, in our hearts. Ellis strips away the ivy and legend that have grown up over the Washington statue and recovers the flesh-and-blood man in all his passionate and fully human prowess.

In the pantheon of our republic’s founders, there were many outstanding individuals. And yet each of them–Franklin, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison� acknowledged Washington to be his superior, the only indispensable figure, the one and only “His Excellency.� Both physically and politically, Washington towered over his peers for reasons this book elucidates. His Excellency is a full, glorious, and multifaceted portrait of the man behind our country’s genesis, sure to become the authoritative biography of George Washington for many decades.]]> 320 Joseph J. Ellis 1400040310 Deborah 0 to-read 4.04 2004
author: Joseph J. Ellis
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/01
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]]> 15844683 Librarian's Note: An alternate cover for this ASIN can be found here

Secret service agent Ethan Burke arrives in Wayward Pines, Idaho, with a clear mission: locate and recover two federal agents who went missing in the bucolic town one month earlier. But within minutes of his arrival, Ethan is involved in a violent accident. He comes to in a hospital, with no ID, no cell phone, and no briefcase. The medical staff seems friendly enough, but something feels?off. As the days pass, Ethan's investigation into the disappearance of his colleagues turns up more questions than answers. Why can't he get any phone calls through to his wife and son in the outside world? Why doesn't anyone believe he is who he says he is? And what is the purpose of the electrified fences surrounding the town? Are they meant to keep the residents in? Or something else out? Each step closer to the truth takes Ethan further from the world he thought he knew, from the man he thought he was, until he must face a horrifying fact? He may never get out of Wayward Pines alive. Intense and gripping, Pines is another masterful thriller from the mind of bestselling novelist Blake Crouch.]]> 320 Blake Crouch Deborah 0 to-read 3.93 2012
author: Blake Crouch
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 1061567 336 Willa Cather 0679413197 Deborah 0 to-read 4.06 1927
author: Willa Cather
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1927
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> 542377 272 Willa Cather 067944727X Deborah 0 to-read 4.00 1918
author: Willa Cather
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1918
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 218671843 An unexpectedĚýroad trip across America brings a family together, in this raucous and moving new novel from the bestselling author of Nothing to See Here.

Ever sinceĚýher dad left them twenty years ago,Ěýit’s just been Madeline Hill and her mom on their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. While she sometimes admits it’s a bit lonely and a less exciting life than she imagined for herself, it’s mostly OK. Mostly.

Then one day Reuben Hill pulls up in a PT Cruiser and informs Madeline that he believes she’s his half sister. Reuben—left behind by their dad thirty years ago—has hired a detective to track down their father and a string of other half siblings.ĚýAnd he wants Mad to leave her home and join him for the craziest kind of road trip imaginable to find them all.

As Mad and Rube—and eventually the others—share stories of their father, who behaved so differently in each life he created, they begin to question what he was looking for with each new incarnation. Who are they to one another? What kind of man will they find? And how will these new relationships change Mad’s previously solitary life on the farm?

Infused with deadpan wit, zany hijinks, and enormous heart, Run for the Hills is a sibling story like no other—a novel about a family forged under the most unlikely circumstances and united by hope in an unknown future.]]> 256 Kevin Wilson 0063317516 Deborah 0 to-read 4.04 2025
author: Kevin Wilson
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> 43224252 ISBN 10 0060129565
ISBN 13 9780060129569

The Thorn Birds is a robust, romantic saga of a singular family, the Clearys. It begins in the early part of t his century, when Paddy Cleary moves his wife, Fiona, and their seven children to Drogheda, the vast Australian sheep station owned by his autocratic and childless older sister; and it ends more than half a century later, when the only survivor of the third generation, the brilliant actress Justine O'Neill, sets a course of life and love halfway around the world from her roots.

the central figures in this enthralling story are the indomitable Meggie, the only Cleary daughter, and the one man she truly loves, the stunningly handsome and ambitious priest Ralph de Bricassart. Ralph's course moves him a long way indeed, from a remote Outback parish to the halls of the Vatican; and Meggie's except for a brief and miserable marriage elsewhere, is fixed to the Drogheda that is part of her bones - but distance does not dim their feelings though it shapes their lives.

