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Have a good one! ~ Saira

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This is the most beautifully written, heart-wrenching story I have ever read.

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little bee; chris cleave; london; africa; immigrant; novel; fiction; hero's journey; women; contemporary; love story; marriage; relationships; darfur; genocide; diamond mines; blood diamonds; xenocide; massacre; sacrifice; tragedy; hope

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modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

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modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

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Little Bee: A Novel [Cleave, Chris] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Little Bee: A Novel

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Happy Birthday Stephanie, hope it's a good one! Here's a book of essays by David Forster Wallace. Some funny stuff in my opinion. Best, John M 

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Happy Birthday Stephanie, hope it's a good one! Here's a book of essays by David Forster Wallace. Some funny stuff in my opinion. Best, John M 

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Hope you have a wonderful celebration and year ahead!
Kristy

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Happy birthday to my Vernor's Buddy!  Here's hoping for a  groovy transition into your new year!  If you're up for true crime meets historical events, get ready for a page-turner - Devil in the White City.  In the mean time, thanks for all you do.  You seriously rock and you continue to be an example of perseverance for us all!
XXOO - Kit

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I hope you have a great day! I recently read The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker and thought you might enjoy it as much as I did.  It's a fictional story about an unexpected shift in the Earth's rotation and the effects it has on society and humankind.
Happy birthday!
-Sara

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"This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices "This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of contact lenses. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall. I knew I still looked like a child." Crystal Osborne...more
This is actually one of my favorite passages from the book.
(less)

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"This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices "This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove.

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Here's the book that's next on my reading list: Murder in Old Bombay. It's a new mystery novel set in 1890's India. My dad is in a writer's group with the author and has been raving about her skill for years as they have diligently workshopped and edited each chapter. Looks like it really paid off, because it is currently winning a bunch of national and local awards! Anyway, hope this birthday is full of all the best kinds of mystery and adventure in your own life!
-Dale

Not sure why I cannot get a photo to upload today, so I'll attach the Amazon link here:

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fiction / mystery & detective / historical

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fiction / mystery & detective / international crime & mystery

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fiction/mystery & detective - historical

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fiction/mystery & detective - international crime & mystery

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mystery & detective - international crime & mystery

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colonial india; 19th century historical mysteries; indian detectives; pakistan; journalist detectives; parsee zoroastrian; indian culture; debut author; south asian mysteries; rajabai clock tower; mumbai; nav march; holmesian; sherlock holmes; own voices mysteries; award winning writers; mwa award winner

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fiction / mystery & detective / historical

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fiction / mystery & detective / international crime & mystery

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fiction/mystery & detective - historical

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fiction/mystery & detective - international crime & mystery

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Murder in Old Bombay: A Mystery [March, Nev] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Murder in Old Bombay: A Mystery

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Wishing you a lovely birthday.  May you spend it considering life and how much wisdom comes with getting older.
One of my favourite books of all time is What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. Because it is short stories the commitment is spread out over time.  Perhaps take with you to the lake this summer.
Debbie Goddard

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Wishing you love and happiness on your birthday and all year through.  The book I am recommending is actually a Memoir based on a boys struggle through school who had dyslexia, but overcame it to become a writer. I had my daughter read it as well, its inspirational.  The book is called BURRO GENIUS!
Anna Massaro

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Hope you have a wonderful day! I found this book fascinating. It is all true stories about North Korean defectors, but reads like a novel. I also loved Educated by Tara Westover, but I think I've shared that before!
Miss you!
Erin

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Hope it's a great day!!! I just finished Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, and LOVED it!!!
- Jenn

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In the 20 years since the publication of her first novel, After You'd Gone, Irish-born Maggie O'Farrell has wooed readers with intricately plotted, lushly imagined fiction featuring nonconformist women buffeted by the essential unpredictability of life, which can turn on a dime. O'Farrell's last book, I Am, I Am, I Am (2018), was a nonfiction account of her own unpredictable life, filtered through 17 dramatic, near-death experiences, from her hair-raising childhood through her middle child's harrowing, periodic anaphylactic attacks brought on by a life-threatening immunological disorder.

With her eighth novel, O'Farrell brilliantly turns to historical fiction to confront a parent's worst nightmare: the death of a child. Set in Stratford, England, in the late 16th century, Hamnet imagines the emotional, domestic, and artistic repercussions after the world's most famous (though never named) playwright and his wife lose their only son, 11-year-old Hamnet, to the bubonic plague in 1596. Four years later, the boy's father transposes his grief into his masterpiece - titled with a common variant of his son's name - in which the father dies and the son lives to avenge him.

O'Farrell's narratives are rarely straightforwardly chronological. In Hamnet, she toggles between two timelines, one beginning on the day the plague first afflicts Hamnet's twin sister Judith, the other circling back to the beginning of their parents' passionate relationship some 15 years earlier.

