Under the Wide and Starry Sky: A
Novel September
23, 2014
*Starred Review* Horan’s
spectacular second novel (following book-club favorite Loving Frank, 2007) has
been worth the wait. Brimming with the same artistic verve that drives her
complicated protagonists, it follows the loving, tumultuous partnership of Scottish
author Robert Louis Stevenson and his Indiana-born wife, Fanny Osbourne. Fanny,
an aspiring artist still tied to her unfaithful first husband when they meet in
1875, is fiery, courageous, and the mother of two living children. Louis, a
younger man whose frailty belies a joyous, energetic spirit, dreams of writing
full-time. While he perfects his craft, she becomes his protector and
editor-collaborator, accompanying him across Europe and America and finally to
Samoa in hopes of healing his weak lungs. This is more than just another novel
designed to honor the unsung accomplishments of a famous man’s spouse, though.
Equally adventurous and colorful, Louis and Fanny could each command the story
singlehandedly. Together, they are riveting and insightfully envisioned,
including through moving depiction of how their relationship transforms over
time. Horan also explores relevant social concerns, such as cultural
imperialism and xenophobia, and how Stevenson’s life influenced his literary
themes. An exhilarating epic about a free-spirited couple who traveled the
world yet found home only in one another.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry
February 1, 2013
by Rachel Joyce
Harold Fry, six months retired from his job as sales
representative for a local brewery, gets a letter from Queenie, a woman he'd
worked with twenty years before but hasn't seen since. She tells him that she's
dying of cancer. The news upsets him for years earlier, Queenie had done him a
great favor and he'd never had the chance to thank her. He sits down to write a
letter to her but finds it hard to say anything without seeming . . .
"limp,' is the word that comes to his mind. When he has finished the letter,
he leaves the house to mail it but when he gets to the mailbox, he walks on to
the next one, and then the next, and the next, and soon he's at the opposite
edge of town. He stops at a convenience store to get something to eat. He tells
the girl at the counter that he has a friend who has cancer and he's got a
letter he's going to post to her. The girl talks about her aunt who had cancer.
She says science doesn't know everything, you have to believe a person can get
better. "You see, if you have faith, you can do anything."
In that moment, Harold, who's spent most of his life doing only
the ordinary and comfortable at all, realizes what he must do. He's going to
walking to his friend's sickbed. He knows it's not reasonable but he's
convinced that as long as he keeps walking toward her, his friend will stay
alive. He telephones the hospice, tells Queenie's nurse to take her a message:
"Tell her Harold Fry is on his way. All she has to do is wait. . . . I am
going to save her, you see. I will keep walking and she must keep living. Will
you say that? . . . Tell her this time I won't let her down.
All the Light We Cannot See – May 6, 2014
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr,
the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller
about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied
France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.
Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of
Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When
she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of
their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home.
When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the
walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives
in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s
most valuable and dangerous jewel.
In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his
younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert
at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a
place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track
the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence,
Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo,
where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.
Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous
metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving
the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds,
people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, a National Book
Award finalist, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply
moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles
Times).
The Nightingale – February 3, 2015
FRANCE, 1939
In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye
to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn't believe that
the Nazis will invade France … but invade they do, in droves of marching
soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and
drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne's home,
she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food
or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make
one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive.
Vianne's sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old
girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While
thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gäetan,
a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and
she falls in love as only the young can … completely. But when he betrays her,
Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life time and
again to save others.
With
courage, grace and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah captures
the epic panorama of WWII and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom
seen: the women's war. The Nightingale tells the stories of two sisters,
separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each
embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in
German-occupied, war-torn France--a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that
celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the durability of women. It
is a novel for everyone, a novel for a lifetime.
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry: A Novel December 2, 2014
"Funny, tender, and moving, The Storied Life of A. J.
Fikry reminds us all exactly why we read and why we love."*
A. J. Fikry’s life is not at all what he expected it to be. He
lives alone, his bookstore is experiencing the worst sales in its history, and
now his prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, has been stolen. But
when a mysterious package appears at the bookstore, its unexpected arrival
gives Fikry the chance to make his life over--and see everything anew.
“This novel has humor, romance, a touch of suspense, but most of
all love--love of books and bookish people and, really, all of humanity in its
imperfect glory.”
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