Eleanor's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 23 Apr 2025 20:20:31 -0700 60 Eleanor's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Love Me Tender 50371656
Constance Debré poursuit sa quête entamée avec Play Boy, celle du sens, de la vie juste, de la vie bonne. Après la question de l’identité se pose la question de l’autre et de l’amour sous toutes ses formes, de l’amour maternel aux variations amoureuses. Faut-il, pour être libre, accueillir tout ce qui nous arrive ? Faut-il tout embrasser, jusqu’� nos propres défaites ? Peut-on renverser le chagrin ?]]> 122 Constance Debré 2081471922 Eleanor 4 3.84 2020 Love Me Tender
author: Constance Debré
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2020
rating: 4
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]]> Elegy, Southwest 214152231 A timely and urgent novel following a young married couple on a road trip through the American southwest as they grapple with the breakdown of their relationship in the shadow of environmental collapse, for fans of Rachel Cusk and Sigrid Nunez.

In November 2018, Eloise and Lewis rent a car in Las Vegas and take off on a two-week road trip across the American southwest. While wildfires rage, the married couple make their way through Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah, tracing the course of the Colorado River, the aquatic artery on which the Southwest depends for survival. Lewis, an artist working for a prominent land art foundation, is grieving the recent death of his mother, while Eloise is an academic researching the past and future of the Colorado River as it threatens to run dry.

Over the course of their trip, Eloise, beginning to suspect she might be pregnant, helplessly witnesses Lewis’s descent as he struggles to find a place for himself in the desert where he never quite felt at home.

Elegy, Southwest is a novel which entwines a tragic love story with an intelligent and profound consideration of the way we now live alongside environmental breakdown; an elegy for lost love and for the landscape that makes us.]]> 288 Madeleine Watts 1668051621 Eleanor 4 3.91 2025 Elegy, Southwest
author: Madeleine Watts
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2025
rating: 4
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]]> Memorial Days 212806569 A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey topeace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of�Horse

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz � just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy � collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at Lambert’s Cove. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the varied waysthose ofother cultures grieve, such as the people of Australia's First Nations, the Balinese, and the Iranian Shiites, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between soulsthat exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.]]> 224 Geraldine Brooks 059365398X Eleanor 5 4.34 2025 Memorial Days
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 5
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Eleanor 5 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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]]> Orbital 123136728
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?]]> 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 Eleanor 4 3.55 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> This Is Happiness 42972008
For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now � just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity � the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.

As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world.

Harking back to a simpler time, This Is Happiness is a tender portrait of a community � its idiosyncrasies and traditions, its paradoxes and kindnesses, its failures and triumphs � and a coming-of-age tale like no other. Luminous and lyrical, yet anchored by roots running deep into the earthy and everyday, it is about the power of stories: their invisible currents that run through all we do, writing and rewriting us, and the transforming light that they throw onto our world.]]> 400 Niall Williams 163557420X Eleanor 5 4.18 2019 This Is Happiness
author: Niall Williams
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2019
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> In the Dream House 43317482 251 Carmen Maria Machado 1644450038 Eleanor 4 4.41 2019 In the Dream House
author: Carmen Maria Machado
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2019
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/03/22
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]]> The Season 214273049

She’s a passionate Western Bulldogs fan (with an imperfect grasp of the rules) who loves the epic theatre of AFL football. But her devotion to the under-16s offers her something else. This is her chance to connect with her youngest grandchild, to be close to him before he rushes headlong into manhood. To witness his triumphs and defeats, to fear for his safety in battle, to gasp and to cheer for his team as it fights for a place in the finals.


With her sharp eye, her generous wit and her warm humour, Garner documents this pivotal moment, both as part of the story and as silent witness. The Season is an unexpected and exuberant a celebration of the nobility, grace and grit of team spirit, a reflection on the nature of masculinity, and a tribute to the game’s power to thrill us.]]> 0 Helen Garner 1922791814 Eleanor 4 4.12 2024 The Season
author: Helen Garner
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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]]> West 35297141
West is the story of Bellman's journey and of Bess, waiting at home for her father to return.]]> 160 Carys Davies 1501179349 Eleanor 4 3.67 2018 West
author: Carys Davies
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2018
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/03/15
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]]> Death of a River Guide 548370 382 Richard Flanagan 1843542196 Eleanor 4 3.93 1994 Death of a River Guide
author: Richard Flanagan
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1994
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/03/13
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]]> The Burrow 205973370
“How rare, this delicacy—this calm, sweet, desolated wisdom.”—Helen Garner

The Burrow follows members of the Lee family as they navigate grief and hope in their quiet Australian Jin, an emergency physician and father; Amy, a published author and mother; Lucie, their bookish and introverted ten-year-old; and Pauline, Amy’s mother who’s trying to make amends. Racked with grief for Ruby—Lucie’s baby sister who died in a shocking accident—the family adopts a rabbit in the hopes of bringing much-needed cheer to their home. At first, each family member benefits from the distraction of a new and needy creature, but when a violent home invasion breaks their fragile sense of peace, the family is forced to confront the terrible circumstances surrounding Ruby’s death.Atmospheric and tautly lyrical, Melanie Cheng’s slim novel brings together four distinct perspectives—and one wide-eyed rabbit—to reveal the enormity of loss, long-buried family secrets, and how to survive in a newfound world after the ultimate tragedy.]]> 200 Melanie Cheng 1959030868 Eleanor 5 3.99 2024 The Burrow
author: Melanie Cheng
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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]]> Clear 176443690
Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies's intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.]]> 196 Carys Davies 1668030667 Eleanor 5 3.85 Clear
author: Carys Davies
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.85
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rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World]]> 208840291 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

As indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love.

Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”]]> 112 Robin Wall Kimmerer 1668072246 Eleanor 5 4.38 2024 The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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]]> Tin Man 31117613
Ellis and Michael are twelve when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of an overbearing father. And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more.

But then we fast forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question, what happened in the years between?

This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that.]]> 213 Sarah Winman 0755390962 Eleanor 4 3.94 2017 Tin Man
author: Sarah Winman
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2017
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/02/15
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]]> <![CDATA[The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies]]> 205363941 A feast of observations about everything from the particular beauty of lemons on a table, to the allure of Colette, to the streets of Paris, by the inimitable Deborah Levy.

Deborah Levy’s vital literary voice speaks about many things.

On footwear: “It has always been very clear to me that people who wear shoes without socks are destined to become my friends and lovers.� On public parks: “A civic garden square gentles the pace of the city that surrounds it, holding a thought before it scrambles.� On Elizabeth Hardwick: “She understands what is at stake in literature.� On the conclusion of a marriage: “It doesn’t take an alien to tell us that when love dies we have to find another way of being alive.�

Levy shares with us her most tender thoughts as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of different literary imaginations; each page is a beautiful, questioning composition of the self. The Position of Spoons is full of wisdom and astonishments and brings us into intimate conversation with one of our most insightful, intellectually curious writers.]]> 176 Deborah Levy 0374614970 Eleanor 4 3.53 2023 The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies
author: Deborah Levy
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2023
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> <![CDATA[On this Ground: Best Australian Nature Writing]]> 223905526 At the same time as many of us tune in to natural landscapes, our environment is imperilled as never before. We are in the midst of a climate emergency that is challenging the future of our species, and all living creatures we share the earth with.
This unique collection of Australia’s best new nature writing gathers together some of our most widely known and most original voices to reflect on our relationship with nature.
These pieces, by turns compelling, urgent, poignant and passionate, offer an insight into the wonder of the natural world around us, and form a clarion call for its protection.
With an introduction from Dave Witty, and featuring contributors including Tim Winton, Bruce Pascoe and Inga Simpson, this collection makes the perfect summer read or gift for the nature-lover in your life.
Praise for What the Trees See:
‘Fascinating and revelatory� � Kate Holden
‘The story of learning a landscape� � Billy Griffiths]]> Dave Witty 1923192957 Eleanor 5 4.88 On this Ground: Best Australian Nature Writing
author: Dave Witty
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.88
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rating: 5
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]]> Elmet 35711376 Fresh and distinctive writing from an exciting new voice in fiction, Elmet is an unforgettable novel about family, as well as a beautiful meditation on landscape.

