Cheryl's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 25 Apr 2025 11:45:16 -0700 60 Cheryl's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Incidents Around the House 199757490 A chilling horror novel about a haunting told from the perspective of a young girl whose troubled family is targeted by an entity she calls “Other Mommy,� from the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box

To eight-year-old Bela, her family is her world. There’sMommy,Daddo,and Grandma Ruth.But there is also Other Mommy, a malevolent entity who asks her every day: “Can I go inside your heart?”�

When horrifying incidents around the house signal that Other Mommy is growing tired of asking Bela the same question, over and over . . . Bela understands that unless she says yes, soon her family must pay.

Other Mommy is getting restless, stronger, bolder. Only the bonds of family can keep Bela safe but other incidents show cracks in her parents' marriage. The safety Bela relies on is on the brink of unraveling.

But Other Mommy needs an answer.

Incidents Around the House is a chilling, wholly unique tale of true horror told by the child Bela. A story about a family as haunted as their home.]]> 367 Josh Malerman 0593723120 Cheryl 4 3.61 2024 Incidents Around the House
author: Josh Malerman
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/04/25
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]]> Gallows Hill 59746719
When their daughter, Margot, inherits the family business, she wants nothing to do with it. The winery is valued for its unparalleled produce, but it's built on a field where hundreds of convicts were once hanged, and the locals whisper morbid rumors. They say the ground is cursed.

It's been more than a decade since Margot last saw her childhood home. But now that she's alone in the sprawling, dilapidated building, she begins to believe the curse is more than real―and that she may be the next victim of the house that never rests...]]> 377 Darcy Coates Cheryl 3 3.84 2022 Gallows Hill
author: Darcy Coates
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/17
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]]> Parasite 31370230 A guard discovers an unusual lifeform on her remote moon outpost. She disregards protocol to investigate it, with catastrophic consequences.

The parasitic alien wears its victims' skins and adopts their personalities. It's a perfect disguise, and allows the creature to spread without being detected. By the time humanity realises it's facing extinction, a third of its six hundred space stations have already gone dark.

As the alien's ruthless progress collapses communication networks, wipes out defences, and leaves hundreds of stations to fend for themselves, a handful of remarkable individuals must find a way to battle the greatest threat the universe has ever encountered.]]> 416 Darcy Coates Cheryl 2 3.84 2016 Parasite
author: Darcy Coates
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2016
rating: 2
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date added: 2025/04/17
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]]> Butter 200776812 The cult Japanese bestseller about a female gourmet cook and serial killer and the journalist intent on cracking her case, inspired by a true story.

There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine.

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Center convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can’t resist writing back.

Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a masterclass in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii but it seems that she might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body, might she and Kaji have more in common than she once thought?

Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, "The Konkatsu Killer," Asako Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.]]> 464 Asako Yuzuki 0063236400 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.50 2017 Butter
author: Asako Yuzuki
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> Fair Play 216895124 For fans of Anthony Horowitz, Tana French, and Sally Rooney, a wonderfully original, genre-breaking literary debut from Ireland that’s an homage to the brilliant detective novels of the early twentieth century, a twisty modern murder mystery, and a searing exploration of grief and loss.

A group of friends gather at an Airbnb on New Year’s Eve. It is Benjamin’s birthday, and his sister Abigail is throwing him a jazz-age Murder Mystery themed party. As the night plays out, champagne is drunk, hors d’oeuvres consumed, and relationships forged, consolidated or frayed. Someone kisses the wrong person; someone else’s heart is broken.

In the morning, all of them wake up—except Benjamin.

As Abigail attempts to wrap her mind around her brother’s death, an eminent detective arrives determined to find Benjamin's killer. In this mansion, suddenly complete with a butler, gardener and housekeeper, everyone is a suspect, and nothing is quite as it seems.

Will the culprit be revealed? And how can Abigail, now alone, piece herself back together in the wake of this loss?

Gripping and playful, sharp and profoundly moving, Fair Play plumbs the depths of the human heart while subverting one of our most popular genres.


]]> 288 Louise Hegarty 0063360551 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.10 Fair Play
author: Louise Hegarty
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.10
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> Her Smoke Rose Up Forever 27059 Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is the quintessential Tiptree collection. These eighteen brilliant short stories reflect the darkly complex world author, Alice Bradley Sheldon, who created and wrote under the persona of reclusive, enigmatic genius James Tiptree, Jr. This updated edition contains revisions from the author’s original notes, offering further insight into the fascinating subjects of her multi award-winning fiction: exploring the alien among us; the unreliability of perception; love, sex, and death; and humanity’s place in a vast, cold universe.]]> 448 James Tiptree Jr. 1892391201 Cheryl 0 to-read 4.19 1990 Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
author: James Tiptree Jr.
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> The Left Hand of Darkness 18423 The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants spend most of their time without a gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters.

Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.]]> 304 Ursula K. Le Guin Cheryl 0 to-read 4.11 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> <![CDATA[The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]]> 2956 327 Mark Twain 0142437174 Cheryl 4 3.82 1884 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
author: Mark Twain
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1884
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/27
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]]> I Who Have Never Known Men 60811826 Deep underground, forty women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.


As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.


Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.]]> 184 Jacqueline Harpman 1945492600 Cheryl 0 to-read 4.11 1995 I Who Have Never Known Men
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/27
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]]> Wild Dark Shore 211004089
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.

Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.]]> 303 Charlotte McConaghy 1250827957 Cheryl 0 to-read 4.28 2025 Wild Dark Shore
author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/27
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]]> How to Sell a Haunted House 59414094 Grady Hendrix takes on the haunted house in a thrilling new novel that explores the way your past—and your family—can haunt you like nothing else.

When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn’t want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world.

Most of all, she doesn’t want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success. Unfortunately, she’ll need his help to get the house ready for sale because it’ll take more than some new paint on the walls and clearing out a lifetime of memories to get this place on the market.

But some houses don’t want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of them…]]> 419 Grady Hendrix 0593201264 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.65 2023 How to Sell a Haunted House
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/27
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]]> Witchcraft for Wayward Girls 207611566 There’s power in a book�

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to the Wellwood Home in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who knows she’s going to go home and marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually paid in blood.

In Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, the author of How to Sell a Haunted House and The Final Girl Support Group delivers another searing, completely original novel and further cements his status as a “horror master� (NPR).]]> 482 Grady Hendrix 0593548981 Cheryl 0 to-read 4.00 2025 Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/27
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]]> Veronica 22259 Bad Behavior and Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Veronica is about flesh and spirit, vanity, mortality, and mortal affection. Set mostly in Paris and Manhattan in the desperately glittering 1980s, it has the timeless depth and moral power of a fairy tale.

As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica—an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal “office kit� and a plaque that reads “Still Anal After All These Years.� Improbably, the two women become friends. Their friendship will survive not only Alison’s reentry into the seductive nocturnal realm of fashion, but also Veronica’s terrible descent into the then-uncharted realm of AIDS. The memory of their friendship will continue to haunt Alison years later, when she, too, is aging and ill and is questioning the meaning of what she experienced and who she became during that time.

