Showing posts with label Melancholy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Melancholy. Show all posts

Monday, October 24, 2022

Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano

A twelve-year-old boy struggles with the worst kind of fame - as the sole survivor of a notorious plane crash - in a heart-wrenching and life-affirming novel for readers of Small Great Things, Little Fires Everywhere, and The Immortalists.

What does it mean not just to survive, but to truly live? 

One summer morning, twelve-year-old Edward Adler, his beloved older brother, his parents, and 183 other passengers board a flight in Newark headed for Los Angeles. Among them are a Wall Street wunderkind, a young woman coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy, an injured vet returning from Afghanistan, a business tycoon, and a free-spirited woman running away from her controlling husband. Halfway across the country, the plane crashes. Edward is the sole survivor.

Edward's story captures the attention of the nation, but he struggles to find a place for himself in a world without his family. He continues to feel that a piece of him has been left in the sky, forever tied to the plane and all of his fellow passengers. But then he makes an unexpected discovery—one that will lead him to the answers of some of life's most profound questions: When you've lost everything, how do find yourself? How do you discover your purpose? 

Dear Edward is at once a transcendent coming-of-age story, a multidimensional portrait of an unforgettable cast of characters, and a breathtaking illustration of all the ways a broken heart learns to love again.

340 pages (January 2020)

 
 
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.)
 
 
Review from npr
 

Ann Napolitano | PRH Author Lunch ALA 2019 (prhlibrary):

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

Title Read-alikes: The Two Lives of Lydia Bird by Josie Silver; The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt; History Lesson for Girls by Aurelie Sheehan;  Before the Fall by Noah Hawley; The Hondbook for Lightning Strike Survivors by Michele Young-Stone; Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter; Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg; Afterlife by Julia Alvarez; Still Life with Monkey by Katharine Weber; Here Until August: Stories by Josephine Rowe; The Dependents by Katharine Dion; The Dive from Clausen's Pier by Ann Packer; and My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

Monday, December 5, 2016

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

A stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure's agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall.

In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure.

Doerr's gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work.

531 pages (May 2014)

Check availability
 
Lit Guide from LitLovers.
 
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.)
 
 
 

Anthony Doer discusses All the Light We Cannot See (Simon & Schuster Books):


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

Title Read-alikes: Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans; The Vanishing Sky by L. Annette Binder; Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles; The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje; In the Wolf's Mouth by Adam Foulds; Beneath a Scarlet Sky by Mark T. Sullivan; The Summer Guest by Alison Anderson; Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi; Jacob's Oath by Martin Fletcher; The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel; The Paris Hours by Alex George; The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah; and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

Monday, November 23, 2015

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur’s chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead.

That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them.

Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten’s arm is a line from Star Trek: "Because survival is insufficient." But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave.

Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all.

A novel of art, memory, and ambition, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it. 

333 pages (September 2014)

Check availability
 
Lit Guide from LitLovers.
 
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.)
 
 
Review from npr


Book Trailer (Knopfdoublday):


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

Title Read-alikes: A Beginning at the End by Mike Chen; The Book of M by Peng Shepherd; Find Me by Laura Van Den Berg; The Dog Stars by Peter Heller; After the Flood by Kassandra Montag; On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee; Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn; Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter; The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker; Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy; The Lightest Object in the Universe by Kimi Eisele; Doomsday Book by Connie Willis; and Hyperion by Dan Simmons.

Monday, April 6, 2015

Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold root beers were selling out at the soda counter of Halderson’s Drugstore, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay on every barbershop magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a new, young president. But for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum it was a grim summer in which death visited frequently and assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder.

 Frank begins the season preoccupied with the concerns of any teenage boy, but when tragedy unexpectedly strikes his family—which includes his Methodist minister father; his passionate, artistic mother; Juilliard-bound older sister; and wise-beyond-his-years kid brother—he finds himself thrust into an adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal, suddenly called upon to demonstrate a maturity and gumption beyond his years.

Told from Frank’s perspective forty years after that fateful summer, Ordinary Grace is a brilliantly moving account of a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling apart around him. It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.

307 pages (March 2013)

 
 
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.)
 
 
 

Ordinary Grace was our "One County, One Book Choice" for 2014 (thecountylibrary):


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

Title Read-alikes: Montana 1948 by Larry Watson; Nothing More Dangerous by Allen Eskens; A Painted House by John Grisham; Unspeakable Things by Jess Lourey; Dodging and Burning by John Copenhaver; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; The Homecoming of Samuel Lake by Jenny Wingfield; Setting Free the Kites by Alex George; The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt; The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall; and The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley; News of the World by Paulette Jiles; and The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?
 
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born, the third child of a wealthy English banker and his wife. Sadly, she dies before she can draw her first breath.

On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in any number of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war. Clearly history (and Kate Atkinson) have plans for her: In Ursula rests nothing less than the fate of civilization.
 
Does Ursula's apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny?

Wildly inventive, darkly comic, startlingly poignant—this is Kate Atkinson at her absolute best, playing with time and history, telling a story that is breathtaking for both its audacity and its endless satisfactions.

529 page (April 2013)

 
Lit Guide from LitLovers.
 
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.)
 
 
Review from npr
 

Book Trailer (Hachette Book Group):


Kate Atkinson Life After Life Interview - Random Book Talk (Random House Books AU):


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

Title Read-alikes: The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton; The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North; Time and Time Again by Ben Elton; The Midnight Library by Matt Haig; 22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson; The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by Victoria Schwab; The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger; Replay by Ken Grimwood; The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck; The Mothers by Brit Bennett; Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo; Blackout by Connie Willis; and Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Z: a novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the “ungettable” Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn’t wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner’s, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and take the rest as it comes.