Daniel is heading north. He is looking for someone. The simplicity of his early life with Daddy and Cathy has turned sour and fearful. They lived apart in the house that Daddy built for them with his bare hands. They foraged and hunted. When they were younger, Daniel and Cathy had gone to school. But they were not like the other children then, and they were even less like them now. Sometimes Daddy disappeared, and would return with a rage in his eyes. But when he was at home he was at peace. He told them that the little copse in Elmet was theirs alone. But that wasn't true. Local men, greedy and watchful, began to circle like vultures. All the while, the terrible violence in Daddy grew.

Atmospheric and unsettling, Elmet is a lyrical commentary on contemporary society and one family's precarious place in it, as well as an exploration of how deep the bond between father and child can go.

]]> 311 Fiona Mozley 1473660548 Eleanor 5 3.77 2017 Elmet
author: Fiona Mozley
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2017
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/01/18
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]]> Parade 195790675
Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.

In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.

When a mother dies, her children confront her the stories she told; the roles she assigned to them; the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

An artist takes on a series of pseudonyms to conceal his work from his mother and father. His brother does the opposite. They share the same parents, but they’ve inherited different things.

Parade is a story that confronts and demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell a true story—about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.]]> 198 Rachel Cusk 0374610045 Eleanor 4 3.55 2024 Parade
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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]]> Jessie Traill: A Biography 49336682 448 Jo Oliver 1925984109 Eleanor 4 3.83 Jessie Traill: A Biography
author: Jo Oliver
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.83
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rating: 4
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date added: 2025/01/06
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]]> The World Was Whole 42079994
Our bodies and homes are our shelters, each one intimately a part of the other. But what about those who feel anxious, uncomfortable, unsettled within these havens? In The World Was Whole, Fiona Wright examines how we inhabit and remember the familiar spaces of our homes and suburbs, as we move through them and away from them into the wider world, devoting ourselves to the routines and rituals that make up our lives. These affectingly personal essays consider how all-consuming the engagement with the ordinary can be, and how even small encounters and interactions can illuminate our lives.

Many of the essays are set in the inner and south-western suburbs of a major Australian city in the midst of rapid change. Others travel to the volcanic coastline of Iceland, the mega-city of Shanghai, the rugged Surf Coast of southern Victoria. The essays are poetic and observant, and often funny, animated by curiosity and candour. Beneath them all lies the experience of chronic illness and its treatment, and the consideration of how this can reshape and reorder our assumptions about the world and our place within it.]]> 256 Fiona Wright 1925336972 Eleanor 4 4.32 The World Was Whole
author: Fiona Wright
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.32
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rating: 4
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]]> The Lives of Rocks 14223 211 Rick Bass 0618596747 Eleanor 4 4.08 2006 The Lives of Rocks
author: Rick Bass
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2006
rating: 4
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]]> The Hermit's Story 14230 179 Rick Bass 0618380442 Eleanor 4 4.10 2002 The Hermit's Story
author: Rick Bass
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2002
rating: 4
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]]> Highway Thirteen: Stories 195791203
In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged for a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims� families, but its impact travels even into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes.

Highway Thirteen , Fiona McFarlane’s newest collection, takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much through the investigation of the aftermath of this violence across time and place, from the killer’s childhood town to Texas, Rome, and tropical northern Australia, McFarlane presents an oblique, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost.

What damages, big and small, do these crimes incur? How do communities make sense of such atrocities? How does the mourning of families sit alongside the public fascination with terrible crimes? And can we tell true crime stories without centering the killers? From the acclaimed author of The Sun Walks Down and The High Places comes a captivating account of loss and its extended echoes in individual lives.]]> 272 Fiona McFarlane 0374606269 Eleanor 4 3.68 2024 Highway Thirteen: Stories
author: Fiona McFarlane
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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]]> Dusk 213854079 272 Robbie Arnott 176156353X Eleanor 4 4.22 2024 Dusk
author: Robbie Arnott
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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]]> Theory & Practice 212351691
Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.

Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.]]> 192 Michelle de Kretser 1923059114 Eleanor 4 3.82 2024 Theory & Practice
author: Michelle de Kretser
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[Profiles of a Lost World: Memoirs of East European Jewish Life Before World War Ii (Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology)]]> 1445518
Abramowicz was a witness to war, revolution and major cultural transformations in the Jewish world. His essays, written and originally published in Yiddish between 1920 and 1955, document the local history of Lithuanian Jewry in rural and small-town settings, and in the city of Vilna―the "Jerusalem of Lithuania"―which was a major center of East European Jewish intellectual and cultural life. They shed light on the daily life of Jews and the flourishing of modern Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe during the early 20th century and offer a personal perspective on the rise of Jewish radical politics.

The collection incorporates local history of Lithuanian Jewry, shtetl folklore, observations on rural occupations, Jewish education, and life under German occupation during World War I. It also includes a series of profiles of leading social and intellectual Jewish personalities of the author's day, from traditional scholars to revolutionaries. Together the selections provide a blend of social and personal history and a window on a lost world.]]> 385 Hirsz Abramowicz 0814327842 Eleanor 0 currently-reading 4.00 1999 Profiles of a Lost World: Memoirs of East European Jewish Life Before World War Ii (Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology)
author: Hirsz Abramowicz
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/18
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]]> The Safekeep 199798201
A house is a precious thing...

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

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

Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is a brilliantly plotted and provocative debut novel you won’t soon forget.]]> 272 Yael van der Wouden 1668034344 Eleanor 5 4.05 2024 The Safekeep
author: Yael van der Wouden
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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If there were six stars I would give them.
]]> Mr Wigg 17408906
It's the summer of 1971, not far from the stone-fruit capital of New South Wales, where Mr Wigg lives on what is left of his family farm. Mrs Wigg has been gone a few years now and he thinks about her every day. He misses his daughter, too, and wonders when he'll see her again.

He spends his time working in the orchard, cooking and preserving his produce and, when it's on, watching the cricket. It's a full life. Things are changing though, with Australia and England playing a one-day match, and his new neighbours planting grapes for wine. His son is on at him to move into town but Mr Wigg has his fruit trees and his chooks to look after. His grandchildren visit often: to cook, eat and hear his stories. And there's a special project he has to finish ...

