The Winter People, by Jennifer McMahon.
West
Hall, Vermont, has always been a town of strange disappearances and
old legends. The most mysterious is that of Sara Harrison Shea, who, in
1908, was found dead in the field behind her house just months after
the tragic death of her daughter, Gertie.
Now, in present day,
nineteen-year-old Ruthie lives in Sara's farmhouse with her mother,
Alice, and her younger sister, Fawn. Alice has always insisted that they
live off the grid, a decision that suddenly proves perilous when
Ruthie wakes up one morning to find that Alice has vanished without a
trace.
Searching for clues, she is startled to find a copy of Sara
Harrison Shea's diary hidden beneath the floorboards of her mother's
bedroom. As Ruthie gets sucked deeper into the mystery of Sara's fate,
she discovers that she's not the only person who's desperately looking
for someone that they've lost. But she may be the only one who can stop
history from repeating itself.
The Wolves of Midwinter, by Anne Rice.
The novel opens on a cold, gray landscape.
It is the beginning of December. Oak fires are burning in the stately
flickering hearths of Nideck Point. It is Yuletide. For Reuben
Golding, now infused with the Wolf Gift and under the loving tutelage of
the Morphenkinder, this promises to be a Christmas like no other . . .
The Yuletide season, sacred to much of the human race, has been equally
sacred to the Man Wolves, and Reuben soon becomes aware that they, too,
steeped in their own profound rituals, will celebrate the ancient
Midwinter festival deep within the verdant richness of Nideck forest.
From out of the shadows of Nideck comes a ghost--tormented, imploring,
unable to speak yet able to embrace and desire with desperate affection .
. . As Reuben finds himself caught up with--and drawn to--the passions
and yearnings of this spectral presence, and as the swirl of
preparations reaches a fever pitch for the Nideck town Christmas
festival of music and pageantry, astonishing secrets are revealed;
secrets that tell of a strange netherworld, of spirits other than the
Morphenkinder, centuries old, who inhabit the dense stretches of redwood
and oak that surround the magnificent house at Nideck Point, "ageless
ones" who possess their own fantastical ancient histories and who taunt
with their dark magical powers . . .
The Snow Queen, by Michael Cunningham. (Audio, narrated by Claire Danes.)
Michael
Cunningham's luminous novel begins with a vision. It's November 2004.
Barrett Meeks, having lost love yet again, is walking through Central
Park when he is inspired to look up at the sky; there he sees a pale,
translucent light that seems to regard him in a distinctly godlike way.
Barrett doesn't believe in visions—or in God—but he can't deny what he's
seen.
At the same time, in the not-quite-gentrified Bushwick
neighborhood of Brooklyn, Tyler, Barrett's older brother, a struggling
musician, is trying—and failing—to write a wedding song for Beth, his
wife-to-be, who is seriously ill. Tyler is determined to write a song
that will be not merely a sentimental ballad but an enduring expression
of love.
Barrett, haunted by the light, turns unexpectedly to
religion. Tyler grows increasingly convinced that only drugs can release
his creative powers. Beth tries to face mortality with as much courage
as she can summon.
Cunningham follows the Meeks brothers as each
travels down a different path in his search for transcendence. In
subtle, lucid prose, he demonstrates a profound empathy for his
conflicted characters and a singular understanding of what lies at the
core of the human soul.
The Snow Queen, beautiful and
heartbreaking, comic and tragic, proves again that Cunningham is one of
the great novelists of his generation.
Bury This, by Andrea Portes.
If
twenty-five years can discover the internet, the cell phone, this thing
called the iPod, can twenty-five years discover the secret of a girl
murdered, abandoned, by the side of the road?
That is the haunting premise of Bury This,
an impressionistic literary thriller about the murder of a young girl
in small-town Michigan in 1979. Beth Krause was by all intents a good
little girl – member of the church choir, beloved daughter of doting
parents, friend to the downtrodden. But dig a little deeper into any
small town, and conflicts and jealousies begin to appear. And somewhere
is that heady mix lies the answer to what really happened to Beth
Krause.
Her unsolved murder becomes the stuff of town legend, and
twenty-five years later the case is re-ignited when a group of film
students start making a documentary on Beth's fateful life. The town has
never fully healed over the loss of Beth, and the new investigation
calls into light several key characters: her father, a WWII vet; her
mother, once the toast of Manhattan; her best friend, abandoned by her
mother and left to fend for herself against an abusive father; and the
detective, just a rookie when the case broke, haunted by his inability
to bring Beth's murderer to justice. All of these passions will collide
once the identity of Beth's murderer is revealed, proving once again
that some secrets can never stay buried.
The Apartment, by Greg Baxter.
One
snowy December morning in an old European city, an American man leaves
his shabby hotel to meet a local woman who has agreed to help him search
for an apartment to rent. THE APARTMENT follows the couple across a
blurry, illogical, and frozen city into a past the man is hoping to
forget, and leaves them at the doorstep of an uncertain future-their
cityscape punctuated by the man's lingering memories of time spent in
Iraq and the life he abandoned in the United States. Contained within
the details of this day is a complex meditation on America's
relationship with the rest of the world, an unflinching glimpse at the
permanence of guilt and despair, and an exploration into our desire to
cure violence with violence.
A novel about how our relationships
to others-and most importantly to ourselves-alters how we see the world,
THE APARTMENT perfectly captures the peculiarity and excitement of
being a stranger in a strange city. Written in an affecting and intimate
tone that gradually expands in scope, intensity, poetry, and drama,
Greg Baxter's clear-eyed first novel tells the intriguing story of these
two people on this single day. Both beguiling and raw in its
observations and language, THE APARTMENT is a crisp novel with enormous
range that offers profound and unexpected wisdom.
White Fire, by Preston Child.
Special
Agent Pendergast arrives at an exclusive Colorado ski resort to rescue
his protégée, Corrie Swanson, from serious trouble with the law. His
sudden appearance coincides with the first attack of a murderous
arsonist who-with brutal precision-begins burning down
multimillion-dollar mansions with the families locked inside. After
springing Corrie from jail, Pendergast learns she made a discovery while
examining the bones of several miners who were killed 150 years earlier
by a rogue grizzly bear. Her finding is so astonishing that it, even
more than the arsonist, threatens the resort's very existence.
Drawn deeper into the investigation, Pendergast uncovers a mysterious
connection between the dead miners and a fabled, long-lost Sherlock
Holmes story-one that might just offer the key to the modern day
killings as well.
Now, with the ski resort snowed in and under
savage attack-and Corrie's life suddenly in grave danger-Pendergast must
solve the enigma of the past before the town of the present goes up in
flames.
The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andrée and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration, by Alec Wilkinson.
In
this grand and astonishing tale, Alec Wilkinson brings us the story of
S. A. Andrée, the visionary Swedish aeronaut who, in 1897, during the
great age of Arctic endeavor, left to discover the North Pole by flying
to it in a hydrogen balloon. Called by a British military officer "the
most original and remarkable attempt ever made in Arctic exploration,"
Andrée's expedition was followed by nearly the entire world, and it made
him an international legend.
(All descriptions from OverDrive.)
No comments:
Post a Comment