New Zealand Music Month of May |
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Christchurch City Libraries has been celebrating NZ Music Month in May with free music events. While many performances have already taken place, you are still in time to catch some excellent shows.You are also still in time to take advantage of the 30% discount on CD loans during May and to enter a competition to win great prizes.Enter text here
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New and Recently Released!
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| The Shadow Queen by Sandra GullandBorn into a family of actors, Claudette leaves her parents' theater troupe to become the companion of King Louis XIV's mistress Athénaïs de Rochechouart, Madame de Montespan, also known as The Shadow Queen for her influence over the king. Serving as both confidante and spy, Claudette employs her theatrical talents to keep her mistress informed about friends and rivals alike. However, Athénaïs' increasing fascination with dark magic troubles Claudette, forcing her to question their arrangement and reevaluate her own precarious position at court. Royal intrigue writ large against an atmospheric backdrop distinguishes this 2nd book in the Sun Court Duet, after Mistress of the Sun. |
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I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War
by Jerome Charyn
The author of The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson turns his attention to 16th U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, capturing his voice -- at once eloquent and homespun -- as the Great Emancipator recounts his life and career through a series of flashbacks. Lincoln describes his hardscrabble childhood, his career as a lawyer and Illinois state legislator, and his election to the presidency of a deeply divided nation, while examining his personal relationships, ranging from his youthful romance with Ann Rutledge to his tumultuous marriage to Mary Todd Lincoln to his bonds with his sons. This reflective, character-driven portrait of a complex man artfully illuminates the inner life of a very public figure.
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| Night in Shanghai by Nicole MonesClassically trained and flat broke, African-American musician Thomas Greene flees segregated Baltimore in 1936 and ends up in Shanghai, where he's hired by Lin, whose father is the boss of one of the city's most powerful crime syndicates. While headlining at a swanky nightclub with his jazz ensemble, Greene meets translator and political activist Song Yuhua, whose affliations with the Communist party and Shanghai's criminal underworld complicate their mutual attraction. Meanwhile, the looming threat of Japanese invasion adds to Greene's increasingly tenuous situation. Like Esi Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues, Night in Shanghai presents a dramatic story of a black musician searching for creative fulfillment and professional success while the world teeters on the brink of war. |
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House of Bathory : a novel
by Linda Lafferty
"In the early 1600s, Elizabeth Báthory, the infamous Blood Countess, ruled Cachtice Castle in the hinterlands of Slovakia. During bizarre nightly rites, she tortured and killed the young women she had taken on as servants. A devil, a demon, the terror of Royal Hungary--she bathed in their blood to preserve her own youth. 400 years later, echoes of the Countess's legendary brutality reach Aspen, Colorado. Betsy Path, a psychoanalyst of uncommon intuition, has a breakthrough with sullen teenager Daisy Hart. Together, they are haunted by the past, as they struggle to understand its imprint upon the present. Betsy and her troubled but perceptive patient learn the truth: the curse of the House of Bathory lives still and has the power to do evil even now. The story, brimming with palace intrigue, memorable characters intimately realized, and a wealth of evocative detail, travels back and forth between the familiar, modern world and a seventeenth-century Eastern Europe brought startlingly to life."
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| Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932: A Novel by Francine ProseAs a teenager, athlete and Olympic hopeful Louisianne “Lou” Villars travels to Paris, where she becomes a coat check girl at the infamous Chameleon Club, a cabaret favored by the city's bohemian demimonde, Lou falls in (and out of) love with performer Arlette, eventually achieving notoriety as a cross-dressing professional racecar driver with connections to the Nazi party. Inspired by the subjects of Brassaï's iconic 1932 photograph "Lesbian Couple at the Monocle," Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, draws on the real-life experiences of Violette Morris and her contemporaries. |
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| The Anatomy Lesson: A Novel by Nina SiegalIn 1632 Amsterdam, a thief's execution produces a valuable commodity: a cadaver for use by the city's Guild of Surgeons to teach anatomy. As Dr. Nicolaes Tulp performs a public dissection in the presence of an enthralled audience, two observers find their lives forever changed by the experience: Rambrandt van Rijn, who will create a painting based on the event, and Rene Descartes, who seeks to understand the nature of the soul. This evocative novel brings the politics and culture of 17th-century Holland to life while examining the intricate connections between the inhabitants of a chaotic, bustling city. |
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James Cook's New World
by Graeme Lay
"Fictionalised account of James Cook's extraordinary second voyage of discovery, from the tropical isles of Polynesia to the icey seas of the great Southern Ocean, the furthest south anyone had ever sailed. This is Graeme Lay's second novel about Captain Cook; the first book covered the first voyage, and it was called The secret life of James Cook"
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