It's a lot of work for an old man with shaking hands, but he'll give it a go, as he always has.]]> 304 Inga Simpson 0733630197 Eleanor 4 4.12 2013 Mr Wigg
author: Inga Simpson
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2013
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/11/05
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]]> Lost & Found: A Memoir 57800384 Lost & Found, she weaves the story of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of the role that loss and discovery play in all of our lives. The resulting book is part memoir, part guidebook to living in a world that is simultaneously full of wonder and joy and wretchedness and suffering--a world that always demands both our gratitude and our grief. A staff writer at The New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, erudition, and wit about our finite yet infinitely complicated lives. Lost & Found is an enduring account of love in all its many forms from one of the great writers of our time.]]> 256 Kathryn Schulz 0525512462 Eleanor 5 4.08 2022 Lost & Found: A Memoir
author: Kathryn Schulz
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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]]> Creation Lake 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Eleanor 4 3.34 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/10/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Kings of the Yukon: One Summer Paddling Across the Far North]]> 36262373 One man's thrilling and transporting journey by canoe across Alaska in search of the king salmon

The Yukon river is 2,000 miles long, the longest stretch of free-flowing river in the United States. In this riveting examination of one of the last wild places on earth, Adam Weymouth canoes along the river's length, from Canada's Yukon Territory, through Alaska, to the Bering Sea. The result is a book that shows how even the most remote wilderness is affected by the same forces reshaping the rest of the planet.

Every summer, hundreds of thousands of king salmon migrate the distance of the Yukon to their spawning grounds, where they breed and die, in what is the longest salmon run in the world. For the communities that live along the river, salmon was once the lifeblood of the economy and local culture. But climate change and a globalized economy have fundamentally altered the balance between man and nature; the health and numbers of king salmon are in question, as is the fate of the communities that depend on them.

Traveling along the Yukon as the salmon migrate, a four-month journey through untrammeled landscape, Adam Weymouth traces the fundamental interconnectedness of people and fish through searing and unforgettable portraits of the individuals he encounters. He offers a powerful, nuanced glimpse into indigenous cultures, and into our ever-complicated relationship with the natural world. Weaving in the rich history of salmon across time as well as the science behind their mysterious life cycle, Kings of the Yukon is extraordinary adventure and nature writing at its most urgent and poetic.]]> 288 Adam Weymouth 0316396702 Eleanor 5 4.05 2018 Kings of the Yukon: One Summer Paddling Across the Far North
author: Adam Weymouth
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)]]> 204811915 People) of a novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.

With her remarkable insight into the human condition and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more—as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?�

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known—“unrecorded lives,� Olive calls them—reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”]]> 326 Elizabeth Strout 0593446097 Eleanor 4 3.98 2024 Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/10/02
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]]> Flying Lessons 15238565 However, when Ria makes a leap herself, she finds that the duties of belonging are not easily discarded.
With Flying Lessons Susan Johnson has created a powerful and involving novel about the continuities and contradictions of family.]]> 257 Susan Johnson 0571143660 Eleanor 5 3.88 1990 Flying Lessons
author: Susan Johnson
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1990
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/09/15
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]]> Ordinary Gods and Monsters 175737441 It was the end of some things, the beginning of so many others.

Nick Wheatley has finished high school, but he isn't ready for the rest of his life. His parents are getting divorced, his sister is downright weird and his best friend and neighbour, Marion, seems to have acquired a boyfriend.

One hot night, Marion's father is killed in a hit-and-run. There are no suspects and no leads. But a sly tip from the local psychic sends Nick and Marion into the undertow of a strange and sinister world they hadn't known existed in the suburbs - one of inscrutable gangsters, speed-dealing bikies and unpredictable, one-eyed conspiracy theorists.

It's a world they'll be lucky to survive.


Praise for Ordinary Gods and Monsters

' Ordinary Gods and Monsters is a glorious Mozart comic opera set in suburban Australia ... So exquisitely written, so precisely choreographed, that it compels you not so much to read along as sing along with it. Only when the laughs are done, and the curtain is falling, and you are applauding like mad, do you realise that the tale has been much sadder than you expected it to be.' Aravind Adiga

'A perfect balance between dread and page-turning pleasure ... the compulsive narrative artfully blends coming-of-age, mystery, and thriller with a hint of the supernatural. I couldn't put it down.' Steve Toltz

'Beautiful, poignant and achingly nostalgic - Womersley's coming-of-age gem captures the wonder and loss of a simpler time.' Toni Jordan

'Chris Womersley's gods and monsters live in suburban backyards, bedrooms, playgrounds, cul-de-sacs and scraps of bush. Colouring this landscape with the vivid dreams and fears of childhood, he elevates it into a mythic realm, exciting and dangerous and a lot more. This novel is a work of magic. It's a note-perfect crime thriller for anyone who longs to see the world as new and to feel it as sharply as they did as a child.' Malcolm Knox

'A beautifully written novel that manages to be funny, suspenseful and incredibly tender.' Tara June Winch]]> 303 Chris Womersley 1761268813 Eleanor 4 3.80 2023 Ordinary Gods and Monsters
author: Chris Womersley
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/02
date added: 2024/09/02
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]]> Everything is Water 213151250 336 Simon Cleary 070226850X Eleanor 4 4.29 Everything is Water
author: Simon Cleary
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.29
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/09/01
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]]> Lilian's Story 1053463

]]> 280 Kate Grenville 1841959952 Eleanor 4 3.69 1984 Lilian's Story
author: Kate Grenville
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1984
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/27
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]]> Edenglassie 136335272 320 Melissa Lucashenko 0702266124 Eleanor 4 4.11 2023 Edenglassie
author: Melissa Lucashenko
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/17
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]]> <![CDATA[InnSaei: Icelandic wisdom for turbulent times]]> 195612081 ԲԳæ offers a compelling, honest and imaginative exploration about how nature, attention and deep breaths keep us grounded and safe by fuelling our creativity, intuition and sense of belonging - all encapsulated in this wonderful Icelandic word.'Innsaei (pronounced Inn-Sy-Eh) is an Icelandic word which, at its simplest level, means 'intuition'. There are deeper layers of meaning which help to explain the philosophy around the sea within, to see within and to see from the inside out. 'The sea within' implies the dynamic movement of the world within, which cannot be put into boxes or silos, because then it ceases to flow. 'To see within' means to know yourself well enough to be able to put yourself into other people's shoes and make connections that constantly regenerate you. And finally, 'to see from the inside out' implies a strong inner compass, that enables you to navigate and create your own path in the ever-changing ocean of life.This book by Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir follows a clear structure in which she explains each of these three strands and how they work together, offering the reader practical exercises such as grounding, gratitude, connection, mindfulness and breathing. Filled with case studies and stories from spiritual leaders, scientists and artists (including Marina Abramovich), it encapsulates Hrund's personal story, the principles of Innsaei as well as some content that speaks to wider global issues such as how we treat the planet.An alternative way of approaching life, ԲԳæ will show the reader how to harness your intuition and creativity and get the most out of living.]]> 186 GUNNSTEINSDÓTTIR HRUND 1788708768 Eleanor 4 3.41 InnSaei: Icelandic wisdom for turbulent times
author: GUNNSTEINSDÓTTIR HRUND
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.41
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/08/13
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]]> The Chronology of Water 9214995 The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch expertly moves the reader through issues of gender, sexuality, violence, and the family from the point of view of a lifelong swimmer turned artist. In writing that explores the nature of memoir itself, her story traces the effect of extreme grief on a young woman's developing sexuality that some define as untraditional because of her attraction to both men and women. Her emergence as a writer evolves at the same time and takes the narrator on a journey of addiction, self-destruction, and ultimately survival that finally comes in the shape of love and motherhood.]]> 310 Lidia Yuknavitch 0979018838 Eleanor 3 4.24 2011 The Chronology of Water
author: Lidia Yuknavitch
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/08/08
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]]> The Lost Daughter 1058564
But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina’s family.]]> 140 Elena Ferrante 1933372427 Eleanor 5 3.70 2006 The Lost Daughter
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> The Carhullan Army 777570
But up in the far north of Cumbria, Jackie and a group of fellow rebel women have escaped The Authority's repressive regime and formed their own militia. Sister, brought to breaking point by the restrictions imposed on her own life, decides to join them. Though her journey is frightening and dangerous, she believes her struggle will soon be over. But Jackie's single-minded vision for the army means that Sister must decide all over again what freedom is, and whether she is willing to fight for it.]]> 224 Sarah Hall 0571236596 Eleanor 4 3.48 2007 The Carhullan Army
author: Sarah Hall
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/05
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]]> The Topeka School 43565369 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century: a tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the New Right

Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of �97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting “lost boys� to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart―who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father’s patient―into the social scene, to disastrous effect.

Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane’s reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan’s marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.]]> 282 Ben Lerner 0374277788 Eleanor 4 3.51 2019 The Topeka School
author: Ben Lerner
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/07/31
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]]> Question 7 179455076
At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.]]> 280 Richard Flanagan 1761343467 Eleanor 4 4.19 2023 Question 7
author: Richard Flanagan
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/07/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon]]> 62594253

Through the vibrant letters and diaries of the two women, science journalist Melissa L. Sevigny traces their forty-three-day journey, during which they ran rapids, chased a runaway boat, and turned their harshest critic into an ally. Their story is a spellbinding adventure of two women who risked their lives to make an unprecedented botanical survey of a little-known corner of the American West at a time when human influences had begun to change it forever.]]> 304 Melissa L. Sevigny 0393868230 Eleanor 5 4.12 2023 Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon
author: Melissa L. Sevigny
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/27
date added: 2024/07/27
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]]> Dream Work 536668 90 Mary Oliver 0871130696 Eleanor 5 4.35 1986 Dream Work
author: Mary Oliver
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1986
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/07/23
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]]> Moon Palace 447
Beginning during the summer that men first walked on the moon, and moving backward and forward in time to span three generations, Moon Palace is propelled by coincidence and memory, and illuminated by marvelous flights of lyricism and wit. Here is the most entertaining and moving novel yet from an author well known for his breathtaking imagination.]]> 320 Paul Auster 0140115854 Eleanor 4 3.99 1989 Moon Palace
author: Paul Auster
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1989
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/22
date added: 2024/07/22
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]]> <![CDATA[How Many More Women?: Exposing how the law silences women]]> 63031035 408 Jennifer Robinson 1761064649 Eleanor 0 4.35 How Many More Women?: Exposing how the law silences women
author: Jennifer Robinson
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.35
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/16
date added: 2024/07/16
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine]]> 365461
The first memoir of its kind by a Palestinian living in the occupied territories, Strangers in the House offers a moving description of daily life for those who have chosen to remain on their land. It is also the family drama of a difficult relationship between an idealistic son and his politically active father, complicated by the arbitrary humiliation of the "occupier's law."]]> 238 Raja Shehadeh 0142002933 Eleanor 0 3.88 2001 Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine
author: Raja Shehadeh
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/16
date added: 2024/07/16
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]]> Molly 101137620 A gripping, unforgettable memoir from one of the best, most original writers of the 21st century.

Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents.

Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly’s death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was.

A masterpiece of autobiography, Molly is a riveting journey into the darkest and most unthinkable parts of the human heart, emerging with a hard-won, unsurpassedly beautiful understanding that expands the possibilities of language to comprehend and express true love.

Unrelentingly clear, honest and concise, Molly approaches the impossible directly, with a total empathy that has no parallel or precedent. A supremely important work that will be taught, loved, relied on and passed around for years to come, Blake Butler affirms now beyond question his position at the very top rank of writers.]]> 320 Blake Butler 1648230377 Eleanor 3 3.61 2023 Molly
author: Blake Butler
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2023
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/07/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Tall Man: The Death of Doomadgee]]> 3901371 In 2004 on Palm Island, an Aboriginal settlement in the "Deep North" of Australia, a thirty-six-year-old man named Cameron Doomadgee was arrested for swearing at a white police officer. Forty minutes later he was dead in the jailhouse. The police claimed he'd tripped on a step, but his liver was ruptured. The main suspect was Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley, a charismatic cop with long experience in Aboriginal communities and decorations for his work.

Chloe Hooper was asked to write about the case by the pro bono lawyer who represented Cameron Doomadgee's family. He told her it would take a couple of weeks. She spent three years following Hurley's trail to some of the wildest and most remote parts of Australia, exploring Aboriginal myths and history and the roots of brutal chaos in the Palm Island community. Her stunning account goes to the heart of a struggle for power, revenge, and justice. Told in luminous detail, Tall Man is as urgent as Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and The Executioner's Song. It is the story of two worlds clashing -- and a haunting moral puzzle that no reader will forget.

]]> 258 Chloe Hooper 1416561595 Eleanor 5 4.26 2008 Tall Man: The Death of Doomadgee
author: Chloe Hooper
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2008
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/07/11
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]]> The Thinning 212267810 'Storytelling at its best. I was enthralled' Sara Winman
(on Inga Simpson's Willowman)

'We haven't always lived like this . . .'

Fin grew up by an observatory, learning about telescopes and planets, inspired by the passions of her mother and father, then leaders in their fields of astrophotography and astronomy. Those days are long over. Now Fin, her mother Dianella, and a band of outliers live deep off the grid, always on amber alert and always ready to run.

In the outside world, things are not extinctions and a loss of diversity threaten what's left of the environment. With a new disaster looming, Fin finds herself thrust into an unlikely partnership with a stranger who has appeared in their camp. Terry is one of a new breed of evolved humans, the Incompletes, who are widely distrusted. But the pair will need to work together during a dangerous journey if they are to play their part in a plan to help restore the natural world - and humankind.

The Thinning is both an exquisitely written novel of nature and urgent psychological suspense by the bestselling and acclaimed author of Willowman, The Last Woman in the World and Mr Wigg.]]> 320 Inga Simpson Eleanor 5 3.84 2024 The Thinning
author: Inga Simpson
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/06/23
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]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Eleanor 4 3.52 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/06/19
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]]> Wrong Norma 175416227 The New Yorker and The Paris Review.

Anne Carson is probably our most celebrated living poet, winner of countless awards and routinely tipped for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Famously reticent, asking that her books be published without cover copy, she has agreed to say this: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night, Sokrates, writing sonnets, forensics, encounters with lovers, the word ‘idea�, the feet of Jesus, and Russian thugs. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong�.�]]> 0 Anne Carson 1529919983 Eleanor 5 4.21 2024 Wrong Norma
author: Anne Carson
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/06/14
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]]> Kairos 58877223 379 Jenny Erpenbeck 332860085X Eleanor 5 3.35 2021 Kairos
author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/06/03
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]]> Lighthousekeeping 15052
One of the most original and extraordinary writers of her generation, Jeanette Winterson has created a modern fable about the transformative power of storytelling.]]> 232 Jeanette Winterson 0156032899 Eleanor 5 3.89 1997 Lighthousekeeping
author: Jeanette Winterson
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/05/27
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]]> The Bee Sting 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 Eleanor 5 3.92 2023 The Bee Sting
author: Paul Murray
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/05/20
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]]> Bird Life 75660871 The second novel by Booker Prize-longlisted author Anna Smaill. A lyrical and ambitious exploration of madness and what it is like to experience the world differently.

In Ueno Park, Tokyo, as workers and tourists gather for lunch, the pollen blows, a fountain erupts, pigeons scatter, and two women meet, changing the course of one another’s lives.

Dinah has come to Japan from New Zealand to teach English and grieve the death of her brother, Michael, a troubled genius who was able to channel his problems into music as a classical pianist—until he wasn’t. In the seemingly empty, eerie apartment block where Dinah has been housed, she sees Michael everywhere, even as she feels his absence sharply.

Yasuko is polished, precise, and keenly observant—of her students and colleagues at the language school, and of the natural world. When she was thirteen, animals began to speak to her, to tell her things she did not always want to hear. She has suppressed these powers for many years, but sometimes she allows them to resurface, to the dismay of her adult son, Jun. One day, she returns home, and Jun has gone. Even her special gifts cannot bring him back.

As these two women deal with their individual traumas, they form an unlikely friendship in which each will help the other to see a different possible world, as Smaill teases out the tension between our internal and external lives and asks what we lose by having to choose between them.]]> 304 Anna Smaill 1957363541 Eleanor 4 3.45 2024 Bird Life
author: Anna Smaill
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/05/06
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]]> The Swift Dark Tide 145625020 The Swift Dark Tide is a story of selfhood and desire, of careful listening to an ungovernable heart.
Part memoir, part love letter, The Swift Dark Tide is also a chronicle of life by the sea, journeying between Melbourne’s St Kilda and the Black Sea town of Odessa. Katia Ariel introduces us to a lineage of soulful, strident women and beautifully nuanced men. She invites us into home and heart to witness love, loss and joy, motherhood, daughterhood and the urgent wildness of the body.
Praise for The Swift Dark
‘A lyrical memoir of family, inheritance and queer becoming. Ariel writes with the eyes of a poet and the heart of a true romantic. Her sentences are crystalline marvels, gifts to be savoured and held up to the light.� � Yves Rees, author of All About Yves
‘Alive with passion and pain, exquisitely metaphorical, Ariel’s memoir is a stunning feat of honesty. Not only a captivating story of one relationship and its breathtaking beginnings, it is also a journey of family, migration, motherhood, and entrusting ourselves to our hearts and bodies. The writing pulses with love, drawing meticulous connections between place, family and desire spanning continents, bodies and generations. Immerse yourself in Ariel’s richly poetic world and savour its visceral impact.� � Katherine Brabon, author of The Shut Ins and The Memory Artist
‘Rich and raw, lyrical, philosophical but also deeply moving, The Swift Dark Tide is that rare an unforgettable memoir.� � Nigel Featherstone, author of My Heart is a Little Wild Thing and Bodies of Men]]> 0 Katia Ariel 0645633712 Eleanor 4 3.79 2023 The Swift Dark Tide
author: Katia Ariel
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/04/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Harlem Shuffle (Ray Carney, #1)]]> 54626223 From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s.

“Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked…� To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver’s Row don’t approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it’s still home.

Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time.

Cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn’t ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn’t ask questions, either.

Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa—the “Waldorf of Harlem”—and volunteers Ray’s services as the fence. The heist doesn’t go as planned; they rarely do. Now Ray has a new clientele, one made up of shady cops, vicious local gangsters, two-bit pornographers, and other assorted Harlem lowlifes.

Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs?

Harlem Shuffle’s ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It’s a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem.

But mostly, it’s a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead.]]> 318 Colson Whitehead 0385545134 Eleanor 4 3.67 2021 Harlem Shuffle (Ray Carney, #1)
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/04/12
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]]> <![CDATA[Gum: The story of eucalypts & their champions]]> 148004097 320 Ashley Hay 1742238289 Eleanor 5 4.27 2002 Gum: The story of eucalypts & their champions
author: Ashley Hay
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2002
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/03/13
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]]> The Crying Room 145633576
When Bernie Rodgers and her husband move to the coastal town of Ballina, she finds that there is more than a physical distance separating her from her adult daughters. Bernie loves her daughters, but the problem she realises is with the way she loved them.

Bernie’s daughter Susie is professionally successful, but her feelings remain distant, even to herself. When she takes on the responsibility for caring for her niece, the pieces of her life finally snap into place. The inexplicable disappearance of an aeroplane though, plunges her life into mystery once again.

Morally acute and dazzlingly accomplished, this is an affecting novel about loneliness, love, family and the need to feel.]]> 246 Gretchen Shirm 0645565377 Eleanor 5 3.49 2023 The Crying Room
author: Gretchen Shirm
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/02/25
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]]> Things I Don't Want to Know 17329120 109 Deborah Levy 1907903631 Eleanor 5 4.13 2014 Things I Don't Want to Know
author: Deborah Levy
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/02/08
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]]> Forbidden Notebook 61026364 Quaderno Proibito is a classic domestic novel by the Italian-Cuban feminist writer Alba de Céspedes, whose work inspired contemporary writers like Elena Ferrante.

In this modern translation by acclaimed Elena Ferrante translator Ann Goldstein, Forbidden Notebook centers the inner life of a dissatisfied housewife living in postwar Rome.

Valeria Cossati never suspected how unhappy she had become with the shabby gentility of her bourgeois life—until she begins to jot down her thoughts and feelings in a little black book she keeps hidden in a closet. This new secret activity leads her to scrutinize herself and her life more closely, and she soon realizes that her individuality is being stifled by her devotion and sense of duty toward her husband, daughter, and son. As the conflicts between parents and children, husband and wife, and friends and lovers intensify, what goes on behind the Cossatis� facade of middle-class respectability gradually comes to light, tearing the family’s fragile fabric apart.

An exquisitely crafted portrayal of domestic life, Forbidden Notebook recognizes the universality of human aspirations.]]> 288 Alba de Céspedes 1662601395 Eleanor 5 4.20 1952 Forbidden Notebook
author: Alba de Céspedes
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1952
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/02/08
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]]> What You Can See from Here 54785530
On a beautiful spring day, a small village in Western Germany wakes up to an omen: Selma has dreamed of an okapi. Someone is about to die.

Luise, Selma’s ten-year-old granddaughter, looks on as the predictable characters of her small world begin acting strangely. Protesting that they are not superstitious, each of the villagers grapples with the buried secrets and deferred decisions that have suddenly become urgent in the face of death.

Luise’s mother struggles to decide whether to end her marriage. An old family friend, known only as the optician, tries to find the courage to tell Selma he loves her. Only Sad Marlies remains unchanged, still moping around her house and cooking terrible food. But when death finally comes, the circumstances are outside anyone’s expectations.

Across three defining moments in her life, Luise grapples with life's big questions alongside her devoted friends, young and old. A story about the absurdity of life and death, a bittersweet portrait of village life and the wider world that beckons beyond, it is also a thoughtful meditation on the way loss and love shape not just a person, but a community. Mariana Leky's What You Can See from Here is a charmer—a moving novel of grief, first love, reluctant love, late love, and finding one's place in the world, even if that place is right where you started.]]> 336 Mariana Leky 0374288828 Eleanor 4 4.11 2017 What You Can See from Here
author: Mariana Leky
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2017
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/01/25
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]]> <![CDATA[Strange Museums: A Journey Through Poland]]> 15699376 238 Fiona McGregor 1921401184 Eleanor 4 4.19 2008 Strange Museums: A Journey Through Poland
author: Fiona McGregor
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/12/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Secrets and Lies: A story of justice, perseverance and the life that comes after]]> 127401331
Secrets and Lies is a story about child sexual abuse. The culture that enabled it. How the perpetrator groomed his victims. How the abuse finally came to an end. And how, four decades after the crimes were committed, his victims embarked on a successful two-year journey to bring the offender to justice.

