Sue's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 29 Apr 2025 21:04:07 -0700 60 Sue's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Liar 218702995 Daily Mail, Ones to Watch'The answer is everyone! So many secrets and lies and twists and revelations that I was not expecting and was completely blown away. This book was impossible to put down �' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐�

'Wow!!! Just wow! This is the best book from Louise Jensen yet!' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐�

* * * *

The Abbotts� new lodger Luke hasn’t told them much about himself, but they can’t expect to know everything about a stranger who’s just moved in.

But Luke keeps asking about their family photos and looking through their things. Why does he want to know everything about them? And why does daughter Jen think someone is watching her?

Then, suddenly, Mum Mel texts the family to say she needs a break. But Mel has never gone away alone before. And now it’s been days, and no one has heard from her.

The Abbotts� house is full of secrets.

They say people never tell the whole truth.

They’re right.

* * * *

Praise for Louise

‘Louise Jensen is the master of suspense � Taut, atmospheric and utterly compulsive, it takes one family’s struggle to survive in desperate times and spins it into a gripping whodunit' Kia Abdullah

‘The term page-turner was made for books like this. Intricate plotting, incredible pace, and a wonderful weaving of past and present� Andrea Mara

‘I absolutely whipped through it. I loved how the characters were relatable and sympathetic � Louise has produced another sure-fire hit that has it all.� J. L. Blackhurst

‘A galloping pulse-pounder� Heat

‘A compelling page-turner� Bella

‘Emotionally gripping story� Woman ]]> 347 Louise Jensen 0008508607 Sue 0 currently-reading 4.24 The Liar
author: Louise Jensen
name: Sue
average rating: 4.24
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> All the Broken Places 61168459 The sequel to the phenomenal bestseller, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, this is John Boyne's latest novel for adults.

1946. Three years after a cataclysmic event which tore their lives apart, a mother and daughter flee Poland for Paris, shame, and fear at their heels, not knowing how hard it is to escape your past.

Nearly eighty years later, Gretel Fernsby lives a life that is a far cry from her traumatic childhood. When a couple moves into the flat below her in her London mansion block, it should be nothing more than a momentary inconvenience. However, the appearance of their nine-year-old son Henry brings back memories she would rather forget.

Faced with a choice between her own safety and his, Gretel is taken back to a similar crossroads she encountered long ago. Back then, her complicity dishonoured her life, but to interfere now could risk revealing the secrets she has spent a lifetime protecting.]]> 400 John Boyne 0593653076 Sue 5 historical-novels, holocaust 4.61 2022 All the Broken Places
author: John Boyne
name: Sue
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: historical-novels, holocaust
review:
Guilt, guilt, guilt that never ends.
]]> What Maisie Knew 392452 What Maisie Knew is a subtle, intricate yet devastating portrayal of an innocent adrift in a corrupt society.]]> 275 Henry James 0140432485 Sue 0 currently-reading 3.42 1897 What Maisie Knew
author: Henry James
name: Sue
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1897
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Impossible Thing 220876042 From the exceptionally original mind of CWA Gold Dagger Award winner and Booker longlisted author Belinda Bauer comes this sweeping tale of obsession, greed, ambition, and a crime that has remained unsolved for a hundred years.

How do you find something that doesn’t exist?

1926. On the cliffs of Yorkshire, men are lowered on ropes to steal the eggs of the sea birds who nest there. The most beautiful are sold for large sums. A small girl—penniless and neglected by her family—retrieves one such treasure. Its discovery will forever alter the course of her life.

A century later. In a remote cottage in Wales, Patrick Fort finds his friend, Nick, and his mother tied up and robbed. The only thing missing: a carved case containing an incredible scarlet egg. Doggedly attempting to retrieve it, Patrick and Nick discover the cruel world of egg trafficking, and soon find themselves on the trail of a priceless collection of eggs lost to history. Until now.

A taut, wonderfully imagined novel brimming with skullduggery at every turn, The Impossible Thing is a blazing testament to Belinda Bauer’s status as one of our greatest living crime writers.]]> Belinda Bauer 0802164420 Sue 2 4.04 The Impossible Thing
author: Belinda Bauer
name: Sue
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves:
review:
I thought I was going to love this but I just couldn’t stay interested in the story.
]]> The Antidote 214539261 NATIONAL BESTSELLER � THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE•FromPulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestsellingauthor of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 from Lit Hub, Marie Claire, TIME, Vulture, Esquire, People, The Chicago Review of Books, and BookPage

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch,� whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples� memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.]]> 433 Karen Russell 0593802268 Sue 3 4.05 2025 The Antidote
author: Karen Russell
name: Sue
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/09
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves:
review:
Not for me. I couldn’t connect to any of the characters or anything that happened.
]]> Flesh 214152261 From Booker Prize finalist David Szalay, a propulsive, hypnotic novel, about a man whose future is derailed by a series of events that he is unable to control.

Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbor—a married woman close to his mother’s age, whom he begrudgingly helps with errands—as his only companion. But as these periodical encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, his life soon spirals out of control, ending in a violent accident that leaves a man dead.

What follows is a rocky trajectory that sees István emigrate from Hungary to London, where he moves from job to job before finding steady work as a driver for London’s billionaire class. At each juncture, his life is affected by the goodwill or self-interest of strangers. Through it all, István is a calm, detached observer of his own life, and through his eyes we experience a tragic twist on an immigrant “success story,� brightened by moments of sensitivity, softness, and Szalay’s keen observation.

Fast-paced and immersive, Flesh reveals István’s life through intimate moments, with lovers, employers, and family members, charted over the course of decades. As the story unfolds, the tension between what is seen and unseen, what can and cannot be said, hurtles forward until finally—with everything at stake—sudden tragedy again throws life as István knows it in jeopardy. Spare and penetrating, Flesh traces the imperceptible but indelible contours of unresolved trauma and its aftermath amid the precarity and violence of an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight, unyielding pathos, and startling humanity.]]> 368 David Szalay 198212279X Sue 0 to-read 3.91 2025 Flesh
author: David Szalay
name: Sue
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Dream Count 219521090 A publishing event ten years in the making�a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists�the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until � betrayed and brokenhearted � she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America � but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 416 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 059380273X Sue 3 No. Just not for me 3.93 2025 Dream Count
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Sue
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves:
review:
No. Just not for me
]]> Casualties of Truth 215534511 From the author of Book of the Little Axe, nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the critically acclaimed 'Til the Well Runs Dry, a riveting literary novel with the sharp edges of a thriller about the abuses of history and the costs of revenge, set between Washington, D.C., and Johannesburg, South Africa

Prudence Wright seems to have it a loving husband, Davis; a spacious home in Washington, D.C.; and the former glories of a successful career at McKinsey, which now enables her to dedicate her days to her autistic son, Roland. When she and Davis head out for dinner with one of Davis’s new colleagues on a stormy summer evening filled with startling and unwelcome interruptions, Prudence has little reason to think that certain details of her history might arise sometime between cocktails and the appetizer course.

Yet when Davis’s colleague turns out to be Matshediso, a man from Prudence’s past, she is transported back to the formative months she spent as a law student in South Africa in 1996. As an intern at a Johannesburg law firm, Prudence attended sessions of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings that uncovered the many horrors and human rights abuses of the Apartheid state, and which fundamentally shaped her sense of righteousness and justice. Prudence experienced personal horrors in South Africa as well, long hidden and now at risk of coming to light. When Matshediso finally reveals the real reason behind his sudden reappearance, he will force Prudence to examine her most deeply held beliefs and to excavate inner reserves of resilience and strength.

Lauren Francis-Sharma’s previous two novels have established her as a deft chronicler of history and its intersections with flawed humans struggling to find peace in unjust circumstances. With keen insight and gripping tension, Casualties of Truth explosively mines questions of whether we are ever truly able to remove the stains of our past and how we may attempt to reconcile with unquestionable wrongs.]]> 267 Lauren Francis-Sharma 0802163793 Sue 4 4.21 2025 Casualties of Truth
author: Lauren Francis-Sharma
name: Sue
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Decameron: A Norton Critical Edition (First Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)]]> 27803142 This volume presents fifty-five stories, newly translated, of the hundred novelle that comprise Boccaccio’s masterpiece.


Winner of the 2014 PEN USA Literary Award for Translation



This Norton Critical Edition includes:

· Fifty-five judiciously chosen stories from Wayne A. Rebhorn’s translation of The Decameron.

· Introductory materials and explanatory footnotes by Wayne A. Rebhorn, along with three maps.

· Biographical works by Filippo Villani and Ludovico Dolce along with literary studies by Francesco Petrarca, Andreas Capellanus, and Boccaccio.

· Eleven critical essays, including those by Giuseppe Mazzotta, Millicent Marcus, Teodolinda Barolini, Susanne L. Wofford, Luciano Rossi, and Richard Kuhns.

· A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography.]]> 551 Giovanni Boccaccio 0393523004 Sue 5 4.20 1349 The Decameron: A Norton Critical Edition (First Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)
author: Giovanni Boccaccio
name: Sue
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1349
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves:
review:

]]> The Note 211400171 A vacation in the Hamptons goes terribly wrong for three friends with a complicated history.

“I absolutely loved The Note. Trust no one in this irresistible page-turner.� —Ashley Elston, #1 New York Times best-selling author of First Lie Wins

It was meant to be a harmless prank.

Growing up, May Hanover was a good girl, always. Well-behaved, top of her class, a compulsive rule-follower. Raised by a first-generation Chinese single mother with high expectations, May didn’t have room to slip up, let alone fail. Her friends didn’t call her the Little Sheriff for nothing.

But even good girls have secrets. And regrets. When it comes to her friendship with Lauren and Kelsey, she's had her fair share of both. Their bond—forged when May was just twelve years old—has withstood a tragic accident, individual scandals, heartbreak and loss. Now the three friends have reunited for the first time in years for a few days of sun and fun in the Hamptons. But a chance encounter with a pair of strangers leads to a drunken prank that goes horribly awry.

When she finds herself at the center of an urgent police investigation, May begins to wonder whether Lauren and Kelsey are keeping secrets from her, testing the limits of her loyalty to lifelong friends.

What had they gone and done?

The Note is a page-turner of the highest orderfrom one of our greatest contemporary suspense writers.]]> 450 Alafair Burke 0593537092 Sue 3 3.85 2025 The Note
author: Alafair Burke
name: Sue
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: american-fiction, mysteries, new-york-estado, not-for-me
review:
Kept me going but not really for me.
]]> Beautiful Ugly 210993995 The million-copy bestselling Queen of Twists Alice Feeney returns with a gripping and deliciously dark thriller about marriage. . .
. . . and revenge.

Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life.

Grady calls his wife to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge the headlights are on, the driver door is open, her phone is still there. . . but his wife has disappeared.

A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. Then he sees the impossible � a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife.

Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t.
Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.]]> 320 Alice Feeney 1250337798 Sue 3 horror, scotland, thriller There are so many twists but they don’t all make sense—plot holes abound. Grady talks to Abby on the phone when she disappears. She stopped to help a woman lying in the road but that was Grady trying to lure her to the cliff so he could push her off. Can’t be in two places at once. She was pregnant, but that was a different Abby. Oh well. Maybe, writing a novel, the author gets stuck in a corner and can’t get out so she just leaves it and moves on to another part of the story.]]> 3.75 2025 Beautiful Ugly
author: Alice Feeney
name: Sue
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: horror, scotland, thriller
review:
A great start..a heartbroken alcoholic writer alone on a small Scottish island where something is not right.
There are so many twists but they don’t all make sense—plot holes abound. Grady talks to Abby on the phone when she disappears. She stopped to help a woman lying in the road but that was Grady trying to lure her to the cliff so he could push her off. Can’t be in two places at once. She was pregnant, but that was a different Abby. Oh well. Maybe, writing a novel, the author gets stuck in a corner and can’t get out so she just leaves it and moves on to another part of the story.
]]> The Amateur Marriage 15764
They seemed like the perfect couple—young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother’s grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married.

