The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

October 7, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Harper, 2009. 508 pgs. Purchased. Young Harrison Shepherd is taken to Mexico by his mother in the late 1920s as she follows her heart — and her goal of marrying a more interesting and wealthier man than Harrison’s American father. There, Harrison falls in love with writing stories and keeping a diary of his experiences of his life in Mexico, of the Depression Era riots in Washington D.C., and of working for exiled Soviet leader Lev Trotsky. […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Chunkster, Fiction, Mexico, North America, United States, Women's Prize • Tags: Barbara Kingsolver

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

July 29, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Riverhead Books, 2010. 512 pgs. Purchased. Longlisted for the 2010 Orange Prize (now known as the Women’s Prize for Fiction), Waters novel is set in the summer of 29147 when Dr. Faraday is called to attend to a patient at Hundreds Hall, a grand English estate he recollects with fond memories. His mother once worked there as a maid and, as a young boy, he was once allowed to step inside the home during a picnic for children from […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, United Kingdom, Women's Prize • Tags: Sarah Waters

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

May 27, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Anna Fields. Blackstone Audio, 2008. Originally published 2001. 11 hours, 24 minutes. Library copy.  In an unnamed country in South America, guests arrive at the Vice President’s home to celebrate the birthday of a Japanese businessman, Katsumi Hosokawa. Eager to woo the businessman and encourage him to invest in the country, the country has invited a famous American opera singer by the name of Roxane Cross to serenade Katsumi. The party is interrupted by a […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Art, Audiobook, Awards and Prizes, Book Club, Fiction, South America, Women's Prize • Tags: Ann Patchett, Anna Fields

The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman

March 28, 2016 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Noah Taylor. Simon & Schuster Audio, 2012. 10 hours, 21 minutes. Library copy. Stationed as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock off the coast of Western Australia, Tom Sherbourne and his wife Isabel live largely in isolation. Two miscarriages and one stillbirth have isolated the couple even further — both from their family on the mainland who are anxious for grandchildren and from each other. The arrival of a battered on the shores of Janus Rock […]

Categories: 2016 Reads, Audiobook, Fiction, Oceania, Women's Prize • Tags: M. L. Stedman, Noah Taylor

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

March 5, 2016 by Christina

Fiction — Kindle edition.  Riverhead, 2014. 568 pgs. Purchased. In the aftermath of World War I, twenty-six year old Frances Wray and her mother are obliged to take in paying guests — a more polite term for lodgers that allows Mrs. Wray and the neighbors to ignore the family’s rather spectacular tumble in social standing. Their room for rent notice is answered by a young, married couple from the “clerk class” named Lilian and Leonard Barber, and the Wrays and Barber have […]

Categories: 2016 Reads, Book Club, Chunkster, Crime, Europe, Fiction, LGBTQA+, United Kingdom, Walter Scott Prize, Women's Prize • Tags: Sarah Waters

The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

March 10, 2015 by Christina

Fiction — print. Vintage, 2011. 758 pgs. Purchased. In 1937, Andras Lévi arrives in Paris to attend architecture college from Budapest on scholarship with a letter he promised an elderly, wealthy woman he knows through the connections of the Jewish community that he would deliver. The woman’s twenty-something son provides Andras with a place to sleep until he can find his own apartment in the city’s Latin Quarter; the woman’s thirty-something daughter, Klara, receives the letter without revealing the mysterious […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, Hungary, Women's Prize • Tags: Julie Orringer

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

October 3, 2014 by Christina

Set in Ireland in 1829, Kent’s novel offers a fictionalized account of the final days of the last person in Iceland to be condemned to death, Agnes Magnúsdóttir. Convicted of murdering Natan Ketilsson and Pétur Jónsson in in Illugastaðir located in northern Iceland on March 13-14, 1828. A year after her conviction, Agnes is moved out of Reykjavík to a small farm in the rural community owned by the district officer Jón, his wife Magrét and their two daughters, Lauga […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Book Club, Crime, Europe, Fiction, Iceland, Women's Prize • Tags: Hannah Kent