Wonderful characters people this book; strong and gentle, Paddy, hiding a private memory; dutiful Fiona, holding back love because it once betrayed her, violent, tormented Frank, and the other hardworking Cleary sons who give the boundless lands of Drogheda the energy and devotion most men save for women; Meggie; Ralp; and Meggie's children, Justine and Dane. And the land itself; stark, relentless in its demands, brilliant in its flowering, prey to gigantic cycles of drought and flood, rich when nature is bountiful, surreal like no other place on earth.

(Jacket)]]> 533 Colleen McCullough Deborah 0 to-read 4.12 1977
author: Colleen McCullough
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/23
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]]> 16054217 The #1 New York Times bestselling series finale and sequel to A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night

Bringing the magic and suspense of the All Souls Trilogy to a deeply satisfying conclusion, this highly anticipated finale went straight to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. In The Book of Life, Diana and Matthew time-travel back from Elizabethan London to make a dramatic return to the present—facing new crises and old enemies. At Matthew’s ancestral home, Sept-Tours, they reunite with the beloved cast of characters from A Discovery of Witches—with one significant exception. But the real threat to their future has yet to be revealed, and when it is, the search for Ashmole 782 and its missing pages takes on even more urgency.]]> 561 Deborah Harkness 0670025593 Deborah 5 4.15 2014
author: Deborah Harkness
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2014/11/23
date added: 2025/01/17
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]]> 25167837 'They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it.' A windless, warm day greets the Sheridan family on the day of their garden party. As daughter Laura takes the reins on party preparations the news of a neighbour's demise casts a cloud over the host and threatens the entire celebration.]]> Katherine Mansfield Deborah 4 3.70 1921
author: Katherine Mansfield
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1921
rating: 4
read at: 2017/06/27
date added: 2025/01/17
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]]> 63245543
Layla Byrnes is exhausted. She's juggling a demanding job as an anaesthetist, a disintegrating marriage, her young kids, and a needy lover. And most particularly she's managing her histrionically unstable mother, who repeatedly threatens to kill herself. But this year, it's different.

When her mother rings just before Christmas, she doesn't follow the usual script. Instead, she tells Layla that there's something she needs to tell her about her much-loved father. In response, Layla drops everything to rush to her childhood home on the wild west coast of Tasmania. She's determined to finally confront her mother - and find out what really happened to her father - and lay some demons to rest.

The Heart is a Star is an engrossing, lyrical and powerfully absorbing novel about the complicated and beautiful messiness of midlife; about the ways in which we navigate an intricate, complicated world; and about how we can uncover our true selves when we are forced to face the myths that make us.]]> 304 Megan Rogers 146071556X Deborah 1 3.57 2023
author: Megan Rogers
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2025/01/05
date added: 2025/01/16
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This was just not the book for me and I found it a real struggle to finish. I have seen a lot of good reviews for the book and recognize that I may be in the minority here, but this one lost me from the beginning and I felt that it lacked believability. Due to the serious nature of the themes in these plot lines I thought it was a real shame that these topics were not explored more fully. I also feel that fewer plot lines would have served the book much better, For example, Layla and Lucas felt farfetched to me and their relationship seems like a gratuitous plot line that was included in the book as part of Layla's midlife crisis. While I didn't jive with this book, there are plenty of others who did enjoy it and I thank Netgalley and Harper Collins for the ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
]]> 437067 182 Kaye Gibbons 0945575335 Deborah 0 to-read 3.82 1991
author: Kaye Gibbons
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 129072772
But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.

Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, "a pluperfect son of Satan." Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.

The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period.

One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.--Tim Appelo]]> 273 Kaye Gibbons Deborah 0 to-read 0.0 1998
author: Kaye Gibbons
name: Deborah
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 1262054 A "vivid, unsentimental, powerful" portrait of a Southern marriage by the New York Times-bestselling author of Ellen Foster (Publishers Weekly).

She hasn't been dead four months and I've already eaten to the bottom of the deep freeze. I even ate the green peas. Used to I wouldn't turn my hand over for green peas . . .

Ruby Stokes has died too young and left her husband, Blinking Jack, behind. With alternating entries from each of them, A Virtuous Woman recounts the tale of their years together in an "exquisitely realised piece of writing" (Elizabeth Buchan, The Mail on Sunday).

From their very different backgrounds--Ruby a daughter of wealth, Jack a penniless tenant farmer--to their relationships with their landlord and his family, and the strength they drew from each other in the face of hardship, this story of a marriage is "full of fantastically gritty metaphors . . . A book that will change your dreams" (The Observer).