Pauline, impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately. While other young marrieds, equally ignorant at the start, seemed to grow more seasoned, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. Even when they find themselves, almost thirty years later, loving, instant parents to a little grandson named Pagan, whom they rescue from Haight-Ashbury, they still cannot bridge their deep-rooted differences. Flighty Pauline clings to the notion that the rifts can always be patched. To the unyielding Michael, they become unbearable.

From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayered apparel of later years, Anne Tyler captures the evocative nuances of everyday life during these decades with such telling precision that every page brings smiles of recognition. Throughout, as each of the competing voices bears witness, we are drawn ever more fully into the complex entanglements of family life in this wise, embracing, and deeply perceptive novel.]]> 352 Anne Tyler 0345472454 Sue 5 fiction 3.65 2004 The Amateur Marriage
author: Anne Tyler
name: Sue
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2006/06/27
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: fiction
review:
most similar: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Family squabbling all the time. Pauline was sort of like the wife in Breathing Lessons. Sad to lose her.
]]> <![CDATA[The Curator (Washington Poe, #3)]]> 53053120
And when a disgraced FBI agent gets in touch things take an even darker turn. Because she doesn't think Poe is dealing with a serial killer at all; she thinks he's dealing with someone far, far worse - a man who calls himself the Curator.

And nothing will ever be the same again...]]> 384 M.W. Craven Sue 0 to-read 4.41 2020 The Curator (Washington Poe, #3)
author: M.W. Craven
name: Sue
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Great Divide 183542441
It is said that the canal will be the greatest feat of engineering in history. But first, it must be built. For Francisco, a local fisherman who resents the foreign powers clamoring for a slice of his country, nothing is more upsetting than the decision of his son, Omar, to work as a digger in the excavation zone. But for Omar, whose upbringing was quiet and lonely, this job offers a chance to finally find connection.

Ada Bunting is a bold sixteen-year-old from Barbados who arrives in Panama as a stowaway alongside thousands of other West Indians seeking work. Alone and with no resources, she is determined to find a job that will earn enough money for her ailing sister’s surgery. When she sees a young man—Omar—who has collapsed after a grueling shift, she is the only one who rushes to his aid.

John Oswald has dedicated his life to scientific research and has journeyed to Panama in single-minded pursuit of one goal: eliminating malaria. But now, his wife, Marian, has fallen ill herself, and when he witnesses Ada’s bravery and compassion, he hires her on the spot as a caregiver. This fateful decision sets in motion a sweeping tale of ambition, loyalty, and sacrifice.

Searing and empathetic, The Great Divide explores the intersecting lives of activists, fishmongers, laborers, journalists, neighbors, doctors, and soothsayers—those rarely acknowledged by history even as they carved out its course.]]> 336 Cristina Henríquez 0063291347 Sue 2 3.91 2024 The Great Divide
author: Cristina Henríquez
name: Sue
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/12
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves:
review:
Some parts are interesting but not enough about Panama.
]]> Kindred 60931 The visionary author’s masterpiece pulls us—along with her Black female hero—through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

Dana, a modern Black woman, is celebrating her 26th birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.]]> 288 Octavia E. Butler 0807083690 Sue 5 One of my favorites. 4.30 1979 Kindred
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Sue
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1979
rating: 5
read at: 1990/01/01
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: science-fiction, african-american, slavery
review:
One of my favorites.
]]> Kin 55419898 920 Miljenko Jergović 1939810523 Sue 0 to-read 4.15 2013 Kin
author: Miljenko Jergović
name: Sue
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Annie's Day 23785283 I didn't want to wake up at 6am, especially on a Saturday. But the man I was cuddled up to was... a morning person.]]> 3 Andy Weir Sue 4 short-stories Great twist! 3.71 2011 Annie's Day
author: Andy Weir
name: Sue
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: short-stories
review:
Great twist!
]]> Intermezzo 208932385 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family, 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.]]> 464 Sally Rooney 0374602646 Sue 2 3.89 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Sue
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/25
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves:
review:
Unbearable. Blah, blah, blah. Nothing at all happens. And the writing is supposed to to be good?
]]> There Was a Country: A Memoir 19146970 From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart—a long-awaited memoir of coming of age in a fragile new nation, and its destruction in a tragic civil warFor more than forty years, Chinua Achebe maintained a considered silence on the events of the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967�1970, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Decades in the making, There Was a Country isa towering account of one of modern Africa’s most disastrous events, from a writer whose words and courage left an enduring stamp on world literature. A marriage of history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection, There Was a Country is a work whose wisdom and compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe’s place as one of the great literary and moral voices of our age.]]> 354 Chinua Achebe 1101595981 Sue 4 4.15 2012 There Was a Country: A Memoir
author: Chinua Achebe
name: Sue
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/20
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves:
review:
This book answered most, if not all, of my questions about the Biafra-Nigeria war. What a tragedy. Still, I would like to know more about the U.S� failure to help the Biafrans.
]]> Private Rites 203756158 From the award-winning author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a speculative reimagining of King Lear, centering three sisters navigating queer love and loss in a drowning world

It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and arcane rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father dies. An architect as cruel as he was revered, his death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.

More estranged than ever, the sisters� lives spin out of control: Irene’s relationship is straining at the seams; Isla’s ex-wife keeps calling; and cynical Agnes is falling in love for the first time. But something even more sinister might be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always seemed unusually interested in the sisters� lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world.]]> 285 Julia Armfield Sue 3 3.37 2024 Private Rites
author: Julia Armfield
name: Sue
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: british, dystopia, fiction, not-for-me, science-fiction, skipped-to-the-end, women-with-women
review:
Promising beginning and intriguing premise but at about 50% spirals into chaos.
]]> Vantage Point 198111971 Succession meets Megan Abbott in this seductive Gothic suspense novel about the dramatic downfall of one of America’s most affluent families.

The old-money Wieland family has it all—wealth, status, power. They’re also famously cursed. Clara and her brother Teddy grew up on a small island in Maine in the shadow of their parents� tragic deaths, haunted by rumors and paparazzi. Fourteen years later they’ve mostly put their turbulent past to rest. Teddy has married Clara’s best friend, Jess, and the three of them have moved back home to take over the sprawling, remote family mansion known as Vantage Point. Then Teddy decides to run for the Senate—an unnerving prospect made much worse when intimate videos of Clara are leaked online. The most frightening part is that she doesn't remember filming any of them. Are the videos real? Or are they deepfakes? Is someone trying to take down the Wielands once and for all?

Everyone thinks Clara is losing her grip on reality, but she knows the videos are only the beginning. Years ago the curse destroyed her parents. Now it’s coming for her. Brimming with palpable tension, Vantage Point reveals a twisted web of family secrets and political ambition that raises questions about the blurred lines between public and private personas and the nature of truth in the digital age.]]> 401 Sara Sligar 0374719608 Sue 2 not-for-me 3.86 2025 Vantage Point
author: Sara Sligar
name: Sue
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: not-for-me
review:
21% is plenty for me. Gothic? I don’t think so. More of a college student romp. Sophomoric.
]]> <![CDATA[The Woman in Suite 11 (Lo Blacklock, #2)]]> 220161593 In this follow-up to #1 New York Times bestselling author Ruth Ware’s multi-million copy mega-hit The Women in Cabin 10, Lo Blacklock returns to attend the opening of a luxury hotel, only to find herself in a white-knuckled race across Europe.

When the invitation to attend the press opening of a luxury Swiss hotel—owned by reclusive billionaire Marcus Leidmann—arrives, it’s like the answer to a prayer. Three years after the birth of her youngest child, Lo Blacklock is ready to reestablish her journalism career, but post-pandemic travel journalism is a very different landscape from the one she left ten years ago.

The chateau on the shores of Lake Geneva is everything Lo’s ever dreamed of, and she hopes she can snag an interview with Marcus. Unfortunately, he proves to be even more difficult to pin down than his reputation suggests. When Lo gets a late-night call asking her to come to Marcus’s hotel room, she agrees despite her own misgivings. She’s greeted, however, by a woman claiming to be Marcus’s mistress, and in life-or-death jeopardy.

What follows is a thrilling cat-and-mouse pursuit across Europe, forcing Lo to ask herself just how much she’s willing to sacrifice to save this woman…and if she can even trust her?]]> 400 Ruth Ware 1668025620 Sue 0 to-read 3.83 2025 The Woman in Suite 11 (Lo Blacklock, #2)
author: Ruth Ware
name: Sue
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The City and Its Uncertain Walls]]> 209192695 From the bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.

We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.

Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.]]> 449 Haruki Murakami 0593801970 Sue 4 3.72 2023 The City and Its Uncertain Walls
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Sue
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves:
review:
Very strange. Who is the shadow and who is the real person? Does it matter? What do the unicorns represent? Interesting that Murukami quotes García Márquez and considers magical realism as simply realism.
]]> <![CDATA[Doce cuentos peregrinos (Spanish Edition)]]> 23824524 ¡Disponible por primera vez en eBook!

En Barcelona, una prostituta que va entrando en la vejez entrena su perro a llorar ante la tumba que ha escogido para sí misma. En Viena, una mujer se vale de su don de ver el futuro para convertirse en la adivina de una familia rica. En Ginebra, el conductor de una ambulancia y su esposa acogen al abandonado y aparentemente moribundo ex presidente de un país caribeño, sólo para descubrir que sus ambiciones políticas siguen intactas.

En estos doce relatos magistrales acerca de las vidas de latinoamericanos en Europa, García Márquez logra transmitir la amalgama de melancolía, tenacidad, pena y ambición que forma la experiencia del emigrante.]]> 99 Gabriel García Márquez 1101911042 Sue 0 currently-reading 4.31 1992 Doce cuentos peregrinos (Spanish Edition)
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Sue
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Wool - Holston (Wool, #1) 12287209
Or you'll get what you wish for.]]> 56 Hugh Howey Sue 4 4.14 2012 Wool - Holston (Wool, #1)
author: Hugh Howey
name: Sue
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: science-fiction, post-apocalyptic
review:

]]> Tuya 22022313 168 Claudia Piñeiro 9870418651 Sue 3 argentina, mysteries 4.15 2005 Tuya
author: Claudia Piñeiro
name: Sue
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/02
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: argentina, mysteries
review:
No estoy de acuerdo con las lectores que encontraron a Inez como un personaje agradable. Me daba asco. Es tan egoísta y superficial, insoportable. El tema principal en mi opinión es el estado de la clase media en Argentina. Son personas completamente vacías.
]]> Elena sabe 26177370 143 Claudia Piñeiro 9877380951 Sue 4 4.16 2007 Elena sabe
author: Claudia Piñeiro
name: Sue
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/04
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: argentina, fiction, mysteries, not-for-me, skipped-to-the-end
review:
Me parece que Elena sabe es un libro muy importante especialmente porque aboga por los discapacitados. Además, critica la iglesia: el sacerdote le dice a Elena el dueño de su cuerpo no es ella sino dios. El libro es un poco lento y repetitivo pero los temas son fundamentales y la manera en que Claudia Piñeiro los presenta es ingeniosa.
]]> Deep South (Anna Pigeon, #8) 76703 352 Nevada Barr 0425178951 Sue 0 to-read 3.92 2000 Deep South (Anna Pigeon, #8)
author: Nevada Barr
name: Sue
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The City & the City 8121642
Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel’s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives.

What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.

Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & the City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.]]> 337 China Miéville Sue 5 literature-contemporary I have to confess I didn’t understand what that meant the first time around. Anyway, this is one of my all-time favorites. Where was Bowden?]]> 3.92 2009 The City & the City
author: China Miéville
name: Sue
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: literature-contemporary
review:
I love the idea of the two cities unseeing each other. Even though the story turned into a shoot-'em-up it managed to maintain the theme. The end is great. "Do you know much about the British Navy?"
I have to confess I didn’t understand what that meant the first time around. Anyway, this is one of my all-time favorites. Where was Bowden?
]]> This Strange Eventful History 199706828
Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family’s strangeness; of François’s union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.

Inspired in part by long-ago stories from her own family’s history, Claire Messud animates her characters� rich interior lives amid the social and political upheaval of the recent past. As profoundly intimate as it is expansive, This Strange Eventful History is “a tour de force…one of those rare novels that a reader doesn’t merely read but lives through with the characters� (Yiyun Li).]]> 421 Claire Messud 0393635058 Sue 3 3.82 This Strange Eventful History
author: Claire Messud
name: Sue
average rating: 3.82
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/23
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: colonialism, did-not-finish, fiction, not-for-me
review:
I just cannot connect to this book. I am interested in Algeria under the French colonizers but this seems to me more of a scattered story about individuals looking for their identity. Maybe the writing is attractive or maybe it just drones on and on with no apparent thread to hold it together.
]]> <![CDATA[Becoming a Translator: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Translation]]> 808336 Becoming a Translator is an essential resource for novice and practising translators. The book helps students learn how to translate faster and more accurately, how to deal with potential problems, including dealing with stress and how the market works. This second edition has been revised throughout, and includes an exploration of new technologies used by translators and a 'Useful Contacts' section including the names, addresses and web addresses of translator organizations, training programmes, journals and translator agencies. Exercises, email exchanges and examples have also been updated throughout. Becoming a Translator is an invaluable guide for all aspiring and practising translators.]]> 320 Douglas Robinson 0415300339 Sue 3 3.64 1997 Becoming a Translator: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Translation
author: Douglas Robinson
name: Sue
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1997
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/06
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves:
review:
Some interesting ideas but makes it more complicated than it needs to be and pads the book with student comments
]]> Silent City 84051091 From the author of LAST ONES LEFT ALIVE comes the story of young female warrior who must start a revolution if she and those she loves are to survive.

Orpen has always been an outlier in Phoenix City - the only outsider ever admitted to the ranks of the banshees, the female warriors who enforce order, and protect it from the skrake - the ravening creatures that have laid waste to the rest of the country, and gather at the city walls.

Unrest is building in the city - a deadly sickness is spreading through the workers, while an unspoken disillusionment is creeping amongst the fighting women, weary of enforcing the all-male management's patriarchal rule, and of the cost, to their sisters, and to young new recruits, of upholding this order.

Rumour has it that banshees have been taking matters into their own hands, and taking swift and violent revenge. When Orpen's troop leader falls under suspicion it becomes clear that Orpen will need to muster all her courage and prowess if she and her fellow banshees are going to be able to find a way to escape, and rebuild a society worth fighting for.]]> 248 Sarah Davis-Goff 1250262607 Sue 2 No connection 3.51 2023 Silent City
author: Sarah Davis-Goff
name: Sue
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves:
review:
No connection
]]> <![CDATA[Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything]]> 17371456 Is That a Fish in Your Ear? offers readers new insight into the mystery of how we come to know what someone else means—whether we wish to understand Astérix cartoons or a foreign head of state. Using translation as his lens, David Bellos shows how much we can learn about ourselves by exploring the ways we use translation, from the historical roots of written language to the stylistic choices of Ingmar Bergman, from the United Nations General Assembly to the significance of James Cameron's Avatar.

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across human experience to describe why translation sits deep within us all, and why we need it in so many situations, from the spread of religion to our appreciation of literature; indeed, Bellos claims that all writers are by definition translators. Written with joie de vivre, reveling both in misunderstanding and communication, littered with wonderful asides, it promises any reader new eyes through which to understand the world. In the words of Bellos: "The practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different: we speak different tongues, and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same—that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of these suppositions, translation could not exist. Nor could anything we would like to call social life. Translation is another name for the human condition."]]> 385 David Bellos Sue 4 3.84 2011 Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything
author: David Bellos
name: Sue
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/19
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Pájaros en la boca y otros cuentos]]> 36011185
Heredera de la más prestigiosa tradición literaria, en la línea de Raymond Carver y Flannery O'Connor, Schweblin maneja el lenguaje de una forma extraordinaria, con una prosa sobria y eficaz al servicio de historias que se mueven en el límite entre lo real y lo fantástico. Los cuentos de Schweblin, perturbadores y desconcertantes, plantean un enigma que provoca y atrapa profundamente al lector.]]> 184 Samanta Schweblin Sue 3 Sí, relatos intrigantes pero me cansé del estilo y el fórmula que la autora usa. Al principio todo parece normal pero poco a poco todo se convierte en algo raro—el señor con su valija, por ejemplo.]]> 3.98 2009 Pájaros en la boca y otros cuentos
author: Samanta Schweblin
name: Sue
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/19
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:
Una colección de relatos muy intrigantes. En algunos, como por ejemplo, Olingiris, hay cosas muy raras y no pude descifrar el punto.
Sí, relatos intrigantes pero me cansé del estilo y el fórmula que la autora usa. Al principio todo parece normal pero poco a poco todo se convierte en algo raro—el señor con su valija, por ejemplo.
]]> Mexican Gothic 52873094
Noemí is also an unlikely rescuer: She’s a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she’s also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: Not of her cousin’s new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by Noemí; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi’s dreams with visions of blood and doom.

Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family’s youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemí, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family’s past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family’s once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as Noemí digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness.

And Noemí, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may soon find it impossible to ever leave this enigmatic house behind.]]> 304 Silvia Moreno-Garcia Sue 2 3.76 2020 Mexican Gothic
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: Sue
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2021/04/12
date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: fiction, horror, mexico, did-not-finish, not-for-me
review:
Not what I was expecting. Nothing to do with Mexico nor is it gothic except for the creepy old house and its disagreeable residents.
]]> Dust 214860555 "An immediate classic that holds its own alongside the greats of American Literature, Dust brings the haunting echoes of our past to a weather-beaten future. Every word of Dust is as familiar as a childhood friend. You understand—instantly—that you will carry it with you for the rest of your life." � K. Ancrum, award-winning author of The Wicker King

In this haunting, speculative coming-of-age novel about finding your place in an unforgiving environment, a partially deaf teen questions everything she knows about family, love, and her future.

After her father has a premonition, Thea and her family move to the Bloodless Valley of southern Colorado, hoping to make a fresh start. But the rivers are dry, the crops are dying, and the black blizzards of Colorado have returned. Much like the barren land, Thea feels her life has stopped growing. She is barely homeschooled, forbidden from going to the library, and has no way to contact her old friends—all due to her parents� fear of the outside world’s dangerous influence.

But to make ends meet, Thea is allowed to work at the café in town. There, she meets Ray, who is deaf. Thea, who was born hard of hearing, has always been pushed by her parents to pass as someone who can hear. Now, with Ray secretly teaching Thea how to sign, she begins to learn what she’s been missing—not just a new language but a whole community and maybe even a chance at love.]]> 310 Alison Stine 1250878748 Sue 3 4.10 2024 Dust
author: Alison Stine
name: Sue
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/15
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves:
review:
YA. Reminded me of The Mosquito Coast and Poisonwood Bible but not as good.
]]> The Dream Hotel 60499589
From Laila Lalami—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a “maestra of literary fiction� (NPR)—comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.]]> 11 Laila Lalami Sue 0 to-read 3.80 2025 The Dream Hotel
author: Laila Lalami
name: Sue
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Trespasses 61189184
As people get up each morning and go to work, school, church or the pub, the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploded, another man beaten, killed or left for dead. In the class Cushla teaches, the vocabulary of seven-year-old children now includes phrases like 'petrol bomb' and 'rubber bullets'. And as she is forced to tread lines she never thought she would cross, tensions in the town are escalating, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together.]]> 343 Louise Kennedy 0593540913 Sue 5 irish 4.06 2022 Trespasses
author: Louise Kennedy
name: Sue
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/10
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: irish
review:
At first I found this tedious but then, wow! It’s wonderful. The male characters are sexist, misogynistic pricks, including Michael.
]]> Kairos 124946972 Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates


Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck’s new novel Kairos—an unforgettably compelling masterpiece—tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears. As the Times Literary Supplement “The weight of history, the particular experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present in Erpenbeck’s work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of this period between states and ideologies.�


In the opinion of her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, Kairos is the great post-Unification novel. And, as The New Republic has commented on his work as a “Hofmann’s translation is invaluable—it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to it is at once ‘loyal� and ‘beautiful.’”]]> 309 Jenny Erpenbeck 0811229351 Sue 3 3.39 2021 Kairos
author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Sue
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: german, political-novels, did-not-finish, not-for-me
review:
Just can’t seem to stick with this. Nothing much happens.
]]> Visitation 9639239 Visitation offers the life stories of twelve individuals who seek to make their home in this one magical little house. The novel breaks into the everyday life of the house and shimmers through it, while relating the passions and fates of its inhabitants. Elegant and poetic, Visitation forms a literary mosaic of the last century, tearing open wounds and offering moments of reconciliation, with its drama and its exquisite evocation of a landscape no political upheaval can truly change.]]> 163 Jenny Erpenbeck 0811219313 Sue 2 3.77 2008 Visitation
author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Sue
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2008
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/24
date added: 2024/11/24
shelves:
review:
Not for me. Really not for me.
]]> <![CDATA[Mrs. Dalloway: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition]]> 18881854
In this vivid portrait of a single day in a woman’s life, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of preparation for a party while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house for friends and neighbors, she is flooded with remembrances of the past—the passionate loves of her carefree youth, her practical choice of husband, and the approach and retreat of war. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old.

From the introspective Clarissa, to the lover who never fully recovered from her rejection, to a war-ravaged stranger in the park, the characters and scope of Mrs. Dalloway reshape our sense of ordinary life and reshaped English literature as we know it.

“Perhaps her masterpiece…Exquisite and superbly constructed…Required like most writers to choose between the surface and the depths as the basis of her operations, she chooses the surface and then burrows in as far as she can.� –E. M. Forster]]> 182 Virginia Woolf Sue 2 3.71 1925 Mrs. Dalloway: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Sue
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1925
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/23
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel]]> 205595420 A legendary editor's reckoning with the twentieth-century novel and the urgent messages it sends.

“How can we live differently?� a young woman urgently demands in Virginia Woolf’s novel The Years. It is the 1930s, war and death are in the air, but her question was asked again and again in the course of a century where things changed fast and changed all the time. The century brought world wars, revolutions, automobiles, movies, and the internet, votes for women, death camps. The century brought questions. Novelists in the twentieth century had a question of their how can we write a novel as startling and unforeseen as the world we live in? Again and again they did, transforming the novel as the century remade the world.

Imagine the history of the twentieth-century novel recounted with the urgency and intimacy of a novel. That’s what Edwin Frank, the legendary editor who has run the New York Review Books publishing imprint since its inception, does in Stranger than Fiction. With penetrating insight and originality, Frank introduces us to books, some famous, some little-known, from the whole course of the century and from around the world. Starting with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground of 1864, Frank shows how its twitchy, self-undermining, and never-satisfied narrator established a voice that would echo through the coming century. He illuminates the political vision of H.G. Wells’s science fiction, Colette and Andre Gide’s subversions of traditional gender roles, and Gertrude Stein’s untethering of the American sentence. He describes the monumental ambition of books such as Mrs. Dalloway, The Magic Mountain and The Man Without Qualities to rebuild a world of human possibility upon the ruins of World War I and explores how Japan’s Natsume Soseki and Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe broke open European models to reflect their own, distinct histories and experience. Here too are Vasily Grossman, Anna Banti, and Elsa Morante reckoning in specific ways with the traumas of World War II, while later chapters range from Marguerite Yourcenar and V. S. Naipaul to Gabriel García Marquez and W.G. Sebald.