What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own time. Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel—and his witty, perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new fashions, and revels in this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a playground: New York City, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera—where they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Gertrude Stein.

Everything seems new and possible. Troubles, at first, seem to fade like morning mist. But not even Jay Gatsby’s parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous—sometimes infamous—husband? How can she forge her own identity while fighting her demons and Scott’s, too? With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler brings us Zelda’s irresistible story as she herself might have told it.

375 pages. (March 2013)

 
Lit Guide from LitLovers.
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.)
 
 
 
 

Book Trailer (St. Martin's Press):


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

Title Read-alikes: The Dream Lover by Elizabeth Berg; Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante; The Paris Wife by Paula McLain; Beautiful Fools by R. Clifton Spargo; What the Lady Wants by Renee Rosen; Wintering by Kate Moses; The Aviator's Wife by Melanie Benjamin; Guests on Earth by Lee Smith; Call Me Zelda by Erika Robuck; The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott; Tiffany Blues by M. J. Rose; Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan; and The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman

The debut of a stunning new voice in fiction—a novel both heartbreaking and transcendent

After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby.

Tom, whose records as a lighthouse keeper are meticulous and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel has taken the tiny baby to her breast. Against Tom’s judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them.

M. L. Stedman’s mesmerizing, beautifully written novel seduces us into accommodating Isabel’s decision to keep this “gift from God.” And we are swept into a story about extraordinarily compelling characters seeking to find their North Star in a world where there is no right answer, where justice for one person is another’s tragic loss.

345 pages. (July 2012)

Check availability
 
Lit Guide from LitLovers.
 
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.)
 
 

Book Trailer:


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

Title Read-alikes: As Bright As Heaven by Susan Meissner; Latitudes of Melt by Joan Clark; The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin; We Must Be Brave by Frrances Liardet; The Lightkeeper's Wife by Karen Viggers; The Stars Are Fire by Anita Shreve; Ask Again, Yes by Mary Bet Keane; Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter; The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards; Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran; Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones; The Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline; and The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Emily, Alone by Stewart O'Nan

A sequel to the bestselling, much-beloved Wish You Were Here, Stewart O'Nan's intimate new novel follows Emily Maxwell, a widow whose grown children have long moved away. She dreams of visits by her grandchildren while mourning the turnover of her quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood, but when her sole companion and sister-in-law Arlene faints at their favorite breakfast buffet, Emily's days change. As she grapples with her new independence, she discovers a hidden strength and realizes that life always offers new possibilities.

Like most older women, Emily is a familiar yet invisible figure, one rarely portrayed so honestly. Her mingled feelings - of pride and regret, joy and sorrow - are gracefully rendered in wholly unexpected ways. Once again making the ordinary and overlooked not merely visible but vital to understanding our own lives, Emily, Alone confirms O'Nan as an American master.

255 pages (March 2011)


 
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.)
 
 
Review from npr

Author Webpage

Book Lust with Nancy Pearl featuring Stewart O'Nan (Seattle Channel):


This title is available for download as an eBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.
 
Title Read-alikes: This is Your Life, Harriet Chance by Jonathan Evison; My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout; Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan; Tempting Fate by Jane Green; Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf; All Adults Here by Emma Straub; George and Lizzie by Nancy Pearl; The Book That Matters Most by Ann Hood; Who Asked You? by Terry Mcmillan; Bear Necessity by James Gould-Bourn; Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler; Dear Ann by Bobbie Ann Mason; and Monogamy by Sue Miller.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Healer by Carol Cassella

From national bestselling author Carol Cassella comes the story of one doctor's struggle to hold her family together through a storm of broken trust and questioned ethics.

Claire is at the start of her medical career when she falls in love with Addison Boehning, a biochemist with blazing genius and big dreams. A complicated pregnancy deflects Claire's professional path, and she is forced to drop out of her residency. Soon thereafter Addison invents a simple blood test for ovarian cancer, and his biotech start-up lands a fortune.

Overnight the Boehnings are catapulted into a financial and social tier they had never anticipated or sought: they move into a gracious Seattle home and buy an old ranch in the high desert mountains of eastern Washington, and Claire drifts away from medicine to become a full-time wife and mother. Then Addison gambles everything on a cutting-edge cancer drug, and when the studies go awry, their comfortable life is swept away. Claire and her daughter, Jory, move to a dilapidated ranch house in rural Hallum, where Claire has to find a job until Addison can salvage his discredited lab. Her only offer for employment comes from a struggling public health clinic, but Claire gets more than a second chance at medicine when she meets Miguela, a bright Nicaraguan immigrant and orphan of the contra war who has come to the United States on a secret quest to find the family she has lost. As their friendship develops, a new mystery unfolds that threatens to destroy Claire’s family and forces her to question what it truly means to heal.

Healer exposes the vulnerabilities of the American family, provoking questions of choice versus fate, desire versus need, and the duplicitous power of money.

291 pages (July 2010)



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.)
 
 


Carol Cassella interview with Author Magazine:

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

Title Read-alikes: All Fall Down by Jennifer Weiner; The Things We Do for Love by Kristin Hannah; Now That You Mention It by Kristan Higgins; Me Before You by Jojo Moyes; This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper; One Summer by David Baldacci; Summer Secrets by Jane Green; The Lemon Orchard by Luanne Rice; The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley; Dead of Night by Jonathan Maberry; The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures by Jennifer Hofmann; When These Mountains Burn by David Joy; and Memorial by Bryan Washington.