"Gibbons again flawlessly reproduces the humor and idiom of rural eastern North Carolina." --Library Journal
]]> 168 Kaye Gibbons 1565122062 Deborah 0 to-read 3.23 1989
author: Kaye Gibbons
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.23
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 45888593 0 Kaye Gibbons 1127080598 Deborah 0 to-read 4.00 1987
author: Kaye Gibbons
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 45438890
Bound in cloth printed and blocked with a design by Jamie Keenan Set in Goudy Old Style with Spartan Bold display 256 pages 8 integrated black & white illustrations Plain slipcase 8¾˝ x 5½˝]]> 256 Dorothy Parker Deborah 0 to-read 4.00 1952
author: Dorothy Parker
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 19388748 NOW A MAJOR BBC SERIES"From the incomparable Winston Graham... who has everything that anyone else has, then a whole lot more" The GuardianDemelza is the second book in Winston Graham's sweeping series of Cornwall, Poldark.Demelza Carne, the impoverished miner's daughter Ross Poldark rescued from a fairground rabble, is now his wife. But the events of these turbulent years test their marriage and their love. Demelza's efforts to adapt to the ways of the gentry - and her husband - bring her confusion and heartache, despite the joy in the birth of their first child. Ross begins a bitter struggle for the rights of the mining communities - and sows the seed of an enduring enmity with powerful George Warleggan.]]> 430 Winston Graham 1743280335 Deborah 0 to-read 4.17 1946
author: Winston Graham
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1946
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 19284400 NOW A MAJOR BBC SERIES"From the incomparable Winston Graham... who has everything that anyone else has, then a whole lot more" The GuardianRoss Poldark is the first book in Winston Graham's sweeping series of Cornwall, Poldark.Tired from a grim war in America, Ross Poldark returns to his land and his family. But the joyful homecoming he has anticipated turns sour, for his father is dead, his estate is derelict and the girl he loves is engaged to his cousin.But his sympathy for the destitute miners and farmers of the district leads him to rescue a half-starved urchin girl from a fairground brawl and take her home - an act which alters the whole course of his life . . .]]> 365 Winston Graham 174328148X Deborah 0 to-read 4.12 1945
author: Winston Graham
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1945
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 56988057
January 1942. The Avallon Hotel & Spa has always offered elegant luxury in the wilds of West Virginia, its mountain sweetwater washing away all of high society’s troubles.

Local girl-turned-general manager June Porter Hudson has guided the Avallon skillfully through the first pangs of war. The Gilfoyles, the hotel’s aristocratic owners, have trained her well. But when the family heir makes a secret deal with the State Department to fill the hotel with captured Axis diplomats, June must persuade her staff—many of whom have sons and husbands heading to the front lines—to offer luxury to Nazis. With a smile.

Meanwhile FBI Agent Tucker Minnick, whose coal tattoo hints at an Appalachian past, presses his ears to the hotel’s walls, listening for the diplomats� secrets. He has one of his own, which is how he knows that June’s balancing act can have dangerous consequences: the sweetwater beneath the hotel can threaten as well as heal.

June has never met a guest she couldn’t delight, but the diplomats are different. Without firing a single shot, they have brought the war directly to her. As clashing loyalties crack the Avallon’s polished veneer, June must calculate the true cost of luxury.]]> 400 Maggie Stiefvater 0593655508 Deborah 0 to-read 4.03 2025
author: Maggie Stiefvater
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 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 3
I flew through this book, my 3 star review is simply because I was so annoyed at the end that I didn't love it; however, I would recommend it to most people.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC of this book.]]> 4.05 2025
author: Charmaine Wilkerson
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2025/01/15
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This book is compulsively readable and the storyline pulls you in from the beginning. I had some trouble following the dual storylines in this one and it dragged toward the end. The buildup to the climax was so long that I really couldn't have cared less by the reveal.

I flew through this book, my 3 star review is simply because I was so annoyed at the end that I didn't love it; however, I would recommend it to most people.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC of this book.
]]> 210455047 Power, privilege, and blood—this is the definitive and thrilling true story of Alex Murdaugh’s violent downfall, from a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter who has become an authority on the case.
Ěý
Alex Murdaugh was a benevolent dictator—the president of the South Carolina trial lawyers� association, a political boss, a part-time prosecutor, and a partner in his family’s law firm. He was always ready with a favor, a drink, and an invitation to Moselle, his family’s 1,700-acre hunting estate. The Murdaugh name ignited respect—and fear—for a hundred miles.