Masterfully layering time and space, thought and sensation, Mary Gaitskill dazzles the reader with psychological insight and a mystical sense of the soul’s hurtling passage through the world. A novel unlike any other, Veronica is a tour de force about the fragility and mystery of human relationships, the failure of love, and love’s abiding power. It shines on every page with depth of feeling and formal beauty.]]> 240 Mary Gaitskill 0375421459 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.42 2005 Veronica
author: Mary Gaitskill
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/24
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]]> The Axeman's Carnival 62996820
Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have ended. ‘If it keeps me awake,� says Marnie’s husband Rob, a farmer, ‘I’ll have to wring its neck.� But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple’s future. Tama can speak, and his fame is growing. Outside, in the pines, his father warns him of the wickedness wrought by humans. Indoors, Marnie confides in him about her violent marriage. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds � and all of the precarity, darkness and hope within them � bleed into one another. Like a stock truck filled with live cargo, the story moves inexorably towards its dramatic conclusion: the annual Axeman’s Carnival.

Part trickster, part surrogate child, part witness, Tama the magpie is the star of this story. Though what he says aloud to humans is often nonsensical (and hilarious with it), the tale he tells us weaves a disturbingly human sense. The Axeman’s Carnival is Catherine Chidgey at her finest � comic, profound, poetic and true.]]> 350 Catherine Chidgey 1776920058 Cheryl 5 4.32 2022 The Axeman's Carnival
author: Catherine Chidgey
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/24
date added: 2025/03/24
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Cheryl 3 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/14
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]]> The Safekeep 199798201
A house is a precious thing...

It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation—leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.

Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is a brilliantly plotted and provocative debut novel you won’t soon forget.]]> 272 Yael van der Wouden 1668034344 Cheryl 0 to-read 4.05 2024 The Safekeep
author: Yael van der Wouden
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
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]]> Dirt Music 35306 One morning Fox is observed poaching by Georgie Jutland. Chance, or a kind of willed recklessness, has brought Georgie into the life and home of Jim Buckridge, the most prosperous fisherman in the area and a man who loathes poachers, Fox above all. But she's never fully settled into Jim's grand house on the water or into the inbred community with its history of violent secrets. After Georgie encounters Fox, her tentative hold on conventional life is severed. Neither of them would call it love, but they can't stay away from each other no matter how dangerous it is, and out on White Point it is very dangerous.

Set in the dramatic landscape of Western Australia, Dirt Music is a love story about people stifled by grief and regret; a novel about the odds of breaking with the past and about the lure of music. Dirt music, Fox tells Georgie, is "anything you can play on a verandah or porch, without electricity." Even in the wild, Luther cannot escape it. There is, he discovers, no silence in nature.

Ambitious, perfectly calibrated, Dirt Music resonates with suspense and supercharged emotion, and it confirms Tim Winton's status as the preeminent Australian novelist of his generation.

]]> 465 Tim Winton 0330490265 Cheryl 2 3.87 2001 Dirt Music
author: Tim Winton
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2001
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/02/24
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]]> Humankind: A Hopeful History 52879286 From the author of Utopia For Realists, a revolutionary argument that the innate goodness and cooperation of human beings has been the greatest factor in our success

If one basic principle has served as the bedrock of bestselling author Rutger Bregman's thinking, it is that every progressive idea -- whether it was the abolition of slavery, the advent of democracy, women's suffrage, or the ratification of marriage equality -- was once considered radical and dangerous by the mainstream opinion of its time. With Humankind, he brings that mentality to bear against one of our most entrenched ideas: namely, that human beings are by nature selfish and self-interested.

By providing a new historical perspective of the last 200,000 years of human history, Bregman sets out to prove that we are in fact evolutionarily wired for cooperation rather than competition, and that our instinct to trust each other has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens. Bregman systematically debunks our understanding of the Milgram electrical-shock experiment, the Zimbardo prison experiment, and the Kitty Genovese "bystander effect."

In place of these, he offers little-known true stories: the tale of twin brothers on opposing sides of apartheid in South Africa who came together with Nelson Mandela to create peace; a group of six shipwrecked children who survived for a year and a half on a deserted island by working together; a study done after World War II that found that as few as 15% of American soldiers were actually capable of firing at the enemy.

The ultimate goal of Humankind is to demonstrate that while neither capitalism nor communism has on its own been proven to be a workable social system, there is a third option: giving "citizens and professionals the means (left) to make their own choices (right)." Reorienting our thinking toward positive and high expectations of our fellow man, Bregman argues, will reap lasting success. Bregman presents this idea with his signature wit and frankness, once again making history, social science and economic theory accessible and enjoyable for lay readers.]]> 462 Rutger Bregman 0316418536 Cheryl 4 4.37 2019 Humankind: A Hopeful History
author: Rutger Bregman
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/10
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]]> Kataraina (Auē, #2) 220103824 In Kataraina, Kat and her whanau take over the telling. As one, they return to her childhood and the time when she first began to feel the greenness of the swamp in her veins - the swamp that holds her tears and the tears of her tipuna, the swamp on the land owned by Stu that has been growing since the girl shot the man.
Becky Manawatu's new novel is the much-awaited sequel to award-winning bestseller Aue and is unflinching in its portrayal of the destructive ways people love one another and the ancestral whenua on which they stand.]]> 284 Becky Manawatu 1067011307 Cheryl 4 4.02 2024 Kataraina (Auē, #2)
author: Becky Manawatu
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> Lola in the Mirror 167582092
'Mirror, mirror, on the grass, what's my future? What's my past?' A girl and her mother are on the lam. They've been running for sixteen years, from police and the monster they left in the kitchen with the knife in his throat. They've found themselves a home inside an orange 1987 Toyota HiAce van with four flat tyres parked in a scrapyard by the edge of the Brisbane River � just two of the 100,000 Australians sleeping rough every night. The girl has no name because names are dangerous when you're on the run. But the girl has a dream. Visions in black ink and living colour. A vision of a life as a groundbreaking artist of international acclaim. A life outside the grip of the Brisbane underworld drug queen 'Lady' Flora Box. A life of love with the boy in the brown suit who's waiting for her in the middle of the bridge that stretches across a flooding and deadly river. A life far beyond the bullet that has her name on it. And now that the storm clouds are rising, there's only one person who can help make her dreams come true. That person's name is Lola and she carries all the answers. But to find Lola, the girl with no name must first do one of the hardest things we can sometimes ever do. She must look in the mirror. A big, moving, blackly funny, violent, heartbreaking and beautiful novel of love, fate, life and death and all the things we see when we look in the mirror. All of the past, all of the present, and all of our possible futures. 'Mirror, mirror, please don't lie. Tell me who you are. Tell me who am I.']]> 512 Trent Dalton 146071332X Cheryl 3 4.37 2023 Lola in the Mirror
author: Trent Dalton
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/27
date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> Emma 6969 The newest edition is here. Another alternate cover can be found here.