The story as a whole is one of fearless, often reckless exploration, as well as unfathomable desolation. Throughout, we discover the power of the novel to reinvent itself, to find a way for itself, to live differently. Stranger than Fiction offers a new vision of the history and art of the novel and of a dark and dazzling time in whose light and shadow we still stand.]]> 482 Edwin Frank 0374615322 Sue 4 academic, literary-theory 3.79 2024 Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel
author: Edwin Frank
name: Sue
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/23
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: academic, literary-theory
review:
Only read the chapter on Virginia Woolf. More later
]]> Night Wherever We Go 61054125 A RECOMMENDED READ The Washington Post - Atlanta Journal-Constitution - CrimeReads - Library Journal

A gripping, radically intimate debut novel about a group of enslaved women staging a covert rebellion against their owners

On a struggling Texas plantation, six enslaved women slip from their sleeping quarters and gather in the woods under the cover of night. The Lucys--as they call the plantation owners, after Lucifer himself--have decided to turn around the farm's bleak financial prospects by making the women bear children. They have hired a "stockman" to impregnate them. But the women are determined to protect themselves.

Now each of the six faces a choice. Nan, the doctoring woman, has brought a sack of cotton root clippings that can stave off children when chewed daily. If they all take part, the Lucys may give up and send the stockman away. But a pregnancy for any of them will only encourage the Lucys further. And should their plan be discovered, the consequences will be severe.

Visceral and arresting, Night Wherever We Go illuminates each woman's individual trials and desires while painting a subversive portrait of collective defiance. Unflinching in her portrayal of America's gravest injustices, while also deeply attentive to the transcendence, love, and solidarity of women whose interior lives have been underexplored, Tracey Rose Peyton creates a story of unforgettable power.]]> 304 Tracey Rose Peyton 0063249898 Sue 4 3.94 2023 Night Wherever We Go
author: Tracey Rose Peyton
name: Sue
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/23
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: african-american, american-fiction, american-south, slavery
review:
Unusual and intriguing story of the cruelties and abuses of slavery. I think it reinforces the idea that slavery had a corrupting influence on the entire culture.
]]> The Tiger's Wife 8366402 The New Yorker’s twenty best American fiction writers under forty, has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation.

In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.

But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. After telling her grandmother that he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone. A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he was too ill to travel. Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is compelled to unravel.

Grief struck and searching for clues to her grandfather’s final state of mind, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a child. On their weeklytrips to the zoo he would read to her from a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which he carried with him everywhere; later, he told her stories of his own encounters over many years with “the deathless man,� a vagabond who claimed to be immortal and appeared never to age. But the most extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told her, the one Natalia must discover for herself. One winter during the Second World War, his childhood village was snowbound, cut off even from the encroaching German invaders but haunted by another, fierce presence: a tiger who comes ever closer under cover of darkness. “These stories,� Natalia comes to understand, “run like secret rivers through all the other stories� of her grandfather’s life. And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives that she will find the answer she is looking for.]]> 338 Téa Obreht 0385343833 Sue 2 not-for-me, yugoslavia 3.41 2011 The Tiger's Wife
author: Téa Obreht
name: Sue
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2011
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/19
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: not-for-me, yugoslavia
review:
Sort of a superficial attraction but that’s all for me
]]> The Wicked Sister 59347642 She thought she'd buried her past. But what if it's been hunting her this whole time?

From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Marsh King's Daughter comes a startling novel of psychological suspense as two generations of sisters try to unravel their tangled relationships between nature and nurture, guilt and betrayal, love and evil.

You have been cut off from society for fifteen years, shut away in a mental hospital in self-imposed exile as punishment for the terrible thing you did when you were a child.

But what if nothing about your past is as it seems?

And if you didn't accidentally shoot and kill your mother, then whoever did is still out there. Waiting for you.

For a decade and a half, Rachel Cunningham has chosen to lock herself away in a psychiatric facility, tortured by gaps in her memory and the certainty that she is responsible for her parents' deaths. But when she learns new details about their murders, Rachel returns, in a quest for answers, to the place where she once felt safest: her family's sprawling log cabin in the remote forests of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

As Rachel begins to uncover what really happened on the day her parents were murdered, she learns—as her mother did years earlier—that home can be a place of unspeakable evil, and that the bond she shares with her sister might be the most poisonous of all.]]> 299 Karen Dionne Sue 2 horror, mysteries, not-for-me Not for me. 4.13 2020 The Wicked Sister
author: Karen Dionne
name: Sue
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/14
date added: 2024/11/14
shelves: horror, mysteries, not-for-me
review:
Not for me.
]]> The Blue Hour 207249717 A stylish and immersive new novel of ambition, legacy, and betrayal from the #1New York Timesbestselling author ofThe Girl on the Train.

An isolated Scottish island, accessible to the mainland only twelve hours a day. A famous (some might say infamous) artist whose notoriously unfaithful husband disappeared after visiting her twenty years ago. A present-day discovery that intimately connects three people and unveils a web of secrets and lies.

A masterful and propulsive novel that asks searing questions of ambition, power, gender and perception, The Blue Hour recalls the very best of Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith and cements Hawkins’s place among the very best of our most nuanced, powerful and stylish storytellers.]]> Paula Hawkins 0063396564 Sue 4 3.38 2024 The Blue Hour
author: Paula Hawkins
name: Sue
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/09
date added: 2024/11/09
shelves:
review:
Not as good as the Girl on the Train, not as bad as the negative reviews claim.
]]> <![CDATA[Un lugar soleado para gente sombría]]> 207804639
En uno de los cuentos, una mujer mantiene a raya a los fantasmas que andan sueltos por un barrio periférico de Buenos Aires; entre ellos, los de su madre muerta de una dolorosa enfermedad, los de unas adolescentes asesinadas en la calle, el de un ladrón pillado en pleno robo y el de un chico que huía de un secuestro exprés. En otra historia, una pareja alquila una casa para unas vacaciones en un pueblo que ha ido perdiendo habitantes desde que el tren dejó de pasar; visitan en la estación abandonada la exposición de los perturbadores lienzos de un artista local, pero lo verdaderamente aterrador será conocer al autor de esas pinturas. En otra pieza, los voluntarios de una ONG que reparte comida por barrios marginales son perseguidos porunos niños de pavorosos ojos negros. En otra, una periodista que investiga la historia de una chica desaparecida en un hotel en Los Ángeles, cuyas espeluznantes imágenes recorrieron internet, acaba enfrentándose a otra leyenda de la ciudad�

Después de su monumental y aclamada novela Nuestra parte de noche, Mariana Enriquez vuelve al relato y demuestra que sigue en plena forma como gran continuadora y renovadora del género de terror, al que ha llevado a las más altas cotas literarias. Partiendo de la tradición −desde las novelas góticas hasta Stephen King y Thomas Ligotti�, la escritora explora nuevos caminos, nuevas dimensiones.]]> 232 Mariana Enríquez Sue 0 currently-reading 4.03 2024 Un lugar soleado para gente sombría
author: Mariana Enríquez
name: Sue
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/02
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Crimson Lake (Crimson Lake, #1)]]> 59138974 The basis for the series Troppo starring Thomas Jane, now streaming on Freevee!

How do you move on when the world won't let you?

12:46: Claire Bingleystands alone at a bus stop
12:47: Ted Conkaffey parks his car beside her
12:52: The girl is missing . . .

Six minutes in the wrong place at the wrong time--that's all it took to ruin Sydney detective Ted Conkaffey's life. Accused but not convicted of a brutal abduction, Ted is now a free man--and public enemy number one. Maintaining his innocence, he flees north to keep a low profile amidst the steamy, croc-infested wetlands of Crimson Lake.

There, Ted's lawyer introduces him to eccentric private investigator Amanda Pharrell, herself a convicted murderer. Not entirely convinced Amanda is a cold-blooded killer, Ted agrees to help with her investigation, a case full of deception and obsession, while secretly digging into her troubled past. The residents of Crimson Lake are watching the pair's every move . . . and the town offers no place to hide.

"Complex, human characters, and a dark, meaty story, and fine writing, and a great sense of place - this is one of the best crime thrillers of the year. Sign me up as a big-time Fox fan!" --Lee Child]]> 342 Candice Fox Sue 3 4.27 2017 Crimson Lake (Crimson Lake, #1)
author: Candice Fox
name: Sue
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/02
date added: 2024/11/02
shelves: australia, did-not-finish, fiction, mysteries
review:
Some of this was not that bad. I liked the main characters but no one else. Why were those two fat police officers allowed to abuse Ted? They shouldn’t have even been allowed to be on the police force. Mother was wonderful. I quit at 80%.
]]> Before And After Socrates 30172000 "...a brilliant commentary on the Greek mind and its attitude to life."--Times Literary Supplement]]> 84 Francis Macdonald Cornford 1786258846 Sue 0 currently-reading 4.29 1932 Before And After Socrates
author: Francis Macdonald Cornford
name: Sue
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1932
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/30
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Blackbird (David Raker #11)]]> 59415863 THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP 3 BESTSELLER AND RICHARD & JUDY PICKTHIS IS A MISSING PERSONS CASE LIKE NOTHING YOU'VE SEEN BEFORE . . .'Tim Weaver is the master of clever, unpredictable plots' CLAIRE DOUGLAS'If you haven't yet met Raker, you're in for a treat' MICK HERRON'A fine addition to an excellent series' OBSERVER'Brilliant . . . A jaw-dropping number of twists and turns. Truly excellent' B.A. PARIS______CCTV footage captures Cate and Aiden Gascoigne driving home seconds before their car plunges into a ravine and explodes.When fire crews arrive, the vehicle is empty.Cate and Aiden have vanished.Missing persons investigator David Raker has solved too many impossible cases. He knows that behind every disappearance lies a dark tale waiting to be uncovered.What he doesn't know is how dark this one is - or how close it will get to him . . .______'Shocking, gripping, heart-pounding, The Blackbird is unputdownable . . . Bloody brilliant' NIKKI MAY'The impressive Weaver triumphs again with this intricate mystery' DAILY MAIL'A wonderfully complex, riveting and engaging read that kept me glued to the pages from beginning to end with its sky high levels of suspense and tension' 5 Reader Review'A superb twisty crime thriller - writing at its very best. Will keep you on the edge of your seat and guessing right up to the end' 5 Reader Review'I always look forward to a new Raker but The Blackbird blew me away. Brilliantly plotted, deliciously dark and so clever and unpredictable I was left reeling as I turned the last page. I'm already eagerly awaiting Tim Weaver's next. A writer at the top of his game' Claire Douglas'Taut and immersive, with all the hallmarks of a true crime novel' Catherine Steadman 'Incredibly well-paced, with menacing, clever twists - Raker is back in this stunning read from one of the masters of the genre. Tim Weaver goes from strength to strength and this is his best book yet' Phoebe Morgan]]> 430 Tim Weaver 1405943750 Sue 0 to-read 4.32 2022 The Blackbird (David Raker #11)
author: Tim Weaver
name: Sue
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Zig Zag Girl (The Brighton Mysteries #1)]]> 36146481 In the first installment of a compelling new series by Elly Griffiths featuring Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens and the magnificent Max Mephisto, a band of magicians who served together in World War II track a killer who’s performing their deadly tricks.

