Neil Gaiman wrote the scary parts and Terry Pratchett wrote the funny bits but the scary parts are funny and the funny bits are a little scary. Armageddon has arrived and it’s up to Crowley, a demon who has a particular fondness for the world, and Aziraphale, an angel who wants everyone to be nice, […]
This combination of thriller, history, romance and physics is a whir of action, danger and close escapes. Miriam Abramov and her brilliant mathematician brother Vanya live in 1914 Kovno. She is the first female surgeon in the Jewish hospital, engaged to another doctor. Vanya is a lecturer at the university. Vanya is working desperately to […]
Daniel is one hundred and one, lying in a care home on his way to death. Elisabeth, his only visitor, is thirty-two. They have been kindred spirits since their first meeting when she was eight. This story of friendship weaves in and out of time in artistic language and imagery. The wordplay includes puns, repetition, […]
Give yourself a treat and listen to this book! The reader, Shvorne Marks, makes you hang on every word-the funny, the silly, the sad and the true. Queenie is a 25 year old Jamaican-Brit who is careening wildly through her life, making one bad decision after another. Her friends, the Corgis, act like a Greek […]
Historical fiction meets fantasy in this story of travel, adventure and friendship during the Victorian era. Merrick Tremayne, a botanist injured while smuggling opium for the East India Company, is sent by them to Peru to steal shoots from the “quinine tree” so that the Company will have its own supply. Merrick finds forests full […]
Based on the true stories of the brave and intrepid women spies of WWI, this novel flies with excitement, terror, dread. Told in two voices, that of the spy Eve Gardiner, code name Marguerite, as she is recruited and, in spite of enormous fear, acts with great ingenuity, and of Charlie St. Claire, an unmarried […]
Written in a conversational style, like listening to the friend who starts stories in the middle, this memoir is of the year Lorene and her family shared their home with her 100 year old grandmother, so they could help her as she came to the end of her life. The story wraps the reader in […]
Sardonically titled, the only true altruist dies in the beginning, setting her husband and two adult children spiraling downward. Each is in crisis, searching for how to live. All are blind to themselves but quick to point out hypocrisy and self-indulgence in others. It makes for challenging relationships. Written with mocking humor, we watch the […]
It is a mystery to me that the author, who is celebrating her survival into her 40’s despite bad decisions that could have led to her drowning twice, strangulation by a stranger, deathly childhood illness, car accidents, robbery with deadly weapons and more, has titled her book with a quote from Sylvia Plath, the poet […]
Rosie, a doctor and mother of four boys, does everything she can think of-scientifically and superstitiously- in order to ensure her fifth child is a girl. Of course, she and her husband instantly fall in love with their new baby boy, Claude. However, when Claude is three, he says he wants to wear dresses and […]
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