David Meagher delivers an intimate account of the lasting impact of child sexual abuse on survivors. From growing up gay in a censorious and very Catholic suburban environment to struggles with mental health and substance use, Secrets and Lies tells the full account of child sexual abuse. Meagher’s story, however, is ultimately one of hope and even a bit of humour. After all, it has a happy ending, or as near to one as is possible under the circumstances.]]> 257 David Meagher 1761045741 Eleanor 4 4.28 Secrets and Lies: A story of justice, perseverance and the life that comes after
author: David Meagher
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.28
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/12/13
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]]> Women & Children 198367720 211 Tony Birch 0702268143 Eleanor 4 4.20 2023 Women & Children
author: Tony Birch
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2023
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/12/03
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]]> Stone Yard Devotional 168632462 A deeply moving novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be 'good', from the award-winning author of The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend.

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

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

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

"Wood joins the ranks of writers such as Nora Ephron, Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout." THE GUARDIAN UK]]> 320 Charlotte Wood Eleanor 4 3.73 2023 Stone Yard Devotional
author: Charlotte Wood
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/11/27
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]]> The Mother 59733578 Just like the garden, the fuse box, the bills, bin night and blown light bulbs, this was just something else she'd now have to take care of herself.

Recently widowed, Miriam Duffy is a respectable North Shore real estate agent and devoted mother and grandmother. She was thrilled when her younger daughter Ally married her true love, but as time goes by Miriam wonders whether all is well with Ally, as she moves to the country and gradually withdraws, finding excuses every time Miriam offers to visit. Their relationship has always had its ups and downs, and Miriam tries to give her daughter the distance she so clearly wants. But is all as it seems?

When the truth of her daughter's situation is revealed, Miriam watches in disbelief as Ally and her children find themselves increasingly vulnerable and cut off from the world. As the situation escalates and the law proves incapable of protecting them, Miriam is faced with an unthinkable decision. But she will do anything for the people she loves most in the world. Wouldn't you?

A stunning, gripping novel that goes to the heart of a mother's love and asks what any of us might do when faced with a threat to the people we hold most dear.]]> 368 Jane Caro 1760879665 Eleanor 4 3.88 2022 The Mother
author: Jane Caro
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2022
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/11/22
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]]> <![CDATA[This Ragged Grace: A Memoir of Recovery and Renewal]]> 123237416
This Ragged Grace tells the story of Octavia's journey to recovery from alcohol addiction, and the parallel story of her father's descent into Alzheimer's. Looking back over this time, each of the seven chapters explores the feelings and experiences of the corresponding year of recovery, tracing the shift in emotion and understanding that comes with the deepening connection to this new way of life. Over the course of this seven-year period, life continues to unfold. Paths are abandoned, people fall ill, waters get choppy, seemingly impossible things are navigated without the old fixes.

As Octavia moves between London, the island of Stromboli, New York, Cornwall and Margate, each place offers something new but ultimately always delivers the same message: that wherever you go, you take yourself with you.]]> 257 Octavia Bright 1838857478 Eleanor 5 4.30 2023 This Ragged Grace: A Memoir of Recovery and Renewal
author: Octavia Bright
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/11/22
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]]> The Vaster Wilds 62952130
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 0593418395 Eleanor 5 3.73 2016 The Vaster Wilds
author: Lauren Groff
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/11/12
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]]> Night Watch 62951865
The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee’s father, who left for the War and never returned. Meanwhile, in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility—the mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.]]> 276 Jayne Anne Phillips 0451493338 Eleanor 4 3.55 2023 Night Watch
author: Jayne Anne Phillips
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/11/08
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]]> Less (Arthur Less, #1) 39927096 You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years now engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes--it would all be too awkward--and you can’t say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of half-baked literary invitations you’ve received from around the world.

QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?

ANSWER: You accept them all.

If you are Arthur Less.

Thus begins an around-the-world-in-eighty-days fantasia that will take Arthur Less to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India and Japan and put thousands of miles between him and the problems he refuses to face. What could possibly go wrong?

Well: Arthur will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Sahara sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and arrive in Japan too late for the cherry blossoms. In between: science fiction fans, crazed academics, emergency rooms, starlets, doctors, exes and, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to see. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. The second phase of life, as he thinks of it, falling behind him like the second phase of a rocket. There will be his first love. And there will be his last.

A love story, a satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, by an author The New York Times has hailed as “inspired, lyrical,� “elegiac,� “ingenious,� as well as “too sappy by half,� Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.]]> 273 Andrew Sean Greer Eleanor 4 3.61 2017 Less (Arthur Less, #1)
author: Andrew Sean Greer
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/15
date added: 2023/10/15
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]]> Crying in H Mart 54814676
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band � and meeting the man who would become her husband � her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.

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

Vivacious, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.]]> 243 Michelle Zauner 0525657746 Eleanor 4 4.25 2021 Crying in H Mart
author: Michelle Zauner
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/13
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]]> Learned by Heart 62874041 Eliza and Lister have never been this wide-awake in their lives, and the Slope, with its curtains drawn wide, is bright with starlight. They talk in whispers, not to disturb the maids who lie sleeping on the other side of the box room. The question Eliza’s been needing to ask swells like a great berry in her mouth, and all at once she’s not scared to let it out, not scared at all, not scared of anything . . .

In 1805, fourteen-year-old Eliza Raine is a school girl at the Manor School for Young Ladies in York. The daughter of an Indian mother and a British father, Eliza was banished to this unfamiliar country as a little girl. When she first stepped off the King George in Kent, Eliza was accompanied by her older sister, Jane, but now she boards alone at the Manor, with no one left to claim her. She spends her days avoiding the attention of her fellow pupils until, one day, a fearless and charismatic new student arrives at the school. The two girls are immediately thrown together and soon Eliza’s life is turned inside out by this strange and curious young woman.

Learned by Heart, Emma Donoghue’s mesmerising new novel, tells the heartbreaking story of the tangled lives of two women whose intense, and unlikely, relationship will change them for ever.]]> 336 Emma Donoghue 0316564435 Eleanor 4 3.47 2023 Learned by Heart
author: Emma Donoghue
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/23
date added: 2023/09/23
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]]> Tom Lake 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Eleanor 4 3.92 2023 Tom Lake
author: Ann Patchett
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 4
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]]> Yellowface 59357120
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 329 R.F. Kuang Eleanor 4 3.84 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/09/16
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]]> Too Much Lip 40229412 A dark and funny new novel from the multi-award-winning author of Mullumbimby.

Wise-cracking Kerry Salter is part of an Aboriginal family living on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. She has spent a lifetime avoiding two things - her hometown and prison. But now her Pop is dying and she's an inch away from the lockup, so she heads south on a stolen Harley. Kerry plans to spend 24 hours, tops, over the border.

She quickly discovers, though, that Bundjalung country has a funny way of grabbing on to people. Old family wounds open as the Salters fight to stop the development of their beloved river. And the unexpected arrival on the scene of a good-looking dugai fella intent on loving her up only adds more trouble - but then trouble is Kerry's middle name. Gritty and darkly hilarious, Too Much Lip offers redemption and forgiveness where none seemed possible.]]> 328 Melissa Lucashenko 0702259969 Eleanor 5 4.03 2018 Too Much Lip
author: Melissa Lucashenko
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/09/16
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]]> After the Forest 65214189 After the Forest is a dark and enchanting fantasy debut from Kell Woods that explores the repercussions of a childhood filled with magic and a young woman contending with the truth of “happily ever after.�

Ginger. Honey. Cinnamon. Flour.

Twenty years after the witch in the gingerbread house, Greta and Hans are struggling to get by. Their mother and stepmother are long dead, Hans is deeply in debt from gambling, and the countryside lies in ruin, its people starving in the aftermath of a brutal war.

Greta has a secret, the witch's grimoire, secreted away and whispering in Greta's ear for the past two decades, and the recipe inside that makes the best gingerbread you've ever tasted. As long as she can bake, Greta can keep her small family afloat.

But in a village full of superstition, Greta and her mysteriously addictive gingerbread, not to mention the rumors about her childhood misadventures, is a source of gossip and suspicion.

And now, dark magic is returning to the woods and Greta's magic—magic she is still trying to understand—may be the only thing that can save her. If it doesn't kill her first.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 375 Kell Woods 1250852501 Eleanor 4 3.80 2023 After the Forest
author: Kell Woods
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/05
date added: 2023/09/05
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]]> The Sitter 184574744 180 Angela O'Keeffe 0702266345 Eleanor 5 3.76 2023 The Sitter
author: Angela O'Keeffe
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/08/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World]]> 60221974 384 Pádraig Ó Tuama 1324035471 Eleanor 5 4.55 2022 Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World
author: Pádraig Ó Tuama
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/23
date added: 2023/08/23
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]]> Song of the Sun God 34308632
The Song of the Sun God spans three continents and three generations of a family that remains dedicated to its homeland, whilst learning to embrace its new home.
This deeply moving saga is about the wisdom, mistakes and sacrifices of our past that enable us to live more freely in the future. It is about finding home and forgiving family.]]> 406 Shankari Chandran 9558897280 Eleanor 4 4.32 2017 Song of the Sun God
author: Shankari Chandran
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2017
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/08/22
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]]> Bright Dead Things 24945396
A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger and harrowing terror and loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact—tracing in intimate detail the various ways the speaker’s sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine� striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,� the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.]]> 105 Ada Limon 1571314717 Eleanor 5 4.21 2015 Bright Dead Things
author: Ada Limon
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/08/13
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]]> The Argonauts 22929741
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.

Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.]]> 160 Maggie Nelson 1555977073 Eleanor 5 4.04 2015 The Argonauts
author: Maggie Nelson
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/05
date added: 2023/08/05
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]]> <![CDATA[The Voice to Parliament Handbook: All the Detail You Need]]> 125121171
'We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.' These words from the Uluru Statement from the Heart are a heartfelt invitation from First Nations People to fellow Australians, who will have the opportunity to respond when the Voice referendum is put to a national vote by the Albanese Government.

Indigenous leader Thomas Mayo and acclaimed journalist Kerry O’Brien have written this handbook to answer the most commonly asked questions about why the Voice should be enshrined in the Constitution, and how it might function to improve policies affecting Indigenous communities, and genuinely close the gap on inequalities at the most basic level of human dignity.

A handy tool for people inclined to support a ‘yes� vote in the referendum, The Voice to Parliament Handbook reflects on this historic opportunity for genuine reconciliation, to right the wrongs and heal the ruptured soul of a nation. This guide offers simple explanations, useful anecdotes, historic analogies and visual representations, so you can share it among friends, family and community networks in the build-up to the referendum.

If the ‘yes� vote is successful this book will also become a keepsake of an important and emotional milestone in Australia's history.]]> 104 Thomas Mayo 1761440365 Eleanor 5 4.51 2023 The Voice to Parliament Handbook: All the Detail You Need
author: Thomas Mayo
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/31
date added: 2023/07/31
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]]> Salonika Burning 61404087
Amid the destruction, there are those who have come to the frontlines to heal: surgeons, ambulance drivers, nurses, orderlies and other volunteers. Four of these people—Stella, Olive, Grace and Stanley—are at the centre of Gail Jones’s extraordinary new novel, which takes its inspiration from the wartime experiences of Australians Miles Franklin and Olive King, and British painters Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer. In Jones’s imagination these four lives intertwine and ramify, compelled by the desire to create something meaningful in the ruins of a broken world.

Immersive and gripping, Salonika Burning illuminates not only the devastation of war but also the vast social upheaval of the times. It shows Gail Jones to be at the height of her powers.]]> 256 Gail Jones 192245883X Eleanor 5 3.58 Salonika Burning
author: Gail Jones
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.58
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/25
date added: 2023/07/25
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]]> The Four Winds 56049432
Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on the brink of a new and optimistic era. But for Elsa Wolcott, deemed too old to marry in a time when marriage is a woman’s only option, the future seems bleak. Until the night she meets Rafe Martinelli and decides to change the direction of her life. With her reputation in ruin, there is only one respectable choice: marriage to a man she barely knows.

By 1934, the world has changed; millions are out of work and drought has devastated the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as crops fail and water dries up and the earth cracks open. Dust storms roll relentlessly across the plains. Everything on the Martinelli farm is dying, including Elsa’s tenuous marriage; each day is a desperate battle against nature and a fight to keep her children alive.

In this uncertain and perilous time, Elsa—like so many of her neighbors—must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or leave it behind and go west, to California, in search of a better life for her family.

The Four Winds is a rich, sweeping novel that stunningly brings to life the Great Depression and the people who lived through it—the harsh realities that divided us as a nation and the enduring battle between the haves and the have-nots. A testament to hope, resilience, and the strength of the human spirit to survive adversity, The Four Winds is an indelible portrait of America and the American dream, as seen through the eyes of one indomitable woman whose courage and sacrifice will come to define a generation.]]> 464 Kristin Hannah 1760984868 Eleanor 0 4.36 2021 The Four Winds
author: Kristin Hannah
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/22
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]]> Mistakes and Other Lovers 124948121 -falling in love with the charismatic youth pastor, Mace, while engaged to her high school boyfriend
-breaking up with her fiancé the night before Valentine's Day
-walking out on her family
-dropping out of uni with no plan B
-ghosting her old friends
-kissing her new friends
-sleepless nights with beers and bongs and boys and girls.

But when Mace proposes to someone else, El's world finally breaks. Will she go back to the safe love she's always known, will Mace realise that she's the one, or will El forge her own path into the unknown?

Mistakes and Other Lovers explores the pressure, pain and freedom of being on the cusp of adulthood and realising things aren't what you thought they'd be. That disappointing the people you love (and yourself) is inevitable. That making mistakes might be the best thing you've ever done.


PRAISE FOR MISTAKES AND OTHER LOVERS

'Mistakes and Other Lovers heralds a bold new voice in Australian fiction. With a sharply-observed exploration of the anxieties and freedoms that come when seeking both selfhood and adulthood, Amy Lovat is one to watch.' Hannah Kent

'Amy Lovat is a captivating, evocative and stunning writer. Mistakes and Other Lovers is a spectacular debut with richly painted characters who delight and debauch in the messiness of love and youth.' Sally Hepworth

'Amy Lovat's writing is unflinching, vivid and pulsing with energy and desire. Reading her is like settling in for a juicy chat with your funniest, raunchiest, messiest friend.' Emily Maguire]]> 336 Amy Lovat 1761263730 Eleanor 4 3.46 Mistakes and Other Lovers
author: Amy Lovat
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.46
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/07/19
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]]> <![CDATA[The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels, #4)]]> 25242224 The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a lifelong friendship between two women with unmatched honesty and brilliance.

The Story of the Lost Child is the concluding volume in the dazzling saga of two women � the brilliant, bookish Elena, and the fiery, uncontainable Lila. Both are now adults, with husbands, lovers, aging parents, and children. Their friendship has been the gravitational center of their lives. Both women fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up � a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. In this final novel she has returned to Naples, drawn back as if responding to the city's obscure magnetism. Lila, on the other hand, could never free herself from the city of her birth. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect the neighborhood. Proximity to the world she has always rejected only brings her role as its unacknowledged leader into relief. For Lila is unstoppable, unmanageable, unforgettable.

The four volumes in this series constitute a long remarkable story that readers will return to again and again, and each return will bring with it new revelations.]]> 473 Elena Ferrante 1609452860 Eleanor 4 4.47 2014 The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels, #4)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2014
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/07/18
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]]> <![CDATA[My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)]]> 35036409 My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.]]> 331 Elena Ferrante Eleanor 5 4.08 2011 My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/07/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955�1964 (Biography)]]> 40890551 456 Tanya Dalziell 1925523098 Eleanor 4 3.70 Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955–1964 (Biography)
author: Tanya Dalziell
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.70
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/07/18
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]]> Willowman 61330932 Cricket has a willow heart. Batmakers around the world have tried everything, crafting bats from birch, maple, ash, even poplars . . . After two hundred years, cricket bat making is still beholden to a single species: salix alba caerulea - or white willow

Reader Cricket Bats, one of the last traditional batmakers back in the old country, has a contemporary home in the Antipodes, with Allan Reader keeping the family business alive in a small workshop. Allan lives alone, all but estranged from his adult daughter, quietly going about his days with the cricket commentary for company.

When Todd Harrow, a gifted young batter, catches Allan's eye, a spark is lit and Allan decides to make a Reader bat for him, selecting the best piece of willow he's harvested in years to do so.

As Harrow charts a meteoric rise to the highest echelons of the sport, leaving his equally talented sister's dreams in his wake, Allan's magical bat takes centre stage as well, awakening something in Allan and bringing him back into himself. But can Allan's fledgling renaissance - hanging as it does on the magic of that bat - carry on after Harrow is cursed by injury and a strained personal life?

Set as the new short form of the game began to gain prominence, Willowman is a love letter to the art and beauty of cricket and a meditation on the inner lives of certain kinds of men and women, for whom it is a way of life. Award-winning author Inga Simpson writes exquisitely about a national sport you will never view the same way again.]]> 403 Inga Simpson 0733634559 Eleanor 5 4.01 2022 Willowman
author: Inga Simpson
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/21
date added: 2023/06/21
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]]> Aphrodite's Breath 76754105

In life, as in myth, women are the ones who are supposed to stay home like Penelope, weaving at their looms, rather than leaving home like Odysseus. Meet eighty-five-year-old Barbara and her sixty-two-year-old writer-daughter Susan, who asked her mother-on a whim-if she wanted to accompany her to live on the Greek island of Kythera. What follows is a moving unravelling of the mother-daughter relationship told in irresistible prose.

Aphrodite's Breath is a strikingly original, funny and forensic examination of love and finding home, amid the stories of the people, olives and wonders of the birthplace of Aphrodite.

Susan Johnson's work has been longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award and shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Prize, the Voss Literary Prize, the Christina Stead Award, the National Biography Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, among others.]]> 0 Susan Johnson 1761186345 Eleanor 5 3.95 2023 Aphrodite's Breath
author: Susan Johnson
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/06/19
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]]> <![CDATA[How To Read Water: Clues & Patterns from Puddles to the Sea]]> 29396396
Includes over 700 clues, signs and patterns. From wild swimming in Sussex to wayfinding in Oman, via the icy mysteries of the Arctic, Tristan Gooley draws on his own pioneering journeys to reveal the secrets of ponds, puddles, rivers, oceans and more to show us all the skills we need to read the water around us.]]> 426 Tristan Gooley 1473615216 Eleanor 0 currently-reading 3.97 2016 How To Read Water: Clues & Patterns from Puddles to the Sea
author: Tristan Gooley
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/07
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us]]> 33786693 No Visible Bruises, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths: That if things were bad enough, victims would just leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response; that violence inside the home is separate from other forms of violence like mass shootings, gang violence, and sexual assault. Through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement, and reform movements from across the country, Snyder explores not only the dark corners of private violence, but also its far-reaching consequences for society, and what it will take to truly address it.]]> 320 Rachel Louise Snyder Eleanor 5 4.52 2019 No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us
author: Rachel Louise Snyder
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/31
date added: 2023/05/31
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]]> The World Beneath 6855229 When the perennially restless Rich decides to take Sophie, whom he hardly knows, on a trek into the Tasmanian wilderness, his overconfidence and her growing disillusion with him set off a chain of events that no one could have predicted. Instead of respect, Rich finds antagonism in his relationship with Sophie; and in the vast landscape he once felt an affinity for, he encounters nothing but disorientation and fear.
Ultimately all three characters will learn that if they are to survive, each must traverse not only the secret territories that lie between them but also those within themselves.]]> 342 Cate Kennedy 1921372966 Eleanor 4 3.51 2009 The World Beneath
author: Cate Kennedy
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2009
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/05/31
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]]> The Days of Abandonment 77810 The Days of Abandonment shocked and captivated its Italian public when first published. It is the gripping story of a woman's descent into devastating emptiness after being abandoned by her husband with two young children to care for. When she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.]]> 188 Elena Ferrante 1933372001 Eleanor 5 3.92 2002 The Days of Abandonment
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2002
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/05/21
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]]> Father of the Rain 7444174 Gardener Amory is a New England WASP who is beginning to feel the cracks in his empire. Nixon is about to be impeached, his wife is leaving him, and his worldview is rapidly becoming outdated. His daughter, Daley, has spent the first eleven years of her life carefully negotiating her parents� conflicting worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of her mother, and the conservative, liquor-soaked life of her father. But when they divorce, and Gardiner’s basest impulses are unleashed, the chasm quickly widens and Daley feels herself stretched thinly across it.
As she grows into adulthood, Daley rejects the narrow world that nourished her father’s fears and prejudices, and embarks on her own separate life—until he hits rock bottom. Lured back home by the dream of getting her father sober and rebuilding a trust that was broken years ago, Daley risks losing everything she has found beyond him, including her new love, Jonathan, who represents so much of what Daley’s father claims to hate, and who has given her so much of what he could never provide.
Intimate in its detail yet epic in range, Father of the Rain is a raw, compelling journey into the emotional complexities, mercurial contours, and magnetic pull of family. It is also the stunning portrait of a deeply complex man and his daughter’s fierce, primal attachment to him.]]> 354 Lily King 0802119492 Eleanor 4 3.95 2010 Father of the Rain
author: Lily King
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2010
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/05/08
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]]> Horse 59109077 A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history

Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack.

New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.

Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse--one studying the stallion's bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.

Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.]]> 401 Geraldine Brooks 0399562966 Eleanor 4 4.17 2022 Horse
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Eleanor
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/04
date added: 2023/05/04
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]]> Birnam Wood 60784757 Birnam Wood is on the move . . .

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker--or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.]]> 432 Eleanor Catton 0374110336 Eleanor 4 3.79 2023 Birnam Wood
author: Eleanor Catton
name: Eleanor
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/15
date added: 2023/04/15
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