Brighton, 1950. The body of a girl is found cut into three pieces. Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens is convinced the killer is mimicking a famous magic trick � the Zig Zag Girl. The inventor of the trick, Max Mephisto, is an old war friend of Edgar’s. They served together in a shadowy unit called the Magic Men, a special ops troop that used stage tricks to confound the enemy.

Max is on the traveling show circuit, touring seaside towns with ventriloquists, sword-swallowers and dancing girls. He’s reluctant to leave this world to help Edgar investigate, but advises him to identify the victim quickly � it takes a special sidekick to do the Zig Zag Girl. Those words come back to haunt Max when the dead girl turns out to be Ethel, one of his best assistants to date. He’s soon at Edgar’s side, hunting for Ethel’s killer.

Another death, another magic trick: Edgar and Max are sure the answer to the murders lies in their army days. And when Edgar receives a letter warning of another “trick� on the way � the Wolf Trap � he knows they’re all in the killer’s sights.

]]> 338 Elly Griffiths Sue 2 3.86 2014 The Zig Zag Girl (The Brighton Mysteries #1)
author: Elly Griffiths
name: Sue
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/26
date added: 2024/10/26
shelves: british, mysteries, not-for-me
review:
Definitely not Ruth Galloway.
]]> <![CDATA[The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (Routledge Translation Classics)]]> 38119372 344 Lawrence Venuti Sue 4 academic 3.67 1994 The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (Routledge Translation Classics)
author: Lawrence Venuti
name: Sue
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/25
date added: 2024/10/25
shelves: academic
review:
I chose this for my book review in Introduction to Translation. Postmortem jargon, impossible to understand.
]]> The Rift 35335259 336 Nina Allan Sue 2 DNF 25%. <br /><br /> 3.49 2017 The Rift
author: Nina Allan
name: Sue
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2017
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/23
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves:
review:
DNF 25%.


]]> <![CDATA[The Lady Astronaut of Mars (Lady Astronaut #4.5)]]> 22057102 A Finalist for the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. Thirty years ago, Elma York led the expedition that paved the way to life on Mars. For years she's been longing to go back up there, to once more explore the stars. But there are few opportunities for an aging astronaut, even the famous Lady Astronaut of Mars. When her chance finally comes, it may be too late. Elma must decide whether to stay with her sickening husband in what will surely be the final years of his life, or to have her final adventure and plunge deeper into the well of space.

At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.

]]> 33 Mary Robinette Kowal Sue 5 Great story! 4.35 2012 The Lady Astronaut of Mars (Lady Astronaut #4.5)
author: Mary Robinette Kowal
name: Sue
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/17
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves:
review:
Great story!
]]> The Night Guest 126919419 The Night Guest is an eerie and ensnaring story set in contemporary Reykjavík that’s sure to keep you awake at night.

Iðunn is in yet another doctor's office. She knows her constant fatigue is a sign that something's not right, but practitioners dismiss her symptoms and blood tests haven't revealed any cause.

When she talks to friends and family about it, the refrain is the same � have you tried eating better? exercising more? establishing a nighttime routine? She tries to follow their advice, buying everything from vitamins to sleeping pills to a step-counting watch. Nothing helps.

Until one night Iðunn falls asleep with the watch on, and wakes up to find she’s walked over 40,000 steps in the night . . .

What is happening when she’s asleep? Why is she waking up with increasingly disturbing injuries? And why won’t anyone believe her?]]> 178 Hildur Knútsdóttir 1250322502 Sue 4 3.42 2021 The Night Guest
author: Hildur Knútsdóttir
name: Sue
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/16
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves:
review:
I don’t know what to think about this book.
]]> Middle of the Night 199124279 In the latest jaw-dropping thriller from New York Times bestselling author Riley Sager, a man must contend with the long-ago disappearance of his childhood best friend—and the dark secrets lurking just beyond the safe confines of his picture-perfect neighborhood.

The worst thing to ever happen on Hemlock Circle occurred in Ethan Marsh’s backyard. One July night, ten-year-old Ethan and his best friend and neighbor, Billy, fell asleep in a tent set up on a manicured lawn in a quiet, quaint New Jersey cul de sac. In the morning, Ethan woke up alone. During the night, someone had sliced the tent open with a knife and taken Billy. He was never seen again.

Thirty years later, Ethan has reluctantly returned to his childhood home. Plagued by bad dreams and insomnia, he begins to notice strange things happening in the middle of the night. Someone seems to be roaming the cul de sac at odd hours, and signs of Billy’s presence keep appearing in Ethan’s backyard. Is someone playing a cruel prank? Or has Billy, long thought to be dead, somehow returned to Hemlock Circle?

The mysterious occurrences prompt Ethan to investigate what really happened that night, a quest that reunites him with former friends and neighbors and leads him into the woods that surround Hemlock Circle. Woods where Billy claimed monsters roamed and where a mysterious institute does clandestine research on a crumbling estate.

The closer Ethan gets to the truth, the more he realizes that no place—be it quiet forest or suburban street—is completely safe. And that the past has a way of haunting the present.]]> 379 Riley Sager 0593472381 Sue 0 to-read 3.87 2024 Middle of the Night
author: Riley Sager
name: Sue
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Vaster Wilds 75252590
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.

Lauren Groff’s new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how—and if—we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.]]> 272 Lauren Groff Sue 4 3.91 2016 The Vaster Wilds
author: Lauren Groff
name: Sue
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/15
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves:
review:
This is not a plot driven story. Read it for the exploration of the link between humans and nature. It includes every detail about food, bodily functions, and injury and pain in a woman’s struggle for survival in the “new world� of the 17th century.
]]> The American Daughters 174164474
Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are an inseparable duo. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days dreaming of a loving future and reminiscing on their family's rebellious and storied history. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and direction-less, until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters. With the courage instilled in her by Sanite—and help from these strong women—Ady learns how to choose herself. So begins her journey toward liberation and imagin­ing a new future.

The American Daughters is a novel of hope and triumph that reminds us what is possible when a community bands together to fight for their freedom.]]> 289 Maurice Carlos Ruffin 0593729404 Sue 2 3.68 2024 The American Daughters
author: Maurice Carlos Ruffin
name: Sue
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/11
date added: 2024/10/11
shelves:
review:
Bad writing, pretty good story.
]]> The Lost Bookshop 65137920 The Keeper of Stories meets The Lost Apothecary in this evocative and charming novel full of mystery and secrets.

‘The thing about books,� she said ‘is that they help you to imagine a life bigger and better than you could ever dream of.�

On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found�

For too long, Opaline, Martha and Henry have been the side characters in their own lives.

But when a vanishing bookshop casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as extraordinary as the ones found in the pages of their beloved books. And by unlocking the secrets of the shelves, they find themselves transported to a world of wonder� where nothing is as it seems.]]> 432 Evie Woods 0008609209 Sue 2 4.03 2023 The Lost Bookshop
author: Evie Woods
name: Sue
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves:
review:
A romance novel with bad writing.
]]> Enlightenment 196775702 The Essex Serpent, a story of love and astronomy told over the course of twenty years through the lives of two improbable best friends.

Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community. It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London.

Over the course of twenty years, by coincidence and design, Thomas and Grace will find their lives brought back into orbit as the mystery of the vanished astronomer unfolds into a devastating tale of love and scientific pursuit. Thomas and Grace will ask themselves what it means to love and be loved, what is fixed and what is mutable, how much of our fate is predestined and written in the stars, and whether they can find their way back to each other.

A thrillingly ambitious novel of friendship, faith, and unrequited love, rich in symmetry and symbolism, Enlightenment is a shimmering wonder of a book and Sarah Perry’s finest work to date.]]> 384 Sarah Perry 006335263X Sue 2 3.91 2024 Enlightenment
author: Sarah Perry
name: Sue
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/02
date added: 2024/10/02
shelves:
review:
Sorry, this is just not for me.
]]> El murmullo de las abejas 25213356 El murmullo de las abejas tiene todos los ingredientes esenciales para convertirse en un clásico de la literatura mexicana contemporánea.

El murmullo de las abejas, nombrada "La mejor novela del 2015" por iTunes.

La autora que despierta la historia de México y recupera su lugar en nuestros corazones.

En Linares, al norte del país, con la Revolución mexicana como telón de fondo, un buen día, la vieja nana de la familia abandona sorpresivamente un reposo que parecía eterno para perderse en el monte. Cuando la encuentran, sostiene dos pequeños bultos, uno en cada de un lado un bebé misterioso y del otro un panal de abejas. Ante la insistencia de la nana por conversar y cuidar al pequeño, la familia Morales decide adoptarlo.

Cubierto por el manto vivo de abejas que lo acompañarán y guiarán para siempre, Simonopio llega a cambiar la historia de la familia que lo acoge y la de toda una región. Para lograrlo, deberá enfrentar sus miedos, el enemigo que los acecha y las grandes amenazas de la la influenza española y los enfrentamientos entre los que desean la tierra ajena y los que protegerán su propiedad a toda costa.

El murmullo de las abejas huele a lavanda, a ropa hervida con jabón blanco, a naranjas y una historia impredecible de amor y de entrega por una familia, por la vida, por la tierra y por un hermano al que se ha esperado siempre, pero también, la de una traición que puede acabarlo todo.]]> 548 Sofía Segovia 6073126034 Sue 4 No puedo más 4.41 2015 El murmullo de las abejas
author: Sofía Segovia
name: Sue
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves:
review:
No puedo más
]]> La voragine 23462126
Sea como fuere, La Vorágine es un relato descomunal y desbocado, que si arranca con un regusto entre el Romaticismo y el Naturalismo, concluye con un lenguaje propio que consigue estremecer al lector cuando lo enfrenta sin redención con la vacuidad del existir. No en balde fue, hasta la aparición de Cien años de soledad, la gran novela de Colombia, y sigue siendo una de las piezas maestras de la narrativa hispánica del siglo XX.]]> 440 José Eustasio Rivera 8494175262 Sue 0 to-read 4.00 1924 La voragine
author: José Eustasio Rivera
name: Sue
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1924
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> In Ascension 200624139 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 BOOKER PRIZE

An astonishing novel about a young microbiologistinvestigating an unfathomable deep vent in the ocean floor, leading her on ajourney that will encompass the full trajectory of the cosmos and the passageof a single human life

Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as anescape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by theundersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling theglobe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlanticocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth'sfirst life forms - what she instead finds calls into question everything weknow about our own beginnings.

Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new spaceagency. Drawn deeper into the agency's work, she learns that the Atlantictrench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, eachpiece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knowsthat to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her decliningmother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible to remain withher family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.

Exploring the natural world with the wonder and reverence we usually reservefor the stars,In Ascensionis a compassionate, deeply inquisitiveepic that reaches outward to confront the greatest questions of existence,looks inward to illuminate the smallest details of the human heart, and showshow - no matter how far away we might be and how much we have lost hope - wewill always attempt to return to the people and places we call home.]]> 382 Martin MacInnes Sue 3 3.89 2023 In Ascension
author: Martin MacInnes
name: Sue
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/28
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves:
review:
Ok, I quit. I managed to read 61% in 10 days. I kept hoping it would pick up but I don’t think it’s worth it.
]]> The Maid's Version 17669095 176 Daniel Woodrell 0316205869 Sue 0 to-read 3.62 2013 The Maid's Version
author: Daniel Woodrell
name: Sue
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Heather, the Totality 31933063 Named a Barnes & Noble Best Book of the The explosive debut novel about family, power, and privilege from the creator of the award-winning Mad Men. Mark and Karen Breakstone have constructed the idyllic life of wealth and status they always wanted, made complete by their beautiful and extraordinary daughter Heather. But they are still not quite at the top. When the new owners of the penthouse above them begin construction, an unstable stranger penetrates the security of their comfortable lives and threatens to destroy everything they've created.]]> 145 Matthew Weiner 0316435309 Sue 5
Merged review:

A metaphor for the enormous gap between the wealthy and privileged and the poor and excluded? Who is the raging, savage beast?]]> 2.91 2017 Heather, the Totality
author: Matthew Weiner
name: Sue
average rating: 2.91
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2018/08/12
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: american-fiction, fiction, new-york, thriller
review:
A metaphor for the enormous gap between the wealthy and privileged and the poor and excluded? Who is the raging, savage beast?

