Leo Gursky is just about surviving, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he’s still alive. But life wasn’t always like this: sixty years ago, in the Polish village where he was born, Leo fell in love and wrote a book. And though Leo doesn’t know it, that book survived, inspiring fabulous circumstances, even love. Fourteen-year-old Alma was named after a character in that very book. She undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With consummate, spellbinding skill, Nicole Krauss gradually draws together their stories.
Inspired by the author’s four grandparents and by a pantheon of authors,
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The author Rudyard Kipling is familiar to most, especially his famed stories that make up The Jungle Book. However, a lesser known fact is that although he was born in India, Rudyard Kipling came to live in Vermont in 1892 with his American wife and set up home in Brattleboro. It was there that he wrote The Jungle Book, inspired by his love for the country of his birth.
Victoria Vinton’s The Jungle Law is a fictional account of the time the Kiplings spent in Vermont. Mixing fact and invention, Vinton parallels Kipling’s story with that of his neighbors’,
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Barcelona, 1945—A great world city lies shrouded in secrets after the war, and a boy mourning the loss of his mother finds solace in his love for an extraordinary book called The Shadow of the Wind, by an author named Julian Carax. When the boy searches for Carax’s other books, it begins to dawn on him, to his horror, that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book the man has ever written. Soon the boy realizes that The Shadow of the Wind is as dangerous to own as it is impossible to forget,
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A Commonwealth Prize Winner
Celebrating the timeless power of storytelling, Mister Pip unites the stirring tale of a young girl’s quest for hope with a marvelous tribute to a Charles Dickens classic. Thirteen-year-old Matilda is coming of age on a Pacific island that has been torn apart by war. Almost everyone, including her father, has left to find work or escape the danger. Among those few who remain is the eccentric and mysterious Mr. Watts, the island’s sole remaining white man, who takes on the role of teacher and begins to read Great Expectations aloud to the students.
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In searching for the answers to life’s enduring questions, Kit Bakke sends an e-mail to her heroine, Louisa May Alcott and is amazed to receive a reply. Their correspondence – a mixture of biography, history and autobiography – becomes an intertwined dance of ideas and stories, bridging the mix-1800s and the twenty-first century. Together, they discuss issues of women’s rights, the obligation to help the sick and needy, and the moral and personal responsibility to resist injustice and initiate reform.
For Kit Bakke, Alcott is considerably more than the author of Little Women. “Her abolitionist zeal,
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In Linda Fairstein’s outstanding new novel, the New York Public Library houses dazzling treasures—and deadly secrets.
When Assistant District Attorney Alex Cooper is summoned to Tina Barr’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, she finds a neighbor convinced that the young woman was assaulted. But the terrified victim, a conservator of rare books and maps, refuses to cooperate with investigators. Then another woman is found murdered in that same apartment with an extremely valuable book, believed to have been stolen. As Alex pursues the murderer, she is drawn into the strange and privileged world of the Hunt family,
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