When he murdered his wife, Maggie, and son Paul at Moselle on a dark summer night, the fragile façade of Alex’s world could no longer hold. His forefathers had covered up a midnight suicide at a remote railroad crossing, a bootlegging ring run from a courthouse, and the attempted murder of a pregnant lover. Alex, too, almost walked away from his unspeakable crimes with his reputation intact, but his downfall was secured by a twist of fate, some stray mistakes, and a fateful decision by an old friend who’d finally seen enough.

Why would a man who had everything kill his wife and grown son? To unwind the roots of Alex’s ruin, award-winning journalist Valerie Bauerlein reported not just from the courthouse every day but also along the backroads and through the tidal marshes of South Carolina’s Lowcountry. When the jurors made their pilgrimage to the crime scene, trying to envision Maggie and Paul’s last moments, she walked right behind them, sensing the ghosts that haunt the Murdaughs� now-shattered legacy.

Through masterful research and cinematic writing, The Devil at His Elbow is a transporting journey through Alex’s life, the night of the murders, and the investigation that culminated in a trial that held tens of millions spellbound. With her stunning insights and fearless instinct for the truth, Bauerlein uncovers layers of the Murdaugh murder case that have not been told.]]> 469 Valerie Bauerlein 0593500598 Deborah 0 to-read 4.52 2024
author: Valerie Bauerlein
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 60371805
The notorious queen of this glittering world is Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six children, including the enigmatic eldest, Niven, whose character has been forged in the crucible of the Somme. But success breeds enemies, and Nellie’s empire faces threats from without and within. For beneath the dazzle of Soho’s gaiety, there is a dark underbelly, a world in which it is all too easy to become lost.

With her unique Dickensian flair, Kate Atkinson gives us a window in a vanished world. Slyly funny, brilliantly observant, and ingeniously plotted, Shrines of Gaiety showcases the myriad talents that have made Atkinson one of the most lauded writers of our time.]]> 439 Kate Atkinson 0385547978 Deborah 0 to-read 3.78 2022
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 7307795
Meanwhile, Jackson Brodie, the beloved detective of novels such as Case Histories, is embarking on a different sort of rescue - that of an abused dog. Dog in tow, Jackson is about to learn, along with Tracy, that no good deed goes unpunished.]]> 350 Kate Atkinson 0385608020 Deborah 0 to-read 3.91 2010
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 3289281 When Will There Be Good News?

On a hot summer day, Joanna Mason's family slowly wanders home along a country lane. A moment later, Joanna's life is changed forever...

On a dark night thirty years later, ex-detective Jackson Brodie finds himself on a train that is both crowded and late. Lost in his thoughts, he suddenly hears a shocking sound...

At the end of a long day, 16-year-old Reggie is looking forward to watching a little TV. Then a terrifying noise shatters her peaceful evening. Luckily, Reggie makes it a point to be prepared for an emergency...

These three lives come together in unexpected and deeply thrilling ways in the latest novel from Kate Atkinson, the critically acclaimed author who Harlan Coben calls "an absolute must-read."]]> 388 Kate Atkinson 0316154857 Deborah 0 to-read 3.98 2008
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 43251694
Jackson's current job, gathering proof of an unfaithful husband for his suspicious wife, is fairly standard-issue, but a chance encounter with a desperate man on a crumbling cliff leads him into a sinister network -- and back across the path of his old friend Reggie. Old secrets and new lies intersect in this breathtaking novel by one of the most dazzling and surprising writers at work today.]]> 392 Kate Atkinson 0316523097 Deborah 0 to-read 3.91 2019
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 9920
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.

Five years, four months and twenty-nine days later, on April 14, 1965, Richard Eugene Hickock, aged thirty-three, and Perry Edward Smith, aged thirty-six, were hanged for the crime on a gallows in a warehouse at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas.

In Cold Blood is the story of the lives and deaths of these six people. It has already been hailed as a masterpiece.]]> 343 Truman Capote 0375507906 Deborah 0 4.16 1966
author: Truman Capote
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read, books-published-in-1966
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]]> 830617 ]]> 286 Daniel Keyes Deborah 0 4.34 1966
author: Daniel Keyes
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read, books-published-in-1966
review:

]]> 889025 192 Jean Rhys 0233958665 Deborah 0 3.43 1966
author: Jean Rhys
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read, books-published-in-1966
review:

]]> 894344 215 Larry McMurtry 0891908897 Deborah 0 4.22 1966
author: Larry McMurtry
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read, books-published-in-1966
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]]> 20615913
She takes on a “job� in Mexico City. The assignment doesn’t sound dangerous at first, but then, as often happens, something goes wrong. Now our dear Mrs. Pollifax finds herself embroiled in quite a hot Cold War—and her country’s enemies find themselves entangled with one unbelievably feisty lady.