Merged review:

A metaphor for the enormous gap between the wealthy and privileged and the poor and excluded? Who is the raging, savage beast?
]]> A Doubter's Almanac 26139748 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER •In this mesmerizing novel, Ethan Canin, theauthor of America America and The Palace Thief, explores the nature of genius, rivalry, ambition, and love among multiple generations of a gifted family.Milo Andret is born with an unusual mind. A lonely child growing up in the woods of northern Michigan in the 1950s, he gives little thought to his own talent. But with his acceptance at U.C. Berkeley he realizes the extent, and the risks, of his singular gifts. California in the seventies is a seduction, opening Milo’s eyes to the allure of both ambition and indulgence. The research he begins there will make him a legend; the woman he meets there—and the rival he meets alongside her—will haunt him for the rest of his life. For Milo’s brilliance is entwined with a dark need that soon grows to threaten his work, his family, even his existence. Spanning seven decades as it moves from California to Princeton to the Midwest to New York, A Doubter’s Almanac tells the story of a family as it explores the way ambition lives alongside destructiveness, obsession alongside torment, love alongside grief. It is a story of how the flame of genius both lights and scorches every generation it touches. Graced by stunning prose and brilliant storytelling, A Doubter’s Almanac is a surprising, suspenseful, and deeply moving novel, a major work by a writer who has been hailed as “the most mature and accomplished novelist of his generation.� Praise for A Doubter’s Almanac �551 pages of bliss . . . devastating and wonderful . . . dazzling . . . You come away from the book wanting to reevaluate your choices and your relationships. It’s a rare book that can do that, and it’s a rare joy to discover such a book.�̧ܾ“[Canin] is at the top of his form, fluent, immersive, confident. You might not know where he’s taking you, but the characters are so vivid, Hans’s voice rendered so precisely, that it’s impossible not to trust in the story. . . . The delicate networks of emotion and connection that make up a family are illuminated, as if by magic, via his prose.�ٱ“Alternately explosive and deeply interior.�—New York (“Eight Books You Need to Read�) “A blazingly intelligent novel.�—Los Angeles Times “[A] beautifully written novel.�—The New York Times Book Review (Editors� Choice)]]> 550 Ethan Canin 081299678X Sue 0 to-read 3.89 2016 A Doubter's Almanac
author: Ethan Canin
name: Sue
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Her Here 53225538 Her Here, she has claimed her place in the literary world." --Rebecca Makkai, author of Music for Wartime and The Great Believers

"In Her Here, Dennis has written a metaphysical investigation that is also a wonderfully personal account of a daughter coming to terms with the loss of her mother, and a mother coming to terms with the loss of her daughter. As Elena conjures Ella's last days, the richly imagined narrative moves back and forth between Paris and Thailand, carrying both characters and readers to a vivid and suspenseful conclusion." --Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy and The Boy in the Field

Elena, struggling with memory loss due to a trauma that has unmoored her sense of self, deserts graduate school and a long-term relationship to accept a bizarre proposition from an estranged family friend in Paris: she will search for a young woman, Ella, who went missing six years earlier in Thailand, by rewriting her journals. As she delves deeper into Ella's story, Elena begins to lose sight of her own identity and drift dangerously toward self-annihilation.

Her Here is an existential detective story with a shocking denouement that plumbs the creative and destructive powers of narrative itself.

An Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate and Cambridge Gates Scholar, Amanda Dennis teaches at the American University of Paris. Her Here is her first novel.]]> 341 Amanda Dennis 194265877X Sue 2 did-not-finish, thailand
Merged review:

50 pages in I was overcome with boredom along with the realization that this book is an exercise in writing. Not for me.]]> 3.27 2021 Her Here
author: Amanda Dennis
name: Sue
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2021/06/08
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: did-not-finish, thailand
review:
50 pages in I was overcome with boredom along with the realization that this book is an exercise in writing. Not for me.

Merged review:

50 pages in I was overcome with boredom along with the realization that this book is an exercise in writing. Not for me.
]]> Familiar: A Novel 19076470 A haunting, enigmatic novel about a woman who is given a second chance—and isn't sure whether she really wants it * A Publishers Weekly "Indie Sleeper" * A Powell's Indiespensable Pick * The Nervous Breakdown's October Book Club Pick *

Elisa Brown is driving back from her annual, somber visit to her son Silas's grave when something changes. Actually, everything her body is more voluptuous; she's wearing different clothes and driving a new car. When she arrives home, her life is familiar—but different. There is her house, her husband. But in the world she now inhabits, Silas is no longer dead, and his brother is disturbingly changed. Elisa has a new job, and her marriage seems sturdier, and stranger, than she remembers. She finds herself faking her way through a life she is convinced is not her own. Has she had a psychotic break? Or has she entered a parallel universe? Elisa believed that Silas was doomed from the start, but now that he is alive, what can she do to repair her strained relations with her children? She soon discovers that these questions hinge on being able to see herself as she really is—something that might be impossible for Elisa, or for anyone. In Familiar, J. Robert Lennon continues his profound and exhilarating exploration of the surreal undercurrents of contemporary American life.]]> 226 J. Robert Lennon 1555970613 Sue 4 3.11 2012 Familiar: A Novel
author: J. Robert Lennon
name: Sue
average rating: 3.11
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2012/12/10
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves: american-fiction, fiction, literature-contemporary, parallel-worlds
review:
Intriguing idea that the author uses to put together a page turner but overall doesn't amount to much.
]]> <![CDATA[Réquiem por un campesino español (Narrativa) (Spanish Edition)]]> 23982200
Réquiem por un campesino español recoge un dramático episodio de la guerra civil en un pueblecito aragonés. Mosén Millán se dispone a ofrecer una misa en sufragio del alma de un joven a quien había querido como a un hijo. Mientras aguarda a los asistentes, el cura reconstruye los el fracaso de su mediación, con la que creyó poder salvar al joven, pero que sólo sirvió para entregarlo a sus ejecutores. El relato es de una perfecta sobriedad y de una sencillez no por ello menos profunda y estremecedora. La narración sobrecoge por su ajustado realismo, por la eficacia de sus símbolos y por el profundo conocimiento de los mecanismos de la conciencia, puesto de manifiesto a través de la evocación del sacerdote. Sin duda, Réquiem por un campesino español es una de las mejores obras de Ramón J. Sender y un libro definitivo sobre nuestra guerra civil, alejado de cualquier panfletarismo.]]> 403 Ramón J. Sender 8423348288 Sue 0 to-read 4.20 1953 Réquiem por un campesino español (Narrativa) (Spanish Edition)
author: Ramón J. Sender
name: Sue
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1953
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Guide Me Home (A Highway 59 Novel)]]> 205082162 The case of a missing Black college student who has disappeared from her all-white sorority pulls Darren out of an early retirement; the third and final novel in the "timely and evocative"( NPR ) Highway 59 trilogy, from Edgar Award-winning New York Times-Bestselling author Attica Locke.

Texas Ranger Darren Mathews isn’t sure he’s been a good cop, but believes he’s got a shot at being a good man—if he manages to dodge the potential indictment hanging over his head and if he, from here on out, pledges allegiance to the truth. It’s a virtue the country appears to have wholly lost its grip on, but one Darren sees as his salvation. He is in the midst of remaking his life with the woman he loves, hoping for the peace of country living at his beloved farmhouse, when he is visited by someone who couldn’t hold the truth on her tongue if it was dipped in sugar, a woman who’s always been bent of tearing his life apart. His mother. Armed with a tall tale about a missing Black college student, Sera (whose white sorority sisters insist she isn’t missing at all). Darren must decide if his can trust his mother is telling the truth—and what her ulterior motive may be, and what if that motive has to do with a grand jury deciding his fate.

Darren gets his hooks into the investigation, along the way discovering things about Sera’s family and her hometown that are odd at best, vaguely sinister at worst. Hamstrung by local law enforcement and the Texas Rangers who likewise doubt the account of a missing girl, if Darren wants answers, he’ll need help from the person whom he swore to never trust again—his mother.

In this emotionally stirring conclusion to the singular Highway 59 series, Darren reckons with his life’s purpose as he’s forced to choose between his own peace and the higher call to do good.]]> 303 Attica Locke 0316494607 Sue 3 4.19 2024 Guide Me Home (A Highway 59 Novel)
author: Attica Locke
name: Sue
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/18
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves: african-american, american-fiction, american-south, fiction, mysteries, political-novels, post-apocalyptic, race
review:
A bit of a slog to get through this.
]]> La sombra del viento 18872806 La Sombra del Viento, un libro maldito que cambiará el rumbo de su vida y le arrastrará a un laberinto de intrigas y secretos enterrados en el alma oscura de la ciudad. Ambientada en la enigmática Barcelona de principios del siglo XX, este misterio literario mezcla técnicas de relato de intriga, de novela histórica y de comedia de costumbres, pero es, sobre todo, una tragedia histórica de amor cuyo eco se proyecta a través del tiempo. Con gran fuerza narrativa, el autor entrelaza tramas y enigmas a modo de muñecas rusas en un inolvidable relato sobre los secretos del corazón y el embrujo de los libros, manteniendo la intriga hasta la última página.]]> 0 Carlos Ruiz Zafón 0307806790 Sue 4 literatura-peninsular 4.50 2001 La sombra del viento
author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
name: Sue
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2002/07/01
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: literatura-peninsular
review:
a really excellent mystery about books.
]]> <![CDATA[If Snow Hadn't Fallen (Lacey Flint, #1.5)]]> 17137551 93 Sharon J. Bolton 1250037018 Sue 0 to-read 3.86 2012 If Snow Hadn't Fallen (Lacey Flint, #1.5)
author: Sharon J. Bolton
name: Sue
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> All This & More 199515825 The Cartographers and The Book of M comes an inventive new novel about a woman who wins the chance to rewrite every mistake she’s ever made� and how far she’ll go to find her elusive “happily ever after.�

But there’s a twist: the reader gets to decide what she does next to change her fate.

One woman. Endless options. Every choice has consequences.

Meek, play-it-safe Marsh has just turned forty-five, and her life is in shambles. Her career is stagnant, her marriage has imploded, and her teenage daughter grows more distant by the day. Marsh is convinced she’s missed her chance at everything—romance, professional fulfillment, and adventure—and is desperate for a do-over.

She can’t believe her luck when she’s selected to be the star of the global sensation All This and More, a show that uses quantum technology to allow contestants the chance to revise their pasts and change their present lives. It’s Marsh’s only shot to seize her dreams, and she’s determined to get it right this time.

But even as she rises to become a famous lawyer, gets back together with her high school sweetheart, and travels the world, she begins to worry that All This and More’s promises might be too good to be true. Because while the technology is amazing, something seems a bit off.�

Can Marsh really make her life everything she wants it to be? And is it worth it?

Perfect for fans of Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library and Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, bestselling author Peng Shepherd’s All This and More is an utterly original, startlingly poignant novel that puts the reader in the driver’s seat.]]> 469 Peng Shepherd 0063278979 Sue 0 to-read 3.33 2024 All This & More
author: Peng Shepherd
name: Sue
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Death at the Sign of the Rook (Jackson Brodie #6)]]> 203229869
In his sleepy Yorkshire town, ex-detective Jackson Brodie is staving off boredom and malaise. His only case is the seemingly tedious matter of a stolen painting. But Jackson soon uncovers a string of unsolved art thefts that lead him down a dizzying spiral of disguise and deceit to Burton Makepeace, a formerly magnificent estate now partially converted into a hotel hosting Murder Mystery weekends.