Emma Woodhouse is one of Austen's most captivating and vivid characters. Beautiful, spoilt, vain and irrepressibly witty, Emma organizes the lives of the inhabitants of her sleepy little village and plays matchmaker with devastating effect.]]> 474 Jane Austen 0141439580 Cheryl 5 4.05 1815 Emma
author: Jane Austen
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1815
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/16
date added: 2025/01/16
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It's a classic for a reason and that reason is that it makes my brain nice and smooth.
]]> <![CDATA[Force of Nature (Aaron Falk, #2)]]> 34275222
Only four come out on the other side.

The hike through the rugged Giralang Ranges is meant to take the office colleagues out of their air-conditioned comfort zone and encourage teamwork and resilience. At least, that's what the corporate retreat website advertises.

Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk has a keen interest in the whereabouts of the missing hiker, Alice Russell. Because Alice knew secrets, about the company she worked for and the people she worked with.

The four returning women tell Falk a tale of fear, violence and fractured trust during their days in the remote Australian bushland. And as Falk delves into the disappearance of Alice, he begins to suspect some dangers ran far deeper than anyone knew.]]> 326 Jane Harper 1250105633 Cheryl 3 3.78 2017 Force of Nature (Aaron Falk, #2)
author: Jane Harper
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2022/08/22
date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> Intermezzo 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Cheryl 5 3.87 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> The Most Fun We Ever Had 41880044
When Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, they are blithely ignorant of all that's to come. By 2016, their four radically different daughters are each in a state of unrest: Wendy, widowed young, soothes herself with booze and younger men; Violet, a litigator-turned-stay-at-home-mom, battles anxiety and self-doubt when the darkest part of her past resurfaces; Liza, a neurotic and newly tenured professor, finds herself pregnant with a baby she's not sure she wants by a man she's not sure she loves; and Grace, the dawdling youngest daughter, begins living a lie that no one in her family even suspects. Above it all, the daughters share the lingering fear that they will never find a love quite like their parents'.

As the novel moves through the tumultuous year following the arrival of Jonah Bendt--given up by one of the daughters in a closed adoption fifteen years before--we are shown the rich and varied tapestry of the Sorensons' past: years marred by adolescence, infidelity, and resentment, but also the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile.]]> 532 Claire Lombardo 0385544251 Cheryl 1 3.88 2019 The Most Fun We Ever Had
author: Claire Lombardo
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2019
rating: 1
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
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To write a book this long, with so many pointless characters, and make every single one of them so unlikeable, is actually quite impressive. The least fun I've ever had.
]]> The Troop 17571466 358 Nick Cutter 1476717710 Cheryl 5 3.83 2014 The Troop
author: Nick Cutter
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/30
date added: 2024/11/30
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The most horrible and disturbing book I've ever read. I don't recommend it to anyone. Five stars.
]]> Our Wives Under the Sea 58659343
Moving through something that only resembles normal life, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had before might be gone. Though Leah is still there, Miri can feel the woman she loves slipping from her grasp.

Our Wives Under The Sea is the debut novel from Julia Armfield, the critically acclaimed author of Salt Slow. It’s a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep deep sea.]]> 240 Julia Armfield 152901722X Cheryl 0 to-read 3.75 2022 Our Wives Under the Sea
author: Julia Armfield
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/25
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]]> On the Beach 38180 On the Beach is a remarkably convincing portrait of how ordinary people might face the most unimaginable nightmare.]]> 296 Nevil Shute Cheryl 5 3.95 1957 On the Beach
author: Nevil Shute
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1957
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/23
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves:
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]]> The Eyes Are the Best Part 195703882 Crying in H-Mart meets My Sister, the Serial Killer in this feminist psychological horror about the making of a female serial killer from a Korean-American perspective.

Ji-won’s life tumbles into disarray in the wake of her appa’s extramarital affair and subsequent departure. Her mother, distraught. Her younger sister, hurt and confused. Her college freshman grades, failing. Her dreams, horrifying� yet enticing.

In them, Ji-won walks through bloody rooms full of eyes. Succulent blue eyes. Salivatingly blue eyes. Eyes the same shape and shade as George’s, who is Umma’s obnoxious new boyfriend. George has already overstayed his welcome in her family’s claustrophobic apartment. He brags about his puffed-up consulting job, ogles Asian waitresses while dining out, and acts condescending toward Ji-won and her sister as if he deserves all of Umma’s fawning adoration. No, George doesn’t deserve anything from her family. Ji-won will make sure of that.

For no matter how many victims accumulate around her campus or how many people she must deceive and manipulate, Ji-won’s hunger and her rage deserve to be sated.

A brilliantly inventive, subversive novel about a young woman unraveling, Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are the Best Part is a story of a family falling apart and trying to find their way back to each other, marking a bold new voice in horror that will leave readers mesmerized and craving more.]]> 278 Monika Kim 1645661237 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.81 2024 The Eyes Are the Best Part
author: Monika Kim
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/09
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]]> <![CDATA[Nights in the Gardens of Spain]]> 632265 304 Witi Ihimaera 0790004062 Cheryl 3 3.94 1995 Nights in the Gardens of Spain
author: Witi Ihimaera
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/27
date added: 2024/11/07
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]]> Last Days 15793201 531 Adam L.G. Nevill 1250018188 Cheryl 1 3.70 2012 Last Days
author: Adam L.G. Nevill
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2012
rating: 1
read at: 2024/11/06
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves:
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Had I realised this book was by the same author as The Reddening (a book so badly written I made a special trip to return it to the library the same day), I wouldn't have paid the hefty $9.45 NZD for it on Kindle. Once I had done so, it was a long slog to 92% at which point the writing became so offensively bad I just gave up. How many times does the randomly introduced character of the final part need to wink per page? I didn't stick around to find out.
]]> <![CDATA[On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous]]> 41880609 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born � a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam � and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.]]> 246 Ocean Vuong 0525562028 Cheryl 4 4.05 2019 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/06
date added: 2024/11/06
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]]> Infected (Infected, #1) 2331954
Working under the government’s shroud of secrecy, CIA operative Dew Phillips crisscrosses the country trying in vain to capture a live victim. With only decomposing corpses for clues, CDC epidemiologist Margaret Montoya races to analyze the science behind this deadly contagion. She discovers that these killers all have one thing in common � they’ve been contaminated by a bioengineered parasite, shaped by a complexity far beyond the limits of known science.

Meanwhile Perry Dawsey � a hulking former football star now resigned to life as a cubicle-bound desk jockey � awakens one morning to find several mysterious welts growing on his body. Soon Perry finds himself acting and thinking strangely, hearing voices . . . he is infected.

The fate of the human race may well depend on the bloody war Perry must wage with his own body, because the parasites want something from him, something that goes beyond mere murder.]]> 342 Scott Sigler 0307406105 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.83 2008 Infected (Infected, #1)
author: Scott Sigler
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Queen 199797559 The national bestselling author of #HorrorBookTok sensation The Troop returns with a heart-pounding novel of terror about a young woman searching for her missing friend and uncovering a shocking truth.