“Should delight you whether you’re looking for smiles or thrills.� �The New York Times Book Review

“Mrs. Pollifax gives Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple a rival to reckon with.� �Toronto Star]]> 210 Dorothy Gilman Deborah 0 4.37 1966
author: Dorothy Gilman
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read, books-published-in-1966
review:

]]> 841504
Through Ned's eyes, 1916 examines the Irish fight for freedom--inspired by poets and schoolteachers, fueled by a desperate desire for independence, and played out in the historic streets of Dublin against the backdrop of World War I. It is the story of the brave men and heroic women who, for a few unforgettable days, managed to hold out against the might of the British Empire to realize an impossible dream.]]> 447 Morgan Llywelyn 031286101X Deborah 0 to-read 4.04 1998
author: Morgan Llywelyn
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 36324354 Romantic Outlaws is the first book to tell the story of the passionate and pioneering lives of Mary Wollstonecraft � English feminist and author of the landmark book, The Vindication of the Rights of Women � and her novelist daughter Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.





Although mother and daughter, these two brilliant women never knew one another � Wollstonecraft died of an infection in 1797 at the age of thirty-eight, a week after giving birth. Nevertheless their lives were so closely intertwined, their choices, dreams and tragedies so eerily similar, it seems impossible to consider one without the other.


Both women became famous writers; fell in love with brilliant but impossible men; and were single mothers who had children out of wedlock; both lived in exile; fought for their position in society; and thought deeply about how we should live. And both women broke almost every rigid convention there was to break: Wollstonecraft chased pirates in Scandinavia. Shelley faced down bandits in Naples. Wollstonecraft sailed to Paris to witness the Revolution. Shelley eloped in a fishing boat with a married man. Wollstonecraft proclaimed that women’s liberty should matter to everyone.


Not only did Wollstonecraft declare the rights of women, her work ignited Romanticism. She inspired Coleridge, Wordsworth and a whole new generation of writers, including her own daughter, who � with her young lover Percy Shelley � read Wollstonecraft’s work aloud by her graveside. At just nineteen years old and a new mother herself, Mary Shelley composed Frankenstein whilst travelling around Italy with Percy and roguish Lord Byron (who promptly fathered a child by Mary’s stepsister). It is a seminal novel, exploring the limitations of human nature and the power of invention at a time of great religious and scientific upheaval. Moreover, Mary Shelley would become the editor of her husband’s poetry after his early death � a feat of scholarship that did nothing less than establish his literary reputation.





Romantic Outlaws brings together a pair of visionary women who should have shared a life, but who instead shared a powerful literary and feminist legacy. This is inventive, illuminating, involving biography at its best.]]> 674 Charlotte Gordon Deborah 0 to-read 4.33 2015
author: Charlotte Gordon
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
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]]> 18362736 495 Katherine Anne Porter Deborah 0 4.00 1965
author: Katherine Anne Porter
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1965
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read, books-published-in-1966
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]]> 525929 446 Mikhail Bulgakov 0679410465 Deborah 0 4.31 1967
author: Mikhail Bulgakov
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read, books-published-in-1966
review:

]]> 2994656 255 Georgette Heyer Deborah 0 4.08 1966
author: Georgette Heyer
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read, books-published-in-1966
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]]> 873309
Margaret struggles toward adulthood in a world torn apart by the Second World War and complicated by her strong-willed mother, Sophia, and grandmother, Charlie Kate, in a story about three generations of passionate, willful Southern women.]]> 254 Kaye Gibbons 0399137912 Deborah 5 4.18 1993
author: Kaye Gibbons
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/13
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]]> 8013828 Charles Portis 1419328743 Deborah 4 4.16 1968
author: Charles Portis
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1968
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves:
review:

]]> 26165721 The dazzling new novel from bestselling, award-winning author Maggie O'Farrell, THIS MUST BE THE PLACE crosses time zones and continents to reveal an extraordinary portrait of a marriage.