As paying guests, impecunious aristocrats and old friends collide, we are treated to Atkinson’s most charming and fiendishly clever mystery yet, one that pays homage to the masters of the genre—from Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers to the modern era of Knives Out and Only Murders in the Building.]]> 307 Kate Atkinson 0385548001 Sue 4 3.94 2024 Death at the Sign of the Rook (Jackson Brodie #6)
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Sue
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/08
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves:
review:
So many threads, so many characters, and then the murder mystery performance. So many references to other works of literature�.I probably missed at least half of them.
]]> Gabriel's Moon 209286331 In his most exhilarating novel yet, Britain’s greatest storyteller transports you from the vibrant streets of sixties London to the sun-soaked cobbles of Cadiz and the frosty squares of Warsaw, as an accidental spy is drawn into the shadows of espionage and obsession.

Gabriel Dax is a young man haunted by the memories of a every night, when sleep finally comes, he dreams about his childhood home in flames. His days are spent on the move as an acclaimed travel writer, capturing the changing landscapes in the grip of the Cold War. When he’s offered the chance to interview a political figure, his ambition leads him unwittingly into a web of duplicities and betrayals.

As Gabriel’s reluctant initiation takes hold, he is drawn deeper into the shadows. Falling under the spell of Faith Green, an enigmatic and ruthless MI6 handler, he becomes ‘her spy�, unable to resist her demands. But amid the peril, paranoia and passion consuming Gabriel’s new covert life, it will be the revelations closer to home that change the rest of his story. .]]> 272 William Boyd 0241542073 Sue 0 to-read 4.10 2024 Gabriel's Moon
author: William Boyd
name: Sue
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Winter Grave 63126976
By contrast, melting ice sheets have brought the Gulf Stream to a halt and northern latitudes, including Scotland, are being hit by snow and ice storms. It is against this backdrop that Addie, a young meteorologist checking a mountain top weather station, discovers the body of a man entombed in ice.

The dead man is investigative reporter, George Younger, missing for three months after vanishing during what he claimed was a hill-walking holiday. But Younger was no hill walker, and his discovery on a mountain-top near the Highland village of Kinlochleven, is inexplicable.

Cameron Brodie, a veteran Glasgow detective, volunteers to be flown north to investigate Younger's death, but he has more than a murder enquiry on his agenda. He has just been given a devastating medical prognosis by his doctor and knows the time has come to face his estranged daughter who has made her home in the remote Highland village.

Arriving during an ice storm, Brodie and pathologist Dr. Sita Roy, find themselves the sole guests at the inappropriately named International Hotel, where Younger's body has been kept refrigerated in a cake cabinet. But evidence uncovered during his autopsy places the lives of both Brodie and Roy in extreme jeopardy.

As another storm closes off communications and the possibility of escape, Brodie must face up not only to the ghosts of his past, but to a killer determined to bury forever the chilling secret that George Younger's investigations had threatened to expose.]]> 303 Peter May 1529428505 Sue 2 Really bad. 4.19 2023 A Winter Grave
author: Peter May
name: Sue
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/03
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves:
review:
Really bad.
]]> Pedro Páramo 1291958 Cuando al final de la década de los sesenta la narrativa hispanoamericana alcanzó un prestigio mundial, se volvió la vista atrás en busca de sus "clásicos". La figura gigantesca de Rulfo destacó inmediatamente. En 1955 aparece Pedro Páramo. Novela gestada largamente por un escritor con fama de poco prolífico y que aunó la propia tradición narrativa hispanoamericana con los principales renovadores de la occidental: Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf... Novela rica, apasionante como pocas, que arrastra al lector del desconcierto a la sugestión. Esta edición ofrece el texto definitivo de Pedro Páramo, corregido por la Fundación Juan Rulfo, incluye una nueva Introducción, varios Apéndices sobre variantes, cronología de la historia, anotaciones a los fragmentos y aclaraciones de Rulfo y un nuevo aparato de notas.

]]> 195 Juan Rulfo 8437604184 Sue 5 latinoamérica, mexico 4.16 1955 Pedro Páramo
author: Juan Rulfo
name: Sue
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1955
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/22
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: latinoamérica, mexico
review:
Didn't learn as much this time (2002).
]]> Creation Lake 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Sue 0 to-read 3.34 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Sue
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Postscript Murders (Harbinder Kaur #2)]]> 54577425 335 Elly Griffiths 0358419182 Sue 5 4.19 2020 The Postscript Murders (Harbinder Kaur #2)
author: Elly Griffiths
name: Sue
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/30
date added: 2024/08/30
shelves:
review:
Lots of twists and coincidences as well as intriguing, precious characters.
]]> August Snow (August Snow #1) 30278946
It's not long before he's summoned to the palatial Grosse Pointe Estates home of business magnate Eleanore Paget. Powerful and manipulative, Paget wants August to investigate the increasingly unusual happenings at her private wealth management bank. But detective work is no longer August's beat, and he declines. A day later, Paget is dead of an apparent suicide which August isn't buying for a minute.

What begins as an inquiry into Eleanore Paget's death soon drags August into a rat's nest of Detroit's most dangerous criminals, from corporate embezzlers to tattooed mercenaries. From the wealthy suburbs to the near-post-apocalyptic remains of the bankrupt city's factory districts, August Snow is a fast-paced tale of murder, greed, sex, economic cyber-terrorism, race and urban decay in modern Detroit.]]> 313 Stephen Mack Jones 1616957182 Sue 0 to-read 3.74 2017 August Snow (August Snow #1)
author: Stephen Mack Jones
name: Sue
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Last Word 194896889
Natalka and Edwin are perfect if improbable partners in a detective agency. At eighty-four, Edwin regularly claims that he’s the oldest detective in England. He is a master at surveillance, deploying his age as a cloak of invisibility. Natalka, Ukrainian-born and more than fifty years his junior, is a math whizz, who takes any cases concerning fraud or deception. Despite a steady stream of minor cases, Natalka is frustrated. She loves a murder, as she’s fond of saying, and none have come the agency’s way. That is until local writer Melody Chambers dies.

Melody’s daughters are convinced that their mother was murdered. Edwin thinks that Melody’s death is linked to that of an obituary writer who predeceased many of his subjects. Edwin and Benedict go undercover to investigate and are on a creative writing weekend at isolated Battle House when another murder occurs. Are the cases linked and what is the role of a distinctly sinister book group attended by many of writers involved? By the time Edwin has infiltrated the group, he is in serious danger…]]> 350 Elly Griffiths 0063374749 Sue 3 4.15 2024 The Last Word
author: Elly Griffiths
name: Sue
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/22
date added: 2024/08/22
shelves:
review:
Interesting quirky and in some cases, evil, characters. Lots of characters and lots of details.
]]> Fugitive Pieces 15836 Winner of the Lannan Literary Fiction Award
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Award

In 1940 a boy bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from the soldiers who murdered his family. His name is Jakob Beer. He is only seven years old. And although by all rights he should have shared the fate of the other Jews in his village, he has not only survived but been rescued by a Greek geologist, who does not recognize the boy as human until he begins to cry. With this electrifying image, Anne Michaels ushers us into her rapturously acclaimed novel of loss, memory, history, and redemption.

As Michaels follows Jakob across two continents, she lets us witness his transformation from a half-wild casualty of the Holocaust to an artist who extracts meaning from its abyss. Filled with mysterious symmetries and rendered in heart-stopping prose, Fugitive Pieces is a triumphant work, a book that should not so much be read as it should be surrendered to.]]> 294 Anne Michaels 0679776591 Sue 4 3.93 1996 Fugitive Pieces
author: Anne Michaels
name: Sue
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 1999/05/02
date added: 2024/08/15
shelves:
review:
How the holocaust shaped the lives of the two protagonists—a survivor and the son of survivors.
]]> Jackrabbit Skin 198619803 Secrets and rage can get under the skin in an unsettling short story by Ivy Pochoda, award-winning author of Sing Her Down and These Women.

Swan is a tattoo artist new to a community in the California desert when a mourning desert dweller named Kurt requests a tribute tattoo to his dead wife. Swan agrees, but the locals warn don’t indulge Kurt in his tragic memories. No wonder. As Kurt returns for more tattoos, the truth about his wife’s death begins to emerge in the ink. And it isn’t pretty.

Ivy Pochoda’s Jackrabbit Skin is part of Never Tell, a heart-pounding collection of stories about secrets, lies, and mind games. They can be read or listened to in one sitting. Just keep the endings to yourself.]]> 45 Ivy Pochoda 1662517084 Sue 4 3.37 2024 Jackrabbit Skin
author: Ivy Pochoda
name: Sue
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/12
date added: 2024/08/12
shelves:
review:
The author has created a creepy, threatening atmosphere and a strong sensation of loneliness and dread.
]]> Weird Lies 29486687 147 Cherry Potts Sue 2 2.00 2013 Weird Lies
author: Cherry Potts
name: Sue
average rating: 2.00
book published: 2013
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/19
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves:
review:
Not great. I wanted to read Peng Shepherd’s Free Cake and couldn’t find it anywhere else. Good story. The rest not so much.
]]> Beautiful Days: Stories 199468942 From New Yorker and Paris Review contributor Zach Williams comes a striking and savage debut story collection that confronts parenthood, mortality, and life’s broken promises.

A couple awakens in a home in the woods to find themselves rapidly aging as their toddler remains unchanged. A work-worn employee navigates conspiracy theories and the threat of violence in an abandoned office. A tour guide leads a troublesome group to an ancient structure, apparently nonhuman in origin, discovering along the way that the most mysterious creatures of all are right beside him.

These ten stories show the fallibility of time and how reality reveals itself behind the gauze of a dream—or a nightmare. Throughout, Williams illustrates how quickly we come to the edges of our patience and endurance, the hidden damages lurking in the shadows of the everyday, the distances we must travel to protect our families, and the tenuousness of even our deepest relationships. Williams sees the perversity in the mundane and dares readers to confront the power—and beauty—of time’s relentless movement.

With exquisite prose and a lacerating wit, Beautiful Days holds a mirror to the many absurdities of being human and refuses to let us look away.]]> 226 Zach Williams 0385550154 Sue 2 3.32 2024 Beautiful Days: Stories
author: Zach Williams
name: Sue
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/10
date added: 2024/08/10
shelves: short-stories, fiction, horror
review:
No. Creepy but not in an interesting way
]]> <![CDATA[Things Don't Break on Their Own]]> 203019749 259 Sarah Easter Collins 0593798333 Sue 0 to-read 3.74 2024 Things Don't Break on Their Own
author: Sarah Easter Collins
name: Sue
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 54 Miles: A Novel 205787244
Young Adam, who has been raised in Harlem by his white father, George, and Black mother, Thelma, goes back to his parents� home state of Alabama to participate in the voting rights campaign, only to be brutalized in the Bloody Sunday melee. He is still recovering from this when he is struck a heavy emotional blow, learning for the first time—and in the cruelest way imaginable—of a family secret that sends him spiraling and plunging further into danger. To save him, and any hope for their relationship, Thelma is drawn back, for the first time in twenty years, to the South she both hates and fears, and to a reckoning that may result in an incalculable loss.