On a sunny morning in June, Margaret Carpenter wakes up to find a new iPhone on her doorstep. She switches it on to find a text from her best friend, Charity Atwater. The problem is, Charity’s been missing for over a month. Most people in town—even the police—think she’s dead.

Margaret and Charity have been lifelong friends. They share everything, know the most intimate details about one another…but Charity carries a secret that even she is unaware of. A secret engraved into her DNA helix. For Charity is also known Subject Six, the crown jewel of Project Athena—a clandestine and unorthodox gene manipulation experiment, the brainchild of tech titan Rudyard Crate. And when Charity’s gene sequencing actualizes during a traumatic event at a high school party, it sets in motion a chain of events that will end in tragedy, bloodshed, and death.

And now Charity wants Margaret to know her story—the real story. In a narrative that takes place over one feverish day, Margaret follows a series of increasingly dreadful breadcrumbs as she forges deeper into the mystery of her best friend—a person she never truly knew at all…]]> 384 Nick Cutter 1668020971 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.56 2024 The Queen
author: Nick Cutter
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/04
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]]> Northanger Abbey 50398 Northanger Abbey is often referred to as Jane Austen's "Gothic parody." Decrepit castles, locked rooms, mysterious chests, cryptic notes, and tyrannical fathers give the story an uncanny air, but one with a decidedly satirical twist.

The story's unlikely heroine is Catherine Morland, a remarkably innocent seventeen-year-old woman from a country parsonage. While spending a few weeks in Bath with a family friend, Catherine meets and falls in love with Henry Tilney, who invites her to visit his family estate, Northanger Abbey. Once there, Catherine, a great reader of Gothic thrillers, lets the shadowy atmosphere of the old mansion fill her mind with terrible suspicions. What is the mystery surrounding the death of Henry's mother? Is the family concealing a terrible secret within the elegant rooms of the Abbey? Can she trust Henry, or is he part of an evil conspiracy? Catherine finds dreadful portents in the most prosaic events, until Henry persuades her to see the peril in confusing life with art.

Executed with high-spirited gusto, Northanger Abbey is a lighthearted, yet unsentimental commentary on love and marriage.]]> 260 Jane Austen 1593082649 Cheryl 3 3.85 1817 Northanger Abbey
author: Jane Austen
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1817
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/17
date added: 2024/10/10
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]]> The Light Between Oceans 13158800 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

Australia, 1926. After four harrowing years fighting on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns home to take a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day's journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby's cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby.

Tom, whose records as a lighthouse keeper are meticulous and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel has taken the tiny baby to her breast. Against Tom's judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them.

M. L. Stedman's mesmerizing, beautifully written debut novel seduces us into accommodating Isabel's decision to keep this "gift from God." And we are swept into a story about extraordinarily compelling characters seeking to find their North Star in a world where there is no right answer, where justice for one person is another's tragic loss.]]> 362 M.L. Stedman 1451681739 Cheryl 4 4.02 2012 The Light Between Oceans
author: M.L. Stedman
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2022/09/25
date added: 2024/10/10
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]]> From Below 58830202 Hundreds of feet beneath the ocean's surface, a graveyard waits...

Years ago, the SS Arcadia vanished without a trace during a routine voyage. Though a strange, garbled emergency message was broadcast, neither the ship nor any of its crew could be found. Sixty years later, its wreck has finally been discovered more than three hundred miles from its intended course...a silent graveyard deep beneath the ocean's surface, eagerly waiting for the first sign of life.

Cove and her dive team have been granted permission to explore the Arcadia's rusting hull. Their purpose is straightforward: examine the wreck, film everything, and, if possible, uncover how and why the supposedly unsinkable ship vanished.

But the Arcadia has not yet had its fill of death, and something dark and hungry watches from below. With limited oxygen and the ship slowly closing in around them, Cove and her team will have to fight their way free of the unspeakable horror now desperate to claim them.

Because once they're trapped beneath the ocean's waves, there's no going back.]]> 469 Darcy Coates 1728220238 Cheryl 4 3.93 2022 From Below
author: Darcy Coates
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/10
date added: 2024/10/10
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]]> Before You Knew My Name 56331126
When she arrived in New York on her 18th birthday carrying nothing but $600 cash and a stolen camera, Alice Lee was looking for a fresh start. Now, just one month later, she is the city's latest Jane Doe, an unidentified murder victim.

Ruby Jones is also trying to start over; she travelled halfway around the world only to find herself lonelier than ever. Until she finds Alice's body by the Hudson River.

From this first, devastating encounter, the two women form an unbreakable bond. Alice is sure that Ruby is the key to solving the mystery of her life - and death. And Ruby - struggling to forget what she saw that morning - finds herself unable to let Alice go. Not until she is given the ending she deserves.

Before You Knew My Name doesn't ask whodunnit. Instead, this powerful, hopeful novel asks: Who was she? And what did she leave behind? The answers might surprise you.]]> 336 Jacqueline Bublitz 075158164X Cheryl 3 3.85 2021 Before You Knew My Name
author: Jacqueline Bublitz
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/09/29
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]]> Silver Nitrate 63249718 New York Times bestselling author of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau and Mexican Gothic comes a fabulous meld of Mexican horror movies and Nazi occultism: a dark thriller about the curse that haunts a legendary lost film--and awakens one woman's hidden powers.

Montserrat has always been overlooked. She’s a talented sound editor, but she’s left out of the boys� club running the film industry in �90s Mexico City. And she’s all but invisible to her best friend, Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, though she’s been in love with him since childhood.

Then Tristán discovers his new neighbor is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, and the legendary auteur claims he can change their lives—even if his tale of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into highly volatile silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. The magic film was never finished, which is why, Urueta swears, his career vanished overnight. He is cursed.

Now the director wants Montserrat and Tristán to help him shoot the missing scene and lift the curse . . . but Montserrat soon notices a dark presence following her, and Tristán begins seeing the ghost of his ex-girlfriend.

As they work together to unravel the mystery of the film and the obscure occultist who once roamed their city, Montserrat and Tristán may find that sorcerers and magic are not only the stuff of movies.]]> 323 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 0593355369 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.56 2023 Silver Nitrate
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/23
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]]> <![CDATA[A Sunny Place for Shady People]]> 203956643 A diabolical collection of stories featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, goblins, and the macabre, by “one of Latin America’s most exciting authors� (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)

On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed—all those birds were once women.

Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women—these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists.

Lyrical and hypnotic, heart-stopping and deeply moving, Enriquez’s stories never fail to enthrall, entertain, and leave us shaken. Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People showcases Enriquez’s unique blend of the literary and the horrific, and underscores why Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, calls her “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”]]> 257 Mariana Enríquez 0593733258 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.80 2024 A Sunny Place for Shady People
author: Mariana Enríquez
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/18
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]]> Stone Yard Devotional 168632462 A deeply moving novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be 'good', from the award-winning author of The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend.

A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place of her childhood, holing up in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro. She does not believe in God, doesn't know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident.

As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can't forget. Disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who left the community decades before to minister to deprived women in Thailand - then disappeared, presumed murdered. Finally, a troubling visitor to the monastery pulls the narrator further back into her past.