Meet Daniel Sullivan, a man with a complicated life. A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California, a father he loathes in Brooklyn and a wife, Claudette, who is a reclusive ex-film star given to shooting at anyone who ventures up their driveway.

He is also about to find out something about a woman he lost touch with twenty years ago, and this discovery will send him off-course, far away from wife and home. Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back?

Maggie O'Farrell's seventh novel is a dazzling, intimate epic about who we leave behind and who we become as we search for our place in the world.]]> 496 Maggie O'Farrell 0755358805 Deborah 0 to-read 4.09 2016
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 219158332 Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain

Before he wasĚýMarkĚýTwain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Born in 1835, the man who would become America’s first, and most influential, literary celebrity spent his childhood dreaming of piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. But when the Civil War interrupted his career on the river, the youngĚýTwainĚýwent west to the Nevada Territory and accepted a job at a local newspaper, writing dispatches that attracted attention for their brashness and humor. It wasn’t long before the former steamboat pilot from Missouri was recognized across the country for his literary brilliance, writing under a pen name that he would immortalize.

In this richly nuanced portrait ofĚýMarkĚýTwain, acclaimed biographer Ron Chernow brings his considerable powers to bear on a man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune, and crafted his persona with meticulous care. After establishing himself as a journalist, satirist, and lecturer, he eventually settled in Hartford with his wife and three daughters, where he went on to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He threw himself into the hurly-burly of American culture, and emerged as the nation’s most notable political pundit. At the same time, his madcap business ventures eventually bankrupted him; to economize,ĚýTwainĚýand his family spent nine eventful years in exile in Europe. He suffered the death of his wife and two daughters, and the last stage of his life wasĚýmarked by heartache, political crusades, and eccentric behavior that sometimes obscured darker forces at play.

Drawing onĚýTwain’s bountiful archives, including thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow masterfully captures the man whose career reflected the country’s westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars, and who was the most important white author of his generation to grapple so fully with the legacy of slavery. Today, more than one hundred years after his death,ĚýTwain’s writing continues to be read, debated, and quoted. In this brilliant work of scholarship, a moving tribute to the writer’s talent and humanity, Chernow reveals the magnificent and often maddening life of one of the most original characters in American history.]]> 1196 Ron Chernow 0525561730 Deborah 0 to-read 4.80 2025
author: Ron Chernow
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.80
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 211051070 From the New York Times bestselling authors of The Nazi Conspiracy and The Lincoln Conspiracy comes a true, little-known story about the first assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy, right before his inauguration.

Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States, is often ranked among Americans� most well-liked presidents. Yet what most Americans don’t know is that JFK’s historic presidency almost ended before it began—at the hands of a disgruntled sociopathic loner armed with dynamite.

On December 11, 1960, shortly after Kennedy’s election and before his inauguration, a retired postal worker named Richard Pavlick waited in his car—a parked Buick—on a quiet street in Palm Beach, Florida. Pavlick knew the president-elect’s schedule. He knew when Kennedy would leave his house. He knew where Kennedy was going. From there, Pavlick had a simple plan—one that could’ve changed the course of history.

Written in the gripping, page-turning style that is the hallmark of Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch’s bestselling series, this is a slice of history vividly brought to life. Meltzer and Mensch are at the top of their game with this brilliant exploration of what could’ve been for one of the most compelling leaders of the 20th century.]]> 288 Brad Meltzer 1250790581 Deborah 0 to-read 4.39 2025
author: Brad Meltzer
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> 217163697 #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 1982112824 Deborah 0 to-read 4.58 2025
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 219301718 A spellbinding novel of literary and psychological suspenseabout the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charismatic, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school—by the legendary author 'who is surely on any shortlist of America’s greatest living writers' (New York Times Magazine)

'Eerie, shocking, provoking, and beautifully written, Fox is yet further proof Oates is one of the greatest writers among us today' Gillian Flynn

Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.