In this telling, the woman we know as Anne Hathaway is called Agnes, pronounced Ann-yis, which O'Farrell explains is how her name appeared in her father's will. She's a wonderful character, a free spirit and healer who, like her late mother, is most at home in the woods. But she's also a Cinderella in her nasty stepmother's household, in which the future playwright - still in his teens with an uncertain future - is indentured as a Latin tutor to help settle a debt incurred by his errant father.

The two abused misfits recognize something special in each other, and the chemistry between them is palpable. A first kiss, later followed by sex that literally rocks and upends the apples in the storage shed, would be heavy-handed in its biblical overtones were it not so beautifully written. Hamnet is, among other things, a love story about a sorely tested marriage.

But before we meet his parents, we meet Hamnet, a smart but easily distractible boy, as he desperately seeks help for his twin sister, who has suddenly taken ill. With rising panic, he checks upstairs and down in his family's small apartment and his grandparents' adjacent house, and is anguished to discover that his mother, grandmother, aunt, and older sister are nowhere to be found. His father is off in London staging his plays. The only one home, drinking ale in the off-bounds parlour, is his irascible grandfather, from whom Hamnet has been warned to keep his distance.

As in her earlier novels, O'Farrell seeds her tale with dark forebodings. Agnes, off tending her bees during Hamnet's frantic search, will come to rue her absence that day:

Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother's: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry ... It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.

Hamnet vividly captures the life-changing intensity of maternity in its myriad stages - from the pain of childbirth to the unassuagable grief of loss. Fierce emotions and lyrical prose are what we've come to expect of O'Farrell. But with this historical novel she has expanded her repertoire, enriching her narrative with atmospheric details of the sights, smells, and relentless daily toil involved in running a household in Elizabethan England - a domestic arena in which a few missing menstrual rags on washday is enough to alarm a mother of girls.

'Hamnet' vividly captures the life-changing intensity of maternity in its myriad stages - from the pain of childbirth to the unassuagable grief of loss.

About halfway through this tour de force, there's a remarkable 10-page passage in which O'Farrell traces how the plague reached Agnes' children. It's a sequence that would stand out even in more salubrious times, but which holds particular resonance in light of the current global Covid-19 pandemic.

"For the pestilence to reach Warwicksire, England, in the summer of 1596," O'Farrell writes, "two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet." The unwitting conduits are a master glassmaker in Murano, who in a moment of inattention burns his hands while blowing glass beads, and a cabin boy on a merchant ship, who becomes enchanted with an African monkey in Alexandria and picks up a stowaway infected flea in his red neckerchief. With the tenaciousness of a forensic viral chaser, O'Farrell charts the flea and its progeny's deadly path, through cats, rats, midshipmen, officers, glassmaker, and into the boxes of glass beads, one of which Hamnet's sister Judith excitedly unpacks when it is delivered to a Stratford seamstress who has been eagerly awaiting them for a client's fancy gown.

Unaware of the source of her children's illness, poor Agnes is left to suffer the consequences. O'Farrell writes, "There is a part of her that would like to wind up time, to gather it in like yarn. She would like to spin the wheel backwards, unmake the skein of Hamnet's death." But of course she realizes, "There will be no going back. No undoing what was laid out for them. The boy has gone and the husband will leave and she will stay and the pigs will need to be fed every day and time runs only one way."

Although more than 400 years have unspooled since Hamnet Shakespeare's death, the story O'Farrell weaves in this moving novel is timeless and ever-relevant.

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The Real 'Hamnet' Died Centuries Ago, But This Novel Is Timeless

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In the 20 years since the publication of her first novel, After You'd Gone, Irish-born Maggie O'Farrell has wooed readers with intricately plotted, lushly imagined fiction featuring nonconformist women buffeted by the essential unpredictability of life, which can turn on a dime.

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I'm wishing you a year of health and happiness! I hope you get to enjoy your day!!!!
-Tasha

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I sure missing seeing you in person. This is a book that really changed my whole perspective on life, and helped me find (and even still maintain) Hope in tough times. I hope you have a good day!
- Nao

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The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

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The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment [Tolle, Eckhart] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

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Wishing you the happiest of days on your birthday!  Since I was on vacation last week, I just finished a bunch of books, lol.  The one that I got through in two days and which literally made me cry at the end was The Four Winds by Kristen Hannah.  Not sure if it is your style or not, but it is a family saga that takes place during the Dust Bowl/Depression years.  I also ready Confessions on the 7:45, a psychological thriller; Group, a memoir about group therapy (funny at times - a good read); and Caste (but I put that to the side because it was definitely not an easy breezy vacation read!)
--Leslie

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
#1 USA TODAY BESTSELLER
#1 WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER
#1 INDIE BESTSELLER

"The Four Winds seems eerily prescient in 2021 . . . Its message is galvanizing and hopeful: We are a nation of scrappy survivors. We've been in dire straits before; we will be again. Hold your people close."―The New York Times

"A spectacular tour de force that shines a spotlight on the indispensable but often overlooked role of Greatest Generation women."―People

"Through one woman's survival during the harsh and haunting Dust Bowl, master storyteller, Kristin Hannah, reminds us that the human heart and our Earth are as tough, yet as fragile, as a change in the wind." ― Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing

From the number-one bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone comes a powerful American epic about love and heroism and hope, set during the Great Depression, a time when the country was in crisis and at war with itself, when millions were out of work and even the land seemed to have turned against them.