With each of these disturbing arrivals, the woman faces some deep questions. Can a person be truly good? What is forgiveness? Is loss of hope a moral failure? And can the business of grief ever really be finished? A meditative and deeply moving novel from one of Australia's most acclaimed and best loved writers.

"Wood joins the ranks of writers such as Nora Ephron, Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout." THE GUARDIAN UK]]> 320 Charlotte Wood Cheryl 0 to-read 3.73 2023 Stone Yard Devotional
author: Charlotte Wood
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/16
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]]> Orbital 123136728 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.56 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Haunting of Hill House 89717 182 Shirley Jackson 0143039989 Cheryl 4 3.85 1959 The Haunting of Hill House
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1959
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/15
date added: 2024/09/15
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]]> Scythe (Arc of a Scythe, #1) 28954189 Thou shalt kill.

A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery. Humanity has conquered all those things, and has even conquered death. Now scythes are the only ones who can end life—and they are commanded to do so, in order to keep the size of the population under control.

Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe—a role that neither wants. These teens must master the “art� of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own.

An alternate cover edition of ISBN: 9781442472426]]> 435 Neal Shusterman Cheryl 0 to-read 4.32 2016 Scythe (Arc of a Scythe, #1)
author: Neal Shusterman
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> Creation Lake 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.35 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> Juice 207627291
Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place � middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They’re exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they’ve seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work.

Problem is, they’re not alone.

So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism.]]> 529 Tim Winton 1035050838 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.95 2024 Juice
author: Tim Winton
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story]]> 204316857 The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, Mieczysław, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort inGörbersdorf, what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the surrounding highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone—or something—seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.]]> 320 Olga Tokarczuk 0593712943 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.66 2022 The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/14
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]]> FantasticLand 28695606
Presented as a fact-finding investigation and a series of first-person interviews, FantasticLand pieces together the grisly series of events. Park policy was that the mostly college-aged employees surrender their electronic devices to preserve the authenticity of the FantasticLand experience. Cut off from the world and left on their own, the teenagers soon form rival tribes who viciously compete for food, medicine, social dominance, and even human flesh. This new social network divides the ravaged dreamland into territories ruled by the Pirates, the ShopGirls, the Freaks, and the Mole People. If meticulously curated online personas can replace private identities, what takes over when those constructs are lost?

FantasticLand is a modern take on Lord of the Flies meets Battle Royale that probes the consequences of a social civilization built online.]]> 272 Mike Bockoven 1510709444 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.84 2016 FantasticLand
author: Mike Bockoven
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> Roadside Picnic 331256
First published in 1972, Roadside Picnic is still widely regarded as one of the greatest science fiction novels, despite the fact that it has been out of print in the United States for almost thirty years.]]> 145 Arkady Strugatsky 0575070536 Cheryl 4 4.16 1972 Roadside Picnic
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1972
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/02
date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> We Are All Completely Fine 20344877
Stan became a minor celebrity after being partially eaten by cannibals. Barbara is haunted by the messages carved upon her bones. Greta may or may not be a mass-murdering arsonist. And for some reason, Martin never takes off his sunglasses.

Unsurprisingly, no one believes their horrific tales until they are sought out by psychotherapist Dr. Jan Sayer. What happens when these likely-insane outcasts join a support group? Together they must discover which monsters they face are within and which are lurking in plain sight.
]]> 182 Daryl Gregory 1616961716 Cheryl 4 3.74 2014 We Are All Completely Fine
author: Daryl Gregory
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/24
date added: 2024/08/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Girls That Invest: Your Guide to Financial Independence through Shares and Stocks]]> 61324281 215 Simran Kaur� 111989378X Cheryl 5 4.52 2022 Girls That Invest: Your Guide to Financial Independence through Shares and Stocks
author: Simran Kaur�
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/22
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]]> Song of Solomon 11334 338 Toni Morrison 140003342X Cheryl 4 4.15 1977 Song of Solomon
author: Toni Morrison
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1977
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/18
date added: 2024/08/18
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]]> What's Eating Gilbert Grape 152662 319 Peter Hedges 0671038540 Cheryl 3 4.10 1991 What's Eating Gilbert Grape
author: Peter Hedges
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/01
date added: 2024/08/01
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[My Year of Rest and Relaxation]]> 44279110
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.]]> 289 Ottessa Moshfegh 0525522131 Cheryl 5 3.62 2018 My Year of Rest and Relaxation
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/26
date added: 2024/07/26
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]]> <![CDATA[We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves]]> 16176440
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, Lowell, Rosemary and her unusual sister Fern. Rosemary begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “Until Fern’s expulsion...,� Rosemary says, “she was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half and I loved her.� As a child, Rosemary never stopped talking. Then, something happened, and Rosemary wrapped herself in silence.

In We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler weaves her most accomplished work to date—a tale of loving but fallible people whose well-intentioned actions lead to heartbreaking consequences.]]> 310 Karen Joy Fowler 0399162097 Cheryl 4 3.70 2013 We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
author: Karen Joy Fowler
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/24
date added: 2024/07/24
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]]> I Know This Much Is True 227711
One of the most acclaimed novels of our time, Wally Lamb's I Know This Much Is True is a story of alienation and connection, devastation and renewal, at once joyous, heartbreaking, poignant, mystical, and powerfully, profoundly human.]]> 897 Wally Lamb 0060987561 Cheryl 3 4.21 1998 I Know This Much Is True
author: Wally Lamb
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/08
date added: 2024/07/08
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]]> The Long Walk 9014 370 Richard Bachman 0451196716 Cheryl 2 4.11 1978 The Long Walk
author: Richard Bachman
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1978
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2024/07/04
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Murder on the Orient Express (Hercule Poirot, #10)]]> 853510
One of the passengers is none other than detective Hercule Poirot. On vacation.

Isolated and with a killer on board, Poirot must identify the murderer—in case he or she decides to strike again.]]> 274 Agatha Christie 0007119313 Cheryl 0 to-read 4.22 1934 Murder on the Orient Express (Hercule Poirot, #10)
author: Agatha Christie
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1934
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> Our Share of Night 61111034
A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.

For Gaspar, the son, this maniacal cult is his destiny. As the Order tries to pull him into their evil, he and his father take flight, attempting to outrun a powerful clan that will do anything to ensure its own survival. But how far will Gaspar’s father go to protect his child? And can anyone escape their fate?

Moving back and forth in time, from London in the swinging 1960s to the brutal years of Argentina’s military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a novel like no other: a family story, a ghost story, a story of the occult and the supernatural, a book about the complexities of love and longing with queer subplots and themes. This is the masterwork of one of Latin America’s most original novelists, “a mesmerizing writer,� says Dave Eggers, “who demands to be read.”]]> 588 Mariana Enríquez 0451495144 Cheryl 4 4.08 2019 Our Share of Night
author: Mariana Enríquez
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/03
date added: 2024/06/03
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]]> <![CDATA[James Acaster's Guide to Quitting Social Media]]> 60389766
When James quit all forms of social media in 2019 he felt like he'd been born anew, but he was worried he'd suffer withdrawal and get lured back online to compete in a never ending popularity contest with only one possible winner (f*cking Zuckerberg). He knew that in order to stay clean he'd have to replace everything social media used to give him with three-dimensional, real-life activities.

