Join self-proclaimed Queen of Babble Lizzie Nichols on her quest to snag the perfect husband. Commitment phobe, Luke doesn’t see Lizzie in his future but after a week without her and that old comforting feeling, he returns with a huge rock. His best friend Chaz is secretly in love with Lizzie and takes every opportunity to advise her on Luke’s lack of intention and to show her that he is the real deal. Deirdre L.
Peony is a young woman about to be married, who is sensitive and unusually well educated for her times. She yearns for something else beyond the gates of her home and the secluded life of her traditional household. In this beautiful yet haunting story, we follow Peony’s life as it unfolds against the background of the classic Chinese opera The Peony Pavilion. The reader will be instantly drawn to the marvelous details about traditions, rituals, and the life of women in seventeenth-century China after the Manchu conquest of the Ming Dynasty. Bonina G.
The protagonist Alice Butler works for a major, cutting-edge toy company. Her job deals with the making of espionage toys. During her assignment to create a hit product for teenage girls, she receives a strange letter written in code and embarks on a journey to solve the mystery of the letter's origins. Her journey leads her to question the ethics of her assignment, her company, and corporate society. Alice is a quirky, highly intelligent young woman. She is simultaneously sharp and independent, but girlish and innocently curious. The author, Scarlett Thomas, writes about cryptology, code-breaking, history and the mathematical language in a compelling and captivating fashion, making the novel accessible for even the least mathematically-minded people. This may be one of the smartest, most thought-provoking, modern piece of literature you will ever pick up.
Cecilia Q.
Delve into this must-read historical novel set in 1860s New York and follow a young German immigrant through the dangerous adventure that his life has become. Unfortunately one night while working as a stableman for the Greatest Circus on Earth, he awakes to find his stable burning to the ground. The next day a body of a pregnant woman is found within the rubble pinning our innocent stableman with murder and arson. With the help of street criminals, the immigrant emerges with a new identity as Irishman Frank Harris narrowly escaping imprisonment. Frank penetrates the crime family, finding love in an unlikely place and eventually attempts to live a normal, ordinary life. However, Frank will discover that his story, his life will never be ordinary. Sky K.
Worlds collide as women in the Welsh borderlands awake one morning in 1944 to find that all the men in their isolated farming community have vanished overnight without a trace. Long isolated from the turmoil of World War II, they know little about the Nazi invasion after the Allied D-Day invasion was rebuffed. As the Nazi’s consolidate their grip on Britain, a secret advance patrol is sent on a secret mission across the English border into Wales. The lives of the soldiers and farm women are inexorably altered as both sides are forced together during a brutal winter. Welsh poet Owen Sheers’ brilliant debut novel is both a chilling alternative history of what could have been and a paean to rural life in the stunning Welsh countryside. Susan L.