"My land tells its story if you listen. The story of our family."

Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on the brink of a new and optimistic era. But for Elsa Wolcott, deemed too old to marry in a time when marriage is a woman's only option, the future seems bleak. Until the night she meets Rafe Martinelli and decides to change the direction of her life. With her reputation in ruin, there is only one respectable choice: marriage to a man she barely knows.

By 1934, the world has changed; millions are out of work and drought has devastated the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as crops fail and water dries up and the earth cracks open. Dust storms roll relentlessly across the plains. Everything on the Martinelli farm is dying, including Elsa's tenuous marriage; each day is a desperate battle against nature and a fight to keep her children alive.

In this uncertain and perilous time, Elsa―like so many of her neighbors―must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or leave it behind and go west, to California, in search of a better life for her family.

The Four Winds is a rich, sweeping novel that stunningly brings to life the Great Depression and the people who lived through it―the harsh realities that divided us as a nation and the enduring battle between the haves and the have-nots. A testament to hope, resilience, and the strength of the human spirit to survive adversity, The Four Winds is an indelible portrait of America and the American dream, as seen through the eyes of one indomitable woman whose courage and sacrifice will come to define a generation.

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great depression; dust bowl; 1930s; thirties; migrants; 4 winds; poverty; farmers; farming; nightingale author; mother daughter; coming of age; oklahoma texas california journey; sweeping; strong female protagonist; book clubs; reading group picks; christian hannah; krisitn hannah; christen hannah; christine hannah; christina hannah; hanna kristen; kristen hanna

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The Four Winds: A Novel [Hannah, Kristin] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Four Winds: A Novel

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Happy Birthday! I just finished The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, which is a fictionalized account of John Brown's fight for abolition across Bloody Kansas and his death at Harper's Ferry. Very funny, but dark at times.

John B

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harpers ferry (w. va.);history;john brown's raid

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harpers ferry (w. va.) - history - john brown's raid

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harpers ferry (w. va.);history;john brown's raid

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books by black authors;historical fiction novels;literary fiction;historical fiction books;national book award winners;historical fiction;civil war historical fiction;slavery historical fiction;underground railroad;national book award;abolitionism;abolitionist movement;african american history;black history;african american;national book award winner;good lord bird;african american urban fiction;birds;black history books;top 10 books;good books;bird;african american books;black authors

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historical fiction; civil war historical fiction; slavery historical fiction; underground railroad; national book award; abolitionism; abolitionist movement; african american history; black history; african american; national book award winner; literary fiction; national book award winners; novels; books by black authors; historical fiction novels; historical fiction books; fiction books; fiction; african american books; african american fiction; literature; african american literature; realistic fiction books

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Amazon.com: The Good Lord Bird: A Novel (9781594632785): McBride, James: Books

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Wishing you improved health for 2021!!  Looking forward to when you can come back in to work!  I'm reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson and loving it.  But you've probably read it already :-D
~ Audrey

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Wishing you a birthday filled with health and happiness! And cake!!

One of my favorite series is The Fever series by Karen Marie Moning. It's fantasy with all kinds of twists!

Lots of Love,
Fi

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MacKayla Lane's life is good. She has great friends, a decent job, and a car that breaks down only every other week or so. In other words, she's your perfectly ordinary twenty-first-century woman. Or so she thinks . . . until something extraordinary happens.
When her sister is murdered, leaving a single clue to her death-a cryptic message on Mac's cell phone-Mac journeys to Ireland in search of answers. The quest to find her sister's killer draws her into a shadowy realm where nothing is as it seems, where good and evil wear the same treacherously seductive mask. She is soon faced with an even greater challenge: staying alive long enough to learn how to handle a power she had no idea she possessed-a gift that allows her to see beyond the world of man, into the dangerous realm of the Fae. . . .

As Mac delves deeper into the mystery of her sister's death, her every move is shadowed by the dark, mysterious Jericho, a man with no past and only mockery for a future. As she begins to close in on the truth, the ruthless Vlane-an alpha Fae who makes sex an addiction for human women-closes in on her. And as the boundary between worlds begins to crumble, Mac's true mission becomes clear: find the elusive Sinsar Dubh before someone else claims the all-powerful Dark Book-because whoever gets to it first holds nothing less than complete control of the very fabric of both worlds in their hands. . . .

Look for all of Karen Marie Moning's sensational Fever novels:
DARKFEVER | BLOODFEVER | FAEFEVER | DREAMFEVER | SHADOWFEVER | ICED | BURNED | FEVERBORN | FEVERSONG
BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Karen Marie Moning's Bloodfever.

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Darkfever: Fever Series Book 1 - Kindle edition by Moning, Karen Marie. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Darkfever: Fever Series Book 1.

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Wishing you a very happy birthday full of celebrations with family and friends and delicious treats. I'm