And so it was that James found ways to anonymously bully strangers, see photos of everyone's dogs, get invited to as many parties as possible, immediately know about all celebrity deaths, get public figures fired, argue with everybody about everything, and so much more without even owning a phone (he painted over the screen of his old one to stop himself looking at Instagram).

His life is amazing and yours could be too if you buy JAMES ACASTER'S GUIDE TO QUITTING SOCIAL MEDIA, BEING THE BEST YOU YOU CAN BE AND SAVING YOURSELF FROM LONELINESS VOL. 1.

You will also need to do everything the book tells you to. Including helping us promote the book by tweeting about it.]]> 304 James Acaster 1472288564 Cheryl 2 3.36 2022 James Acaster's Guide to Quitting Social Media
author: James Acaster
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2024/05/03
date added: 2024/05/03
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]]> Demon Copperhead 60194162 "Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver 0063251922 Cheryl 5 4.46 2022 Demon Copperhead
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/03
date added: 2024/05/03
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review:

]]> Dune (Dune, #1) 44767458
When House Atreides is betrayed, the destruction of Paul’s family will set the boy on a journey toward a destiny greater than he could ever have imagined. And as he evolves into the mysterious man known as Muad’Dib, he will bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream.]]> 658 Frank Herbert 059309932X Cheryl 3 4.33 1965 Dune (Dune, #1)
author: Frank Herbert
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1965
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/12
date added: 2024/04/12
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review:

]]> Notes on an Execution 57773248
Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood. He hoped it wouldn’t end like this, not for him.

Through a kaleidoscope of women—a mother, a sister, a homicide detective—we learn the story of Ansel’s life. We meet his mother, Lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel’s wife, inseparable since birth, forced to watch helplessly as her sister’s relationship threatens to devour them all; and finally, Saffy, the homicide detective hot on his trail, who has devoted herself to bringing bad men to justice but struggles to see her own life clearly. As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the rippling fissures that such destruction inevitably leaves in its wake.

Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy, Notes on an Execution presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice and our cultural obsession with crime stories, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men.]]> 306 Danya Kukafka 0063052733 Cheryl 3 4.04 2022 Notes on an Execution
author: Danya Kukafka
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/27
date added: 2024/03/27
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]]> Me Talk Pretty One Day 4137 272 David Sedaris 0349113912 Cheryl 0 to-read 4.01 2000 Me Talk Pretty One Day
author: David Sedaris
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West]]> 394535 Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.]]> 351 Cormac McCarthy Cheryl 0 to-read 4.18 1985 Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Weather 37506228
As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience—but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks... And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in—funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.]]> 208 Jenny Offill 0385351100 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.57 2020 Weather
author: Jenny Offill
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Talented Mr. Ripley (Ripley, #1)]]> 2247142
It’s here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.� Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game.

“Sinister and strangely alluring,� (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving—and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche—as ever.]]> 271 Patricia Highsmith Cheryl 0 to-read 3.96 1955 The Talented Mr. Ripley (Ripley, #1)
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1955
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/20
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]]> How High We Go in the Dark 57850265
Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects-a pig-develops human speech; a man who, after recovering from his own coma, plans a block party for his neighbours who have also woken up to find that they alone have survived their families; and a widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.

From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead, How High We Go in the Dark follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world. This is a story of unshakable hope that crosses literary lines to give us a world rebuilding itself through an endless capacity for love, resilience and reinvention. Wonderful and disquieting, dreamlike and all too possible.]]> 293 Sequoia Nagamatsu 0063072645 Cheryl 5 3.81 2022 How High We Go in the Dark
author: Sequoia Nagamatsu
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/20
date added: 2024/03/20
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I dunno man this one just really got me good.
]]> One Day 6280118
So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that?

And every year that follows?
--back cover]]> 435 David Nicholls 0340896965 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.86 2009 One Day
author: David Nicholls
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/07
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]]> Never Let Me Go 6334
Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.

Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.]]> 288 Kazuo Ishiguro 1400078776 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.85 2005 Never Let Me Go
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/13
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]]> The Poisonwood Bible 7244 The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.]]> 546 Barbara Kingsolver 0060786507 Cheryl 0 to-read 4.10 1998 The Poisonwood Bible
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/12
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]]> The Shepherd's Hut 36742671
In The Shepherd's Hut, Winton crafts the story of Jaxie Clackton, a brutalized rural youth who flees from the scene of his father's violent death and strikes out for the vast wilds of Western Australia. All he carries with him is a rifle and a waterjug. All he wants is peace and freedom. But surviving in the harsh saltlands alone is a savage business. And once he discovers he's not alone out there, all Jaxie's plans go awry. He meets a fellow exile, the ruined priest Fintan MacGillis, a man he's never certain he can trust, but on whom his life will soon depend.

The Shepherd's Hut is a thrilling tale of unlikely friendship and yearning, at once brutal and lyrical, from one of our finest storytellers.]]> 267 Tim Winton 0143786113 Cheryl 0 to-read 4.01 2018 The Shepherd's Hut
author: Tim Winton
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/12
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]]> The Goldfinch 17333223
Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love - and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettably vivid characters and thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph - a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate.]]> 771 Donna Tartt 0316055433 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.94 2013 The Goldfinch
author: Donna Tartt
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/12
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]]> The Go-Between 258079 The Go-Between is edited with an introduction and notes by Douglas Brooks-Davies in Penguin Modern Classics.

'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'

When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The haunting story of a young boy's awakening into the secrets of the adult world, The Go-Between is also an unforgettable evocation of the boundaries of Edwardian society.

Leslie Poles Hartley (1895-1972) was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, and educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford. For more than thirty years from 1923 he was an indefatigable fiction reviewer for periodicals including the Spectator and Saturday Review. His first book, Night Fears (1924) was a collection of short stories; but it was not until the publication of Eustace and Hilda (1947), which won the James Tait Black prize, that Hartley gained widespread recognition as an author. His other novels include The Go-Between (1953), which was adapted into an internationally-successful film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, and The Hireling (1957), the film version of which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

If you enjoyed The Go-Between, you might like Barry Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'Magical and disturbing'
Independent

'On a first reading, it is a beautifully wrought description of a small boy's loss of innocence long ago. But, visited a second time, the knowledge of approaching, unavoidable tragedy makes it far more poignant and painful'
Express]]> 326 L.P. Hartley 0940322994 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.99 1953 The Go-Between
author: L.P. Hartley
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1953
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/12
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]]> The Secret History 29044 559 Donna Tartt 1400031702 Cheryl 5 4.17 1992 The Secret History
author: Donna Tartt
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/12
date added: 2024/02/12
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]]> The Bone People 460635 The powerful, visionary, Booker Award–winning novel about the complicated relationships between three outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage.

“This book is just amazingly, wondrously great.� —Alice Walker

In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes: part Maori, part European, asexual and aromantic, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family.