A hypnotic, galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oates’s Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he can’t outfox. Written in Oates’s trademark intimate, sweeping style, and interweaving multiple points of view, Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry, a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery.]]> 672 Joyce Carol Oates 0593978080 Deborah 0 to-read 4.19 2025
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
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]]> 57108122
It’s 2011: America is in a deep recession and Occupy Wall Street is escalating. But at the elite Wrynn College of Art, students paint and sculpt in a rarified bubble. Louisa Arceneaux is a thoughtful, observant nineteen-year-old when she transfers to Wrynn as a scholarship student, but she soon finds herself adrift in an environment that prizes novelty over beauty. Complicating matters is Louisa’s unexpected attraction to her charismatic roommate, Karina Piontek, the preternaturally gifted but mercurial daughter of wealthy art collectors. Gradually, Louisa and Karina are drawn into an intense sensual and artistic relationship, one that forces them to confront their deepest desires and fears. But Karina also can’t shake her fascination with Preston Utley, a senior and anti-capitalist Internet provocateur, who is publicly feuding with visiting professor and political painter Robert Berger—a once-controversial figurehead seeking to regain relevance.

When Preston concocts an explosive hoax, the fates of all four artists are upended as each is unexpectedly thrust into the cutthroat New York art world. Now, all must struggle to find new identities in art, in society, and amongst each other. In the process, they must either find their most authentic terms of life—of success, failure, and joy—or risk losing themselves altogether.

With a canny, critical eye, Sirens & Muses upends notions of class, money, art, youth, and a generation’s fight to own their future.]]> 368 Antonia Angress 0593496442 Deborah 0 to-read 3.96 2022
author: Antonia Angress
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2022
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]]> 60749649 NATIONAL BESTSELLER


Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, American Academy of Arts & Letters Sue Kaufman Prize, The New England Book Award, and the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree


A Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Chautauqua Prize 2023, and Barnes & Noble Discover Book Prize


Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, NPR, Esquire, Oprah Daily, and more


Set in a Native community in Maine,ĚýNight of the Living RezĚýis a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy.
Ěý


In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author Morgan Talty—with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep insight—breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. A boy unearths a jar that holds an old curse, which sets into motion his family’s unraveling; a man, while trying to swindle some pot from a dealer, discovers a friend passed out in the woods, his hair frozen into the snow; a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s projects the past onto her grandson; and two friends, inspired byĚýAntiques Roadshow, attempt to rob the tribal museum for valuable root clubs.Ěý


A collection that examines the consequences and merits of inheritance,ĚýNight of the Living RezĚýis an unforgettable portrayal of an Indigenous community and marks the arrival of a standout talent in contemporary fiction.]]> 296 Morgan Talty 1953534252 Deborah 0 to-read 3.91 2022
author: Morgan Talty
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 58661458 The highly anticipated new novel by acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Haigh is a tense, riveting story about the disparate lives that intersect at a women's clinic in Boston.

For almost a decade, Claudia has counseled patients at Mercy Street, a clinic in the heart of the city. The work is consuming, the unending dramas of women in crisis. For its patients, Mercy Street offers more than health care; for many, it is a second chance.

But outside the clinic, the reality is different. Anonymous threats are frequent. A small, determined group of anti-abortion demonstrators appears each morning at its door. As the protests intensify, fear creeps into Claudia's days, a humming anxiety she manages with frequent visits to Timmy, an affable pot dealer in the midst of his own existential crisis. At Timmy's, she encounters a random assortment of customers, including Anthony, a lost soul who spends most of his life online, chatting with the mysterious Excelsior11--the screenname of Victor Prine, an anti-abortion crusader who has set his sights on Mercy Street and is ready to risk it all for his beliefs.

Mercy Street is a novel for right now, a story of the polarized American present. Jennifer Haigh has written a groundbreaking novel, a fearless examination of one of the most divisive issues of our time.]]> 331 Jennifer Haigh Deborah 0 to-read 3.80 2022
author: Jennifer Haigh
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 9592213 322 Jennifer Haigh 0060755806 Deborah 0 to-read 3.84 2011
author: Jennifer Haigh
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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]]> 195539515
New Orleans is one of the most distinctive cities in the world, but like most American cities, rapidly developing. Designer and writer Valorie Hart and photographer Sara Essex Bradley have sought out spectacular residences that represent the best of old bohemian New Orleans—domiciles that serve both as inspiration and as an imaginative balm to all that is unappealingly conventional and cookie-cutter in design today. Ranging from a Garden District cottage to a Civil War–era Creole mansion, all the homes feature elements of elegance and eccentricity, old French furniture and vintage finds, colors only produced by local light. The free spirits who own these homes have a lust for all the arts, from music to dance, painting, and fine cuisine. They include an artist in a crumbling garret, an eccentric dreamer, a voodoo queen, moneyed wayfarers, world travelers, a resourceful magpie, bon vivants, gypsies, and old souls—all united in their love of the chipped and tattered, romantic and resplendent.

