Sweetland by Michael Crummey

The epic tale of an endangered Newfoundland community and the struggles of one man determined to resist its extinction.

The scarcely populated town of Sweetland rests on the shore of a remote Canadian island. Its slow decline finally reaches a head when the mainland government offers each islander a generous resettlement package—the sole stipulation being that everyone must leave. Fierce and enigmatic Moses Sweetland, whose ancestors founded the village, is the only one to refuse. As he watches his neighbors abandon the island, he recalls the town's rugged history and its eccentric cast of characters. Evoking The Shipping News, Michael Crummey—one of Canada's finest novelists—conjures up the mythical, sublime world of Sweetland's past amid a storm battered landscape haunted by local lore. As in his critically acclaimed novel Galore, Crummey masterfully weaves together past and present, creating in Sweetland a spectacular portrait of one man's battle to survive as his environment vanishes around him.

322 pages (Jan 2014)

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13 Book Club Questions to Energize Any Meetup from Bustle

 

To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

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Michael Crummy at Penguin Random House Canada

 

"Michael Crummey says Sweetland is about mortality" from The Toronto Star

Michael Crummey Brown Bag at the Canadian Literature Centre:

Title Read-alikes: Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga; Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout; Our Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper; Miller's Valley by Anna Quindlen; Crow Lake by Mary Lawson; The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman; Juliet in August by Dianne Warren; The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell by Robert Dugoni; And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrik Backman; Night of the Animals by Bill Broun; Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique; All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toes; and Road Ends by Mary Larson.

Dream with Little Angels by Michael Hiebert

Michael Hiebert's remarkable debut novel tells the riveting story of a small southern town haunted by tragedy, one brave woman's struggle to put a troubling mystery to rest--and its impact on the sensitive boy who comes of age in the midst of it all. . .

Abe Teal wasn't even born when Ruby Mae Vickers went missing twelve years ago. Few people in Alvin, Alabama, talk about the months spent looking for her, or about how Ruby Mae's lifeless body was finally found beneath a willow tree. Even Abe's mom, Leah, Alvin's only detective, has avoided the subject. But now, another girl is missing.

Fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Dailey took the bus home from school as usual, then simply vanished. Townsfolk comb the dense forests and swampy creeks to no avail. Days later, Tiffany Michelle Yates disappears. Abe saw her only hours before, holding an ice cream cone and wearing a pink dress.

Observant and smart, Abe watches his mother battle small-town bureaucracy and old resentments, desperate to find both girls and quietly frantic for her own children's safety. As the search takes on a terrifying urgency, Abe traverses the shifting ground between innocence and hard-won understanding, eager to know and yet fearing what will be revealed.

Dream with Little Angels is by turns lyrical, heartbreaking, and shocking--a brilliantly plotted novel of literary suspense and of the dark shadows, painful secrets, and uncompromising courage in one small town.

298 pages (June 2013)

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The Best Book Club Questions to Spark Discussion from The Oprah Magazine

 

To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

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This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: Lost Boy Lost Girl by Peter Straub; The Searcher by Tana French; The Round House by Louise Erdrich; Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger; The Distant Dead by Heather Young; Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng; The Survivors by Jane Harper; The Good Daughter by Karin Slaughter; The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens; The Bones of You by Debbie Howells; The Never List by Koethi Zan; The Longings of Wayward Girls by Karen Brown; and The Dark Road to Mercy by Wiley Cash.

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

The riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed, and betrayed by passion and desire for a world beyond her own.

 

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Emperor's Children, a brilliant new novel: the riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed, and betrayed by passion and desire for a world beyond her own.  

Nora Eldridge, an elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, long ago compromised her dream to be a successful artist, mother and lover. She has instead become the “woman upstairs,” a reliable friend and neighbor always on the fringe of others’ achievements. Then into her life arrives the glamorous and cosmopolitan Shahids—her new student Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale, and his parents: Skandar, a dashing Lebanese professor who has come to Boston for a fellowship at Harvard, and Sirena, an effortlessly alluring Italian artist.

When Reza is attacked by schoolyard bullies, Nora is drawn deep into the complex world of the Shahid family; she finds herself falling in love with them, separately and together. Nora’s happiness explodes her boundaries, and she discovers in herself an unprecedented ferocity—one that puts her beliefs and her sense of self at stake.

Told with urgency, intimacy and piercing emotion, this brilliant novel of passion and artistic fulfillment explores the intensity, thrill—and the devastating cost—of embracing an authentic life.

253 pages (April 2013)

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To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

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Author Website

Claire Messud reads from and discusses The Woman Upstairs-Part 1 (The Center for Fiction):

Claire Messud reads from and discusses The Woman Upstairs-Part 2 (The Center for Fiction):

This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh; The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt; The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold; The Blue Guitar by John Banvile; Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier; Exhibit Alexandra by Natasha Bell; Luster by Raven Leilani; Indiscretion by Charles Dubow; The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood; Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng; The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine; Life After Life by Kate Atkinson; and The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer.