Disarmingly cheerful, witty and bittersweet, this is the story of a woman who finds herself suddenly single, responsible for a deaf child and the winner of a huge lottery. She decides that a road trip to rethink her life is in order. It's an odd book. Characters they meet on the road often give little …
Continue reading Butterflies In November by Audur Ava Olafsdottir
Two intelligent misfits will finds their lives changed when a new tenant moves into their Paris apartment block. One at the end of her life, the intelligent concierge who hides herself in obscurity, and one beginning her life, a bright 12 year old girl who is frustrated with the hypocrisy of the people around her. …
Continue reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
Natalie is a social worker whose romance is going nowhere. Her boyfriend Carter is head of a group of activists, and although he's lovely, he frequently gets too caught up in changing the world to have time for her. When she follows him to the small town of Angel Landing, she moves in with her …
I loved this book. Loved loved loved it. I think it's because it's so honest and heartbreaking. Wild is the memoir of a 26 year old woman whose life falls apart, and to find herself, she hikes the PCT trail from California to Oregon alone. Four years before the hike, Cheryl lost her mother to …
Alice Hoffman mixes the magical with the everyday, the mystical with the mundane. In this story, two women find their lives mixed up when one of them finds out she's pregnant. Rae ran away with her high school boyfriend seven years ago, but finds herself run out on when she turns out to be pregnant. …
After losing three children to stillbirth, a lighthouse keeper's wife convinces her husband to keep a child that washes up in a boat on their island. But have they done the right thing? Is someone missing their child? What appears to be the right choice is often not simple. Tom's wife, Isabel, has been torn …
A gentle mix of modern life and ancient fairy tale, this book is about memory and childhood, magic and the mundane. Opening on an adult returning to his childhood home after the death of his parents, it soon slips into the half forgotten story of the man as a young boy. Starting with the suicide …
Continue reading The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman
I think what strikes you first about de Bernieres is how human is writing is. It's mundane, describes the ordinary, or perhaps ordinary people caught up in history, in change. While war wages around the sleeping, pastoral island of Cephallonia, for example, goats must still be milked, fathers scolded and meals shared, distant politics debated, …
Continue reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