One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor—a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession.

As Kerewin succumbs to Simon’s feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality.

Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where indigenous and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.

Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.]]> 450 Keri Hulme 0140089225 Cheryl 0 to-read 4.05 1984 The Bone People
author: Keri Hulme
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #1)]]> 44421460 What would you change if you could go back in time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?]]> 213 Toshikazu Kawaguchi 1529029589 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.66 2015 Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #1)
author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/28
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]]> The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 11275
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.]]> 607 Haruki Murakami 0965341984 Cheryl 5 4.16 1994 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/25
date added: 2024/01/25
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]]> Little Fires Everywhere 34273236
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned � from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren � an enigmatic artist and single mother � who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother–daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town � and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at an unexpected and devastating cost . . .]]> 338 Celeste Ng 0735224293 Cheryl 4 4.05 2017 Little Fires Everywhere
author: Celeste Ng
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/09
date added: 2024/01/09
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]]> Crying in H Mart 54814676
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band � and meeting the man who would become her husband � her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.

It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.]]> 243 Michelle Zauner 0525657746 Cheryl 3 4.25 2021 Crying in H Mart
author: Michelle Zauner
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/28
date added: 2023/12/28
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]]> The Idiot 30962053 A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.

The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.

At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.]]> 423 Elif Batuman 1594205612 Cheryl 5 3.67 2017 The Idiot
author: Elif Batuman
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/20
date added: 2023/12/20
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]]> Perfect Sound Whatever 44096745 The hilarious and heartwarming new memoir from James Acaster: cult comedian, bestselling author, undercover cop, receiver of cabbages.

January, 2017.
James Acaster wakes hungover and alone in New York, his girlfriend having just left him. Thinking this is his rock bottom, little does James know that by the end of the year he will have befouled himself in a Los Angeles steakhouse and disrespected a pensioner on television.

Luckily, there is one thing he can rely on for comfort � music. In true Acaster fashion, this ends up with a completely unnecessary mission: to buy as much music as he can released in 2016, the year before everything went wrong (for James, at least). Some albums are life-changing masterpieces, others are ‘Howdilly Doodilly� by Okilly Dokilly, a metalcore album devoted to The Simpsons character Ned Flanders. But all of them play a part in the year that James gets his life back on track.

In PERFECT SOUND WHATEVER, James takes us through the music of 2016, the bullshit of 2017, and how the beauty of one defeated the ugliness of the other. He will also reveal how he stole a cookie from Clint Eastwood and attempted to complete his musical odyssey by reforming one of Kettering’s most overlooked bands.]]> 304 James Acaster 1472260325 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.85 2019 Perfect Sound Whatever
author: James Acaster
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> His Favourite Graves 176968281 Desperate for reward money � and to rescue his marriage � an embattled sheriff takes incalculable risks to find a missing boy. An edge-of-your-seat, twisted and twisty thriller from New Zealand's King of Crime.

Acacia Pines, small town USA. Sheriff Cohen's life is falling apart � his father accidentally burned down the retirement home, his wife has moved out, and his son is bullying other kids at school.

When high-school student, Lucas Connor, is abducted, Cohen sees a chance to get his life back on track � to win back his wife and scoop the reward money offered for Lucas's safe return.

But as the body count rises, it becomes clear that Logan's going to have to make the kind of decision from which there's no coming back ... a decision with deadly consequences...

A furiously paced, edge-of-your-seat thriller exposing the dark underbelly of small-town life, His Favourite Graves is also a twisted and twisty story of father-and-son relationships, and the one last gamble of a desperate man to save everything...]]> 276 Paul Cleave Cheryl 0 to-read 4.17 2023 His Favourite Graves
author: Paul Cleave
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/12
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]]> Death Valley 91239751
Out on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant.]]> 240 Melissa Broder 1668024845 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.46 2023 Death Valley
author: Melissa Broder
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Maniac 75665931 From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times� Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.

The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.

A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.]]> 368 Benjamín Labatut 0593654471 Cheryl 0 to-read 4.33 2023 The Maniac
author: Benjamín Labatut
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/12
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]]> <![CDATA[The Last House on Needless Street]]> 54621094
All these things are true. And yet they are all lies...

You think you know what's inside the last house on Needless Street. You think you've read this story before. That's where you're wrong.

In the dark forest at the end of Needless Street, lies something buried. But it's not what you think...]]> 337 Catriona Ward 1788166167 Cheryl 4 3.82 2021 The Last House on Needless Street
author: Catriona Ward
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/06
date added: 2023/12/06
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]]> American Dirt 45046527
Lydia lives in Acapulco. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while cracks are beginning to show in Acapulco because of the cartels, Lydia’s life is, by and large, fairly comfortable. But after her husband’s tell-all profile of the newest drug lord is published, none of their lives will ever be the same.

Forced to flee, Lydia and Luca find themselves joining the countless people trying to reach the United States. Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to?]]> 459 Jeanine Cummins Cheryl 4 4.32 2020 American Dirt
author: Jeanine Cummins
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/05
date added: 2023/12/02
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]]> Wilder Girls 42505366
It started slow. First the teachers died one by one. Then it began to infect the students, turning their bodies strange and foreign. Now, cut off from the rest of the world and left to fend for themselves on their island home, the girls don't dare wander outside the school's fence, where the Tox has made the woods wild and dangerous. They wait for the cure they were promised as the Tox seeps into everything.

But when Byatt goes missing, Hetty will do anything to find her, even if it means breaking quarantine and braving the horrors that lie beyond the fence. And when she does, Hetty learns that there's more to their story, to their life at Raxter, than she could have ever thought true.]]> 357 Rory Power 0525645586 Cheryl 4 3.46 2019 Wilder Girls
author: Rory Power
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/28
date added: 2023/11/28
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]]> Maurice 3103
Forster understood that his homage to same-sex love, if published when he completed it in 1914, would probably end his career. Thus, Maurice languished in a drawer for fifty-seven years, the author requesting it be published only after his death (along with his stories about homosexuality later collected in The Life to Come).

Since its release in 1971, Maurice has been widely read and praised. It has been, and continues to be, adapted for major stage productions, including the 1987 Oscar-nominated film adaptation starring Hugh Grant and James Wilby.]]> 256 E.M. Forster 0393310329 Cheryl 0 to-read 4.07 1971 Maurice
author: E.M. Forster
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/26
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]]> The Line of Beauty 139087
As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends.

Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this U.K. bestseller is a major work by one of our finest writers.]]> 438 Alan Hollinghurst 0739464469 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.76 2004 The Line of Beauty
author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> Breath 2176735 Breath is an extraordinary evocation of an adolescence spent resisting complacency, testing one’s limits against nature, finding like-minded souls, and discovering just how far one breath will take you. It’s a story of extremes—extreme sports and extreme emotions.

