Bookmark the Blog


LIMA NIGHTS

 From a National Book Award finalist—for her memoir American Chica—and the author of the acclaimed novel Cellophane comes this spare, powerful story of sexual obsession and its consequences.

Carlos Bluhm leads the good life in upper-class Lima: he attends social functions with his elegant wife, goes out drinking with his three best friends, has the occasional, fleeting assignation. . . . Until he meets Maria Fernandez, a dancer at a tango bar in a rough part of town. The beautiful sixteen-year-old intoxicates him. An indigenous dark-skinned Peruvian, she represents everything his safe white world does not,

read more

SEE YOU IN A HUNDRED YEARS

 Logan Ward and his wife, Heather, were prototypical New Yorkers circa 2000: their lives steeped in ambition, work, and stress. Feeling their souls grow numb, wanting their toddler son to see the stars at night, the Wards made a plan. They would return to their native South, find a farm, and for one year live exactly as people did in 1900 Virginia: without a car or electricity–and with only the food they could grow themselves. It was a project that would push their relationship to the brink–and illuminate stunning hardships and equally remarkable surprises.

From Logan’s emotionally charged battles with Belle,

read more

TWO RIVERS

 T. Greenwood’s new novel is a powerful, haunting tale of enduring love, destructive secrets, and opportunities that arrive in disguise . . .

In Two Rivers, Vermont, Harper Montgomery is living a life overshadowed by grief and guilt. Since the death of his wife, Betsy, twelve years earlier, Harper has narrowed his world to working at the local railroad and raising his daughter, Shelly, the best way he knows how. Still wracked with sorrow over the loss of his life-long love and plagued by his role in a brutal, long-ago crime, he wants only to make amends for his past mistakes.

read more

MY REVOLUTIONS

 Michael Frame plays it safe – he’s a stay-at-home, suburban dad to stepdaughter Sam and a supportive husband to businesswoman Miranda. In fact, as far as Sam and Miranda are concerned, Michael’s past is a vague but uncomplicated territory – it’s almost as if he didn’t exist before he came into their lives.

This is almost the truth. Michael Frame is not who he says he is; he is not who he has been for the past two decades. He’s actually Chris Carver, a fugitive from the law and ex-member of one of the most volatile and infamous revolutionary groups of 1960s and 70s London.

read more

THE WILDERNESS

 It’s Jake’s birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life – his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his mid-sixties, and he isn’t quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer’s.

As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable.

read more

HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET

One of our recommended books is Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol.

This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war,

read more