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2011 - 2012
The Long Song
by Andrea Levy
In The Long Song, Levy turns her attention to the final days of slavery in early 19th-century Jamaica. Packaged with a preface and an afterword purporting to have been written by Mr. Thomas Kinsman, a well-to-do black printer living in Jamaica in 1898, and occasionally punctuated by editorial suggestions from that long-suffering man, the novel is presented as the memoir of his octogenarian mother, Miss July, who was born into slavery on a sugar plantation known as Amity. ~ New York Times www.andrealevy.co.uk
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The Typist
by Michael Knight
When Francis Vancleave "Van" joins the army in 1944, he has every reason to expect his term of service will pass uneventfully. After all, the war is winding down and Van's one singular talent-typing ninety-five words a minute-keeps him off the battlefield and in General MacArthur's busy Tokyo headquarters, where his days are filled with paperwork in triplicate and letters of dictation. Little does Van know that the first year of the occupation will prove far more volatile for him than for the U.S. Army. www.michaelknightfiction.com
My Name is Mary Sutter
by Robin Oliveira
Midwife Mary Sutter was set on becoming a doctor, but the Albany Medical College would not admit women. At the outbreak of the Civil War, she traveled to Washington, D.C. where she locked horns with government officials who finally allowed her to work at the Union Hotel Hospital, the most derelict of the District's hospitals. Oliveira's novel describes the pitiful state of combat medicine in the 19th century through the eyes of one woman determined to save soldiers. www.robinoliveira.com
Great House
by Nicole Krauss
The novel consists of four stories divided among eight chapters, all touching on themes of loss and recovery, and anchored to a massive writing desk that resurfaces among numerous households, much to the bewilderment of those in its orbit, among them a lonely American novelist clinging to the memory of a poet who has mysteriously vanished in Chile, an old man in Israel facing the imminent death of his wife of 51 years, and an esteemed antiques dealer tracking down the things stolen from his father by the Nazis. Much like in Krauss's The History of Love, the sharply etched characters seem at first arbitrarily linked across time and space, but Krauss pulls together the disparate elements, settings, characters, and fragile connective tissue to form a formidable and haunting mosaic of loss and profound sorrow. ~ Publishers Weekly
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The Hound of the Baskervilles
by Conan Doyle
After the sudden death of Sir Charles Baskerville - purportedly caused by a giant ghostly hound - Watson is sent by Sherlock Holmes to Devon to protect Sir Henry Baskerville, heir to the family fortune, and to investigate the circumstances surrounding the tale. Is it merely legend, or are the Baskervilles indeed haunted by an evil which extends beyond the grave? Set on the ancient moor, with its atmosphere of mystery and ghostly shadows, 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' is a completely chilling and unforgettable piece of writing.
Questions
Red Hook Road
by Ayelet Waldman
Set on the coast of Maine over the course of four summers, Red Hook Road tells the story of two families, the Tetherlys and the Copakens, and of the ways in which their lives are unraveled and stitched together by misfortune, by good intentions and failure, and by love and calamity.
World and Town
by Gish Jen
Hattie Kong—the daughter of a descendant of Confucius and an American missionary to China—has, in her fiftieth year of living in the United States, lost both her husband and her best friend to cancer. Now two years later, she has decided to move to a small town hoping for a simple, American life. But the arrival of cell-phones, chain stores, financial hardship and fundamentalist Christians have changed the character of the town. How Hattie reacts to all of this and defines her new world is at the heart of this humorous and enthralling novel.
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The Secret in Their Eyes
by Eduardo Sacheri
Benjamín Chaparro is a retired detective still obsessed by the brutal, decades-old rape and murder of a young married woman in her own bedroom. While attempting to write a book about the case, he revisits the details of the investigation. As he reaches into the past, Chaparro also recalls the beginning of his long, unrequited love for Irene Hornos, then just an intern, now a respected judge. Set in the Buenos Aires of the 1970s, Sacheri’s tale reveals the underpinnings of Argentina’s Dirty War and takes on the question of justice—what it really means and in whose hands it belongs.
Questions
Titles Selected by Suzanne Fisher, Librarian
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