This book is a valentine to a New Orleans that is disappearing, a last call to remember, appreciate, and repeat and revive its great bohemian soul.]]> 240 Valorie Hart 0847899764 Deborah 0 to-read 4.00
author: Valorie Hart
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> 195460900 In her most ambitious novel to date, New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard takes on the story of a family from the hopeful early days of young marriage to parenthood, divorce, and its costly aftermath—to illuminate how the mistakes of parents are passed down through generations to fester, or to be healed.Ěý

After falling in love in the last years of the 1970s, Eleanor and Cam follow their dream of raising three children on a New Hampshire farm. Theirs is a seemingly idyllic life of summer softball games and Labor Day cookouts, snow days and skating on the pond. But when a tragic accident permanently injures the family’s youngest child, Eleanor blames Cam. Her inability to forgive him leads to a devastating betrayal: an affair with the family babysitter that brings about the end of their marriage.

Over the decades that follow, the five members of this fractured family—and the many others who make up their world—make surprising discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together, and often tear them apart. As we follow the family from the days of illegal abortion and the draft through the early computer age, the Challenger explosion, the AIDS epidemic, the early awakenings of the #MeToo era, and beyond, through the gender transition of one of the children and another’s choice to cease communication with her mother, we witness a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its past and find redemption in the face of unanticipated disaster.

With endearingly flawed characters and a keen eye for detail, Joyce Maynard transforms the territory she knows best—home, family, parenthood, love, and loss—into the stuff of a page-turning thriller. In this achingly beautiful novel, she reminds us how great sorrow and great joy may coexist—and frequently do.

Ěý]]> 470 Joyce Maynard Deborah 0 to-read 4.33 2021
author: Joyce Maynard
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> 50403478 Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, returns to the world of Gilead with Jack, the latest in one of the great works of contemporary American fiction.

Jack Ěýtells the story of John Ames Boughton, the beloved, erratic, and grieved-over prodigal son of a Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa. In segregated St. Louis sometime after World War II, Jack falls in love with Della Miles, an African American high school teacher who is also the daughter of a preacher―discerning, generous, and independent. Their fraught, beautiful romance is one of Robinson’s greatest achievements.

The Gilead novels are about the dilemmas and promise of American history―about the ongoing legacy of the Civil War and the enduring impact of both racial inequality and deep-rooted religious belief. They touch the deepest chords in our national character and resonate with our deepest feelings.]]> 309 Marilynne Robinson 0374279306 Deborah 4 3.85 2020
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Deborah
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2020
rating: 4
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]]> 42972008
For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now � just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity � the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.

As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world.

Harking back to a simpler time, This Is Happiness is a tender portrait of a community � its idiosyncrasies and traditions, its paradoxes and kindnesses, its failures and triumphs � and a coming-of-age tale like no other. Luminous and lyrical, yet anchored by roots running deep into the earthy and everyday, it is about the power of stories: their invisible currents that run through all we do, writing and rewriting us, and the transforming light that they throw onto our world.]]> 400 Niall Williams 163557420X Deborah 0 to-read 4.18 2019
author: Niall Williams
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> 52012731 Nina de Gramont's The Christie Affair is a beguiling novel of star-crossed lovers, heartbreak, revenge, and murder—and a brilliant re-imagination of one of the most talked-about unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century.

Every story has its secrets.
Every mystery has its motives.

“A long time ago, in another country, I nearly killed a woman. It’s a particular feeling, the urge to murder. It takes over your body so completely, it’s like a divine force, grabbing hold of your will, your limbs, your psyche. There’s a joy to it. In retrospect, it’s frightening, but I daresay in the moment it feels sweet. The way justice feels sweet.�

The greatest mystery wasn’t Agatha Christie’s disappearance in those eleven infamous days, it’s what she discovered.

London, 1925: In a world of townhomes and tennis matches, socialites and shooting parties, Miss Nan O’Dea became Archie Christie’s mistress, luring him away from his devoted and well-known wife, Agatha Christie.

The question is, why? Why destroy another woman’s marriage, why hatch a plot years in the making, and why murder? How was Nan O’Dea so intricately tied to those eleven mysterious days that Agatha Christie went missing?]]> 320 Nina de Gramont 1250274621 Deborah 0 to-read 4.03 2022
author: Nina de Gramont
name: Deborah
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: to-read
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]]>