A young man takes three journeys, through Greece, India and Africa. He travels with little purpose, letting the chance encounters of the road dictate his path. But although he knows that he is drifting, he is unable to settle. It is as if, without these encounters, the person he is cannot exist. And yet each journey ends in disaster. A novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion, In a Strange Room is an extraordinary evocation of one man’s search for love, and a place to call home.
Monthly Archives: February 2012
The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death.
The Privileges by Jonathan Dee
Smart, socially gifted, and chronically impatient, Adam and Cynthia Morey are so perfect for each other that united they become a kind of fortress against the world. In their hurry to start a new life, they marry young and have two children before Cynthia reaches the age of twenty-five. Adam is a rising star in the world of private equity and becomes his boss’ protege. With a beautiful home in the upper-class precincts of Manhattan, gorgeous children, and plenty of money, they are, by any reasonable standard, successful. But the Moreys’ standard is not the same as other people’s. The future in which they have always believed for themselves and their children – a life of almost boundless privilege, in which any desire can be acted upon and any ambition made real – is still out there, but it is not arriving fast enough to suit them. As Cynthia, at home with the kids day after identical day, begins to drift, Adam is confronted with a decision that tests how much he is willing to risk to ensure his family’s happiness and to recapture the sense that, for him and his wife, the only acceptable life is one of infinite possibility.
The 33 by Jonathan Franklin
Inside the miraculous survival and dramatic rescue of the chilean miners.
The Postmistress by Sarah Blake
It is 1940 and half the world is living through the horror of the Second World War, but America still believes it is safe from the bloodshed.
In Franklin, a small town on Cape Cod, Iris James is the postmistress and she firmly believes that her job is to keep and deliver people’s secrets, to pass along the news of love and sorrow that letters carry. But one day she does the unthinkable: she doesn’t deliver a letter and instead slips it into her pocket.
The Jewel of St Petersburg by Kate Furnivall
Russia, 1910. Valentina Ivanova is the darling of St. Petersburg’s elite aristocracy-until her romance with a Danish engineer creates a terrible scandal and her parents push her into a loveless engagement with a Russian count.
Meanwhile, Russia itself is bound for rebellion. With the Tsar and the Duma at each other’s throats, and the Bolsheviks drawing their battle lines, the elegance and opulence of Tsarist rule are in their last days. And Valentina will be forced to make a choice that will change not only her own life, but the lives of those around her forever.