On the wild, lonely coast of Western Australia, two thrillseeking and barely adolescent boys fall into the enigmatic thrall of veteran big-wave surfer Sando. Together they form an odd but elite trio. The grown man initiates the boys into a kind of Spartan ethos, a regimen of risk and challenge, where they test themselves in storm swells on remote and shark-infested reefs, pushing each other to the edges of endurance, courage, and sanity. But where is all this heading? Why is their mentor’s past such forbidden territory? And what can explain his American wife’s peculiar behavior? Venturing beyond all limits—in relationships, in physical challenge, and in sexual behavior—there is a point where oblivion is the only outcome. Full of Winton’s lyrical genius for conveying physical sensation, Breath is a rich and atmospheric coming-of-age tale from one of world literature’s finest storytellers.]]> 218 Tim Winton 0374116342 Cheryl 5 3.90 2008 Breath
author: Tim Winton
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/11/17
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]]> The Ruins 21726 336 Scott Smith 1400043875 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.67 2006 The Ruins
author: Scott Smith
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> Year of Wonders 4965
Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition.

As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love.

As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders."

Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. ]]> 304 Geraldine Brooks 0142001430 Cheryl 5 4.00 2001 Year of Wonders
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/11
date added: 2023/11/11
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]]> The Only Good Indians 52180399 The creeping horror of Paul Tremblay meets Tommy Orange’s There There in a dark novel of revenge, cultural identity, and the cost of breaking from tradition in this latest novel from the Jordan Peele of horror literature, Stephen Graham Jones.

Seamlessly blending classic horror and a dramatic narrative with sharp social commentary, The Only Good Indians follows four American Indian men after a disturbing event from their youth puts them in a desperate struggle for their lives. Tracked by an entity bent on revenge, these childhood friends are helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way.]]> 305 Stephen Graham Jones 1982136456 Cheryl 4 3.68 2020 The Only Good Indians
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/04
date added: 2023/11/04
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]]> <![CDATA[The Committed (The Sympathizer, #2)]]> 52260627
Both literary thriller and brilliant novel of ideas, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen’s position in the firmament of American letters]]> 345 Viet Thanh Nguyen 0802157068 Cheryl 4 3.94 2021 The Committed (The Sympathizer, #2)
author: Viet Thanh Nguyen
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/25
date added: 2023/10/25
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]]> The People in the Trees 16126596 369 Hanya Yanagihara 0385536771 Cheryl 5 3.72 2013 The People in the Trees
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/05
date added: 2023/09/05
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]]> Mister Magic 63331415 Who is Mister Magic? Former child stars reunite to uncover the tragedy that ended their show—and discover the secret of its enigmatic host—in this dark supernatural thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hide.

Thirty years after a tragic accident shut down production of the classic children’s program Mister Magic, the five surviving cast members have done their best to move on. But just as generations of cultishly devoted fans still cling to the lessons they learned from the show, the cast, known as the Circle of Friends, have spent their lives searching for the happiness they felt while they were on it. The friendship. The feeling of belonging. And the protection of Mister Magic.

But with no surviving video of the show, no evidence of who directed or produced it, and no records of who—or what—the beloved host actually was, memories are all the former Circle of Friends has.

Then a twist of fate brings the castmates back together at the remote desert filming compound that feels like it’s been waiting for them all this time. Even though they haven’t seen each other for years, they understand one another better than anyone has since.

After all, they’re the only ones who hold the secret of that circle, the mystery of the magic man in his infinitely black cape, and, maybe, the answers to what really happened on that deadly last day. But as the Circle of Friends reclaim parts of their past, they begin to wonder: Are they here by choice, or have they been lured into a trap?

Because magic never forgets the taste of your friendship. . . .]]> 295 Kiersten White 0593359267 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.55 2023 Mister Magic
author: Kiersten White
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> To Paradise 57739876 From the author of the classic A Little Life, a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, about lovers, family, loss and the elusive promise of utopia.

In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist’s damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him—and solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearances.

These three sections are joined in an enthralling and ingenious symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one another: A townhouse in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village; illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; the weak and the strong; race; the definition of family, and of nationhood; the dangerous righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries; the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it can’t exist. What unites not just the characters, but these Americas, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us human: Fear. Love. Shame. Need. Loneliness.

To Paradise is a fin de siècle novel of marvellous literary effect, but above all it is a work of emotional genius. The great power of this remarkable novel is driven by Yanagihara’s understanding of the aching desire to protect those we love � partners, lovers, children, friends, family and even our fellow citizens � and the pain that ensues when we cannot.]]> 720 Hanya Yanagihara 0385547935 Cheryl 5 3.74 2022 To Paradise
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/09
date added: 2023/08/09
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]]> The Essex Serpent 32075861
Moving between Essex and London, myth and modernity, Cora Seaborne's spirited search for the Essex Serpent encourages all around her to test their allegiance to faith or reason in an age of rapid scientific advancement. At the same time, the novel explores the boundaries of love and friendship and the allegiances that we have to one another. The depth of feeling that the inhabitants of Aldwinter share are matched by their city counterparts as they strive to find the courage to express and understand their deepest desires, and strongest fears.]]> 422 Sarah Perry 0062666371 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.49 2016 The Essex Serpent
author: Sarah Perry
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence]]> 58772732 Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle's Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence--plant, animal, human, artificial--and how they transform our understanding of humans' place in the cosmos.

What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans, or shared with other beings--beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in "artificial" intelligence. But as it approaches, it also gets weirder: rather than a friend or helpmate, AI increasingly appears as something stranger than we ever imagined, an alien invention that threatens to decenter and supplant us.

At the same time, we're only just becoming aware of the other intelligences which have been with us all along, even if we've failed to recognize or acknowledge them. These others--the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us are slowly revealing their complexity, agency, and knowledge, just as the technologies we've built to sustain ourselves are threatening to cause their extinction, and ours. What can we learn from them, and how can we change ourselves, our technologies, our societies, and our politics, to live better and more equitably with one another and the non-human world?

Artist and maverick thinker James Bridle drawn on biology and physics, computation, literature, art, and philosophy, to answer these unsettling questions. Startling and bold, Ways of Being explores the fascinating, strange and multitudinous forms of knowing, doing, and being which are becoming evident in the present, and which are essential for our survival.

Includes illustrations]]> 384 James Bridle 0374601119 Cheryl 0 to-read 4.17 2022 Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
author: James Bridle
name: Cheryl
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Red Team Blues (Martin Hench, #1)]]> 60784417
Martin Hench is 67 years old, single, and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He lives and roams California in a very comfortable fully-furnished touring bus, The Unsalted Hash, that he bought years ago from a fading rock star. He knows his way around good food and fine drink. He likes intelligent women, and they like him back often enough.

Martin is a―contain your excitement―self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He’s as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he’s a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike. He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. He’s not famous, except to the people who matter. He’s made some pretty powerful people happy in his time, and he’s been paid pretty well. It’s been a good life.

Now he’s been roped into a job that’s more dangerous than anything he’s ever agreed to before―and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive.]]> 213 Cory Doctorow 1250865840 Cheryl 0 to-read 3.77 2023 Red Team Blues (Martin Hench, #1)
author: Cory Doctorow
name: Cheryl
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/09
shelves: to-read
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]]>