Books

“The Luminaries” is a Booker-Prize winning book by Eleanor Catton. This intriguing book is described as a “fiendishly clever ghost story and gripping page turner and a thrilling novelistic achievement.” The New York Times praised it saying the author had created a “parody of a 19th-century novel, and in so doing created a novel for the 21^st, something utterly new.” This week, I wanted to select a book that would offer an engaging modern story with escapism, adventure and an entertaining look at human complexity. The Luminaries fits this description perfectly. Read More

“Love in the Time of Cholera” is a book by Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, a Colombian novelist, screenwriter and journalist. His writing style has been referred to as “magical realism,” because he uses elements of fantasy to explain and enhance real life experiences. Most of his books express a theme of human solitude.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1982 for a book called “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which enchanted and intrigued me. Marquez is a stunning writer who pulls readers into his stories in a sensory way. He understands relationships. Sometimes you feel as though you walking alongside the characters, experiencing their lives with intensity and realism. Read More

Khaled Hosseini is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns”. His new novel “And the Mountains Echoed” is about love, betrayal and how families take care of one another. It explores how the choices we make can have an impact across generations. Read More

“The Paris Architect” is the debut novel of American author Charles Belfoure. His own personal interest with historical preservation inspired a fascinating fictional book about World War II. It is full of characters who demonstrate the spectrum of human emotion that is revealed times of political conflict.

The book is set in Nazi occupied France and tells the story of Lucien, a struggling architect, who, like many people in Paris, was not all that sympathetic to the Jews. He was Read More

“The Valley of Amazement” is a novel by Amy Tan, a New York Times bestselling author with magical writing skills. Ms Tan was born in the United States to immigrant Chinese parents and her writing often tries to penetrate the unique cultural impact of her parents’ homeland. Read More

The Firebird is the latest book by New York Times best-selling author Susanna Kearsley. She was a museum curator before becoming a writer and her love for ancient artifacts and the mysteries they embody is woven in this book. Read More

Still Life with Bread Crumbs: A Novel is a new book by Anna Quindlen, a bestselling author and journalist that I have admired for years. Her collective works show her to be a woman of great depth and compassion. Read More

I was in my twenties when I first read Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel. It made an enormous impression on me. This is one of those must read books for women, told through Hagar Shipley’s ninety-year-old eyes. Throughout the book, small nostalgic events trigger flashbacks that reveal the story of her life and her strong and often irrational personality. I remember a scene where she imagines herself as a beautiful young woman, swirling, laughing and dancing with her husband. Then, in real life, she finds herself falling down the stairs in her 65-year-old son’s home. Read More

After taking a 13 year break from writing novels, and following the amazing international success of her memoir “Eat Pray Love,” Elizabeth Gilbert has returned to fiction with “The Signature of  All Things: A Novel.”

The book is set in the 18^th and 19^th centuries and tells the rags to riches story of the Whittaker family led by the creative and resourceful Henry Whittaker. After conquering extreme poverty and facing personal challenges, he becomes the richest man in Philadelphia. His strong willed and adventurous daughter Alma eventually inherits all of her father’s money and Read More

Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search, by Martin Sixsmith, is a true story about what happens when a young unmarried Irish girl gets pregnant in the 1950s.

Philomena is sent to a Catholic nunnery in Tipperary to have her baby and, since she is unable to pay money for her release, has to work in the kitchens and gardens for 3 years with her son. Eventually she is forced to give up her child, who is sold for adoption to an American family. He disappears from her life. Philomena then spends 50 years looking for him, unaware that he is looking for her as well. Read More