Meanwhile, Thelma’s brother Luther is also spiraling, but in a different way. Forty-two years after his parents were lynched before his eyes, and twenty years after the man who led the lynch mob walked out of court a free man, Luther has just made a shocking discovery. He‘s found the murderer, Floyd Bitters, helpless and enfeebled in a rest home—unable to move or even to speak. The old man is literally at Luther’s mercy. And Luther, who has never overcome this trauma that defined his life, is suddenly forced to relive it all again as he grapples with the awful question of what justice now demands.]]> 336 Leonard Pitts Jr. 1572848847 Sue 3 4.63 54 Miles: A Novel
author: Leonard Pitts Jr.
name: Sue
average rating: 4.63
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/09
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: african-american, civil-rights, historical-novels
review:
A narrative about a family destroyed by white hate and violence.
]]> <![CDATA[The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories]]> 99300
Written from a feminist perspective, often focusing on the inferior status accorded to women by society, the tales include "turned," an ironic story with a startling twist, in which a husband seduces and impregnates a naïve servant; "Cottagette," concerning the romance of a young artist and a man who's apparently too good to be true; "Mr. Peebles' Heart," a liberating tale of a fiftyish shopkeeper whose sister-in-law, a doctor, persuades him to take a solo trip to Europe, with revivifying results; "The Yellow Wallpaper"; and three other outstanding stories.

These charming tales are not only highly readable and full of humor and invention, but also offer ample food for thought about the social, economic, and personal relationship of men and women � and how they might be improved.

Collects:
—The Yellow Wallpaper
—Three Thanksgivings
—The Cottagette
—TܰԱ
—Making a Change
—If I Were a Man
—Mr. Peebles' Heart]]> 129 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 0486298574 Sue 5 4.05 1892 The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: Sue
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1892
rating: 5
read at: 2016/05/02
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: feminism, american-classics, american-fiction, horror
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm]]> 209594 304 Jacob Grimm 0486210804 Sue 5 4.01 1812 Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm
author: Jacob Grimm
name: Sue
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1812
rating: 5
read at: 2015/12/27
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:

]]> Absinthe: A Thriller 36223239 377 Guido Eekhaut Sue 3 4.09 Absinthe: A Thriller
author: Guido Eekhaut
name: Sue
average rating: 4.09
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2022/02/11
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: fiction, nordic-mysteries, not-for-me, political-novels, skipped-to-the-end
review:
Tedious, plodding, boring characters. Corruption, corruption, and more corruption.
]]> Those People 42602092 From the internationally bestselling author of Our House, a new addictive novel of domestic suspense that dives into the world of suburban neighborhood drama and asks, "Could your neighbor make you angry enough to kill?"

Lowland Way is the epitome of the suburban dream. Every house and yard is carefully maintained for maximum curb appeal, and everyone knows one another and gets along. One homeowner, Sissy Watkins, runs a successful B and B from her house. Two brothers and their families live next door to each other. It's the picture-perfect neighborhood.

When Darren Booth and his girlfriend, Jodie, move in across from Sissy, it doesn't take long for them to begin making trouble. They're loud, rude, messy, and don't play by the community rules. They blast music at all hours and have started an unsightly renovation on their house. Before long, guests don't want to stay at Sissy's B and B, and everyone is fed up with the new neighbors.

An all-out war is brewing on Lowland Way. When a person is killed, accusations start flying. Someone is dead, and everyone has something to hide....]]> 368 Louise Candlish 0451489152 Sue 4 3.49 2019 Those People
author: Louise Candlish
name: Sue
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/14
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: british, fiction, mysteries, class
review:
When our property, lifestyle, and families are threatened we revert to some primordial state. Is that the point? A satire of the shallow, petty, materialistic, egocentric “new rich� ? Also, the upper middle class families in the neighborhood seem to get along so well but when things get difficult their relationships fall apart.
]]> The Fortress 50374795
Jonathon has offered himself as a supplicant in The Fortress after his pregnant wife Adalia discovered the ugly sexual violence pervading his top-tier firm. She has agreed to continue their fractured relationship on the condition he enter The Fortress for one year.

Jonathon is utterly unprepared for what will happen to him over the course of the year � not only to his body, but his mind and his heart.

This absorbing, confronting and moving novel asks questions about consent, power, love and fulfilment. It asks what it takes for a man to change, and whether change is possible without a radical reversal of the conditions that seem normal.]]> 289 S.A. Jones Sue 4 The story is ok but I think there is too much emphasis on the physical side of things. ]]> 3.51 The Fortress
author: S.A. Jones
name: Sue
average rating: 3.51
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2020/12/26
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: australia, feminism, fiction, science-fiction
review:
Definitely not on the same level as Úrsula LeGuin nor even Sherri S. Tepper.
The story is ok but I think there is too much emphasis on the physical side of things.
]]> The Kind Worth Killing 74822944
In a tantalizing set-up reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith’s classic Strangers on a Train� On a night flight from London to Boston, Ted Severson meets the stunning and mysterious Lily Kintner. Sharing one too many martinis, the strangers begin to play a game of truth, revealing very intimate details about themselves. Ted talks about his marriage that’s going stale and his wife Miranda, who he’s sure is cheating on him. Ted and his wife were a mismatch from the start—he the rich businessman, she the artistic free spirit—a contrast that once inflamed their passion, but has now become a cliché.

But their game turns a little darker when Ted jokes that he could kill Miranda for what she’s done. Lily, without missing a beat, says calmly, “I’d like to help.� After all, some people are the kind worth killing, like a lying, stinking, cheating spouse. . . .

Back in Boston, Ted and Lily’s twisted bond grows stronger as they begin to plot Miranda's demise. But there are a few things about Lily’s past that she hasn’t shared with Ted, namely her experience in the art and craft of murder, a journey that began in her very precocious youth.

Suddenly these co-conspirators are embroiled in a chilling game of cat-and-mouse, one they both cannot survive . . . with a shrewd and very determined detective on their tail.]]> 320 Peter Swanson 006226754X Sue 0 to-read 4.02 2015 The Kind Worth Killing
author: Peter Swanson
name: Sue
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Dollmaker 44890966
Stitch by perfect stitch, Andrew Garvie makes exquisite dolls in the finest antique style. Like him, they are diminutive, but graceful, unique and with surprising depths. Perhaps that's why he answers the enigmatic personal ad in his collector's magazine.

Letter by letter, Bramber Winters reveals more of her strange, sheltered life in an institution on Bodmin Moor, and the terrible events that put her there as a child. Andrew knows what it is to be trapped; and as they knit closer together, he weaves a curious plan to rescue her.

On his journey through the old towns of England he reads the fairytales of Ewa Chaplin--potent, eldritch stories which, like her lifelike dolls, pluck at the edges of reality and thread their way into his mind. When Andrew and Bramber meet at last, they will have a choice--to remain alone with their painful pasts or break free and, unlike their dolls, come to life.]]> 415 Nina Allan 1590519949 Sue 5 3.79 2019 The Dollmaker
author: Nina Allan
name: Sue
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/04
date added: 2024/08/04
shelves: british, fiction, science-fiction
review:
First person narrator provides the frame for layers and layers of imbedded stories. Parallels and doubles via weird Polish fairytales.
]]> <![CDATA[J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature]]> 8425214
Anton Leist and Peter Singer have assembled an outstanding group of contributors who probe deeply into Coetzee's extensive and extraordinary corpus. They explore his approach to ethical theory and philosophy and pay particular attention to his representation of the human-animal relationship. They also confront Coetzee's depiction of the elementary conditions of life, the origins of morality, the recognition of value in others, the sexual dynamics between men and women, the normality of suppression, and the possibility of equality in postcolonial society. With its wide-ranging consideration of philosophical issues, especially in relation to fiction, this volume stands alone in its extraordinary exchange of ethical and literary inquiry.]]> 408 Anton Leist 0231148410 Sue 5 academic, africa-southern 4.50 2010 J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature
author: Anton Leist
name: Sue
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/01
date added: 2024/07/31
shelves: academic, africa-southern
review:
2 chapters Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year
]]> Lo que está en mi corazón 312974 Spanish 272 Marcela Serrano 8408043781 Sue 0 to-read 3.67 2001 Lo que está en mi corazón
author: Marcela Serrano
name: Sue
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mothers' Instinct 61467934 Soon to be a major US motion picture starring Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain, Mothers' Instinct is a dark, twisty domestic thriller in which the bond between two couples--best friends and next-door neighbors--mutates in dangerous and deadly ways in the wake of a tragic accident.

David and Laetitia Brunelle and Sylvain and Tiphaine Geniot are inseparable friends and next-door neighbors in a pretty, tranquil suburb. Their sons Milo and Maxime, born in the same year, grow up together as close as brothers. But when Maxime is killed in an accident, their idyllic world shatters. Maxime's parents, Sylvain and Tiphaine, are consumed by grief and bitterness, while David and Laetitia are wracked with guilt for their role in the tragedy. Soon the couples are barely speaking, although they maintain a polite facade.

Then a mysterious series of "accidents" begins to happen to Milo, raising Laetitia's suspicions. Are their former best friends trying to punish them by threatening their son? As an increasingly paranoid Laetitia frantically tries to protect Milo from harm, the little civility left between the two families curdles into outward hostility. Is Laetitia just imagining things? Or are Sylvain and Tiphaine secretly conspiring to exact their revenge . . . and if so, who will pay?

In her American debut, blockbuster Belgian author Barbara Abel plunges into the deepest, darkest corners of her characters' hearts and minds to explore the limits of friendship, the overwhelming power of maternal love, and how far hate, fear, and vengeance can drive us. Tense and blood-chilling, with a surprising final twist, Mothers' Instinct will keep you on edge until the final page.

Translated from the French by Susan Pickford]]> 352 Barbara Abel 0063306328 Sue 2 3.61 2013 Mothers' Instinct
author: Barbara Abel
name: Sue
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2013
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/26
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:
Maybe the film will be better.
]]> Civil Disobedience 18626866 33 Henry David Thoreau Sue 5 3.96 1849 Civil Disobedience
author: Henry David Thoreau
name: Sue
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1849
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/25
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Self-Reliance and Other Essays (Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy)]]> 123845 Essays, First Series (1841) and Essays, Second Series (1844), offer a representative sampling of his views outlining that moral idealism as well as a hint of the later skepticism that colored his thought. In addition to the celebrated title essay, the others included here are "History," "Friendship," "The Over-Soul," "The Poet," and "Experience," plus the well-known and frequently read Harvard Divinity School Address.]]> 117 Ralph Waldo Emerson 0486277909 Sue 4 academic, philosophy 4.13 1844 Self-Reliance and Other Essays (Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy)
author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
name: Sue
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1844
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/25
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves: academic, philosophy
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands]]> 154629339 For fans of Piranesi and The Midnight Library, a stunning historical fantasy novel set on a grand express train, about a group of passengers on a dangerous journey across a magical landscape

It is said there is a price that every passenger must pay. A price beyond the cost of a ticket.

There is only one way to travel across the Wastelands: on the Trans-Siberian Express, a train as famous for its luxury as for its danger. The train is never short of passengers, eager to catch sight of Wastelands creatures more miraculous and terrifying than anything they could imagine. But on the train's last journey, something went horribly wrong, though no one seems to remember what exactly happened. Not even Zhang Weiwei, who has spent her life onboard and thought she knew all of the train’s secrets.

Now, the train is about to embark again, with a new set of passengers. Among them are Marya Petrovna, a grieving woman with a borrowed name; Henry Grey, a disgraced naturalist looking for redemption; and Elena, a beguiling stowaway with a powerful connection to the Wastelands itself. Weiwei knows she should report Elena, but she can’t help but be drawn to her. As the girls begin a forbidden friendship, there are warning signs that the rules of the Wastelands are changing and the train might once again be imperiled. Can the passengers trust each other, as the wildness outside threatens to consume them all?]]> 310 Sarah Brooks Sue 3 Couldn’t quite finish this. 4.00 2024 The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands
author: Sarah Brooks
name: Sue
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/26
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:
Couldn’t quite finish this.
]]>