| Find me by André AcimanWhat it is: a follow-up to the bestselling Call Me By Your Name, which picks up years later as Elio, his father Samuel, and Elio's first love Oliver start -- and end -- relationships.
Is it for you? Readers who loved the meditation on love found in the earlier book will want to pick that story up again here.
But what about Elio and Oliver? You'll have to be patient to find out if they ever get back together. |
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| The curious heart of Ailsa Rae by Stephanie ButlandStarring: 28-year-old Ailsa Rae, who finally receives a heart transplant and must adjust to a new way of living.
What happens: Told in part through blog posts and emails, this moving novel traces Ailsa's post-transplant life, which includes growing independence, a changing relationship with her caretaker mother, new friendships, a job, and the search for the father who abandoned her at birth.
Why you might like it: This endearing, Edinburgh-set read sparkles with both humour and emotion. |
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| The revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson SextonThe timelines: In 2017, Ava, who is biracial, moves herself and her son in with her increasingly erratic white grandmother. In 1925, Ava's ancestor Josephine, once a slave, runs a successful family farm, but an uneasy friendship with the white woman next door may have terrible consequences.
The themes: the impact of racism; interracial relationships between women; motherhood; the power of hope.
Want a taste? "'I have a bad feeling about her.' He nods in Grandma's direction." |
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The unreliable people
by Rosetta Allan
Is all love doomed under a heartless regime? Antonina is a student at the prestigious Academy of Art in St Petersburg, though at times she feels she might be a better fit at the Centre of Non-Conformist Art across town. She knows she stands out as different, being neither Russian, Korean nor Kazak - and yet she embodies them all. She is Koryo-Saram- a descendant of the exiled population that Stalin labelled the Unreliable People. But what does that mean? And why did the strange, elegant woman entice her as a young child to climb out of her bedroom window to go on a long train journey through Kazakhstan?
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Red at the bone
by Jacqueline Woodson
Two families from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody's mother, for her own ceremony a celebration that ultimately never took place
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The world that we knew
by Alice Hoffman
In Berlin, at the time when the world changed, Hanni Kohn knows she must send her twelve-year-old daughter away to save her from the Nazi regime. She finds her way to a renowned rabbi, but its his daughter, Ettie, who offers hope of salvation when she creates a mystical Jewish creature, a rare and unusual golem, who is sworn to protect Lea. Once Ava is brought to life, she and Lea and Ettie become eternally entwined, their paths fated to cross, their fortunes linked. Lea and Ava travel from Paris, where Lea meets her soulmate, to a convent in western France known for its silver roses; from a school in a mountaintop village where three thousand Jews were saved. Meanwhile, Ettie is in hiding, waiting to become the fighter shes destined to be. What does it mean to lose your mother? How much can one person sacrifice for love? In a world where evil can be found at every turn, we meet remarkable characters that take us on a stunning journey of loss and resistance, the fantastical and the mortal, in a place where all roads lead past the Angel of Death and love is never ending.
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Ask again, yes
by Mary Beth Keane
Francis Gleeson and Brian Stanhope are two NYPD rookies assigned to the same Bronx precinct in 1973. They aren’t close friends on the job, but end up living next door to each other outside the city. What goes on behind closed doors in both houses; the loneliness of Francis’s wife, Lena, and the instability of Brian’s wife, Anne, sets the stage for the stunning events to come. Ask Again, Yes by award-winning author Mary Beth Keane, is a beautifully moving exploration of the friendship and love that blossoms between Francis’s youngest daughter, Kate, and Brian’s son, Peter, who are born six months apart. In the spring of Kate and Peter’s eighth grade year a violent event divides the neighbours, the Stanhopes are forced to move away, and the children are forbidden to have any further contact. But Kate and Peter find a way back to each other, and their relationship is tested by the echoes from their past. Ask Again, Yes reveals how the events of childhood look different when reexamined from the distance of adulthood; villains lose their menace, and those who appeared innocent seem less so. Kate and Peter’s love story is marked by tenderness, generosity, and grace.
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Sweet sorrow
by David Nicholls
One life-changing summer Charlie meets Fran. In 1997, Charlie Lewis is the kind of boy you don't remember in the school photograph. His exams have not gone well. At home he is looking after his father, when surely it should be the other way round, and if he thinks about the future at all, it is with a kind of dread. Then Fran Fisher bursts into his life and despite himself, Charlie begins to hope. But if Charlie wants to be with Fran, he must take on a challenge that could lose him the respect of his friends and require him to become a different person. He must join the Company. And if the Company sounds like a cult, the truth is even more appalling. The price of hope, it seems, is Shakespeare.
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| Nothing to see here by Kevin WilsonWhat it's about: Lillian has agreed to watch her friend Madison's stepchildren for the summer. Twist: they burst into flames when upset.
What happens: Lillian, whose life has stalled ever since she was kicked out of school, has no experience with children. And yet she starts to love these two unloved kids.
Why you might like it: Flawed, quirky characters and offbeat humor make this a wry, engaging read. |
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Live a little: A novel
by Howard Jacobson
A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything - including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two long-suffering carers, Nastya and Euphoria, with tangled stories of her husbands and love affairs. Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without the aid of a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he's whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. Unlike Beryl, he forgets nothing - especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has hung over him like an oppressive cloud ever since. There's very little life remaining for either of them, but perhaps just enough to heal some of the hurt inflicted along the way, and find new meaning in what's left. Told with Jacobson's trademark wit and style, Live a Little is in equal parts funny, irreverent and tender - a novel to make you consider all the paths not taken, and whether you could still change course.
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Night for day
by Patrick Flanery
Los Angeles, 1950. Over the course of a single day, two friends grapple with the moral and professional uncertainties of the escalating Communist witch-hunt in Hollywood. Director John Marsh races to convince his actress wife not to turn informant for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, while leftist screenwriter Desmond Frank confronts the possibility of exile to live and work without fear of being blacklisted. As Marsh and Frank struggle to complete shooting on their film She Turned Away, which updates the myth of Orpheus to the gritty noir underworld of post-war Los Angeles, the chaos of their private lives pushes them towards a climactic confrontation with complicity, jealousy, and fear. Night for Day conjures a feverish vision of one of the country's most notorious periods of national crisis, illuminating the eternal dilemma of both art and politics: how to make the world anew.
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Waterline
by Chris Else
The world is going crazy. In a South Pacific nation overrun by technology, an affluent family has fallen on hard times. Brian, Stella and their two teenage kids must move from the capital to Byte, a small, rain-swept city in the grip of a Kafkaesque, computerised bureaucracy and a gang of religious vigilantes. When Brian falls foul of the authorities, Stella, Mandy and Luke must fend for themselves. Stella's only option seems to be an offer of help from the least likely quarter - but with what consequences? Exploring the choices we might have to make in our increasingly complex society, Water Line is a dramatic tale, laced with dark humour, about responsibility, self-determination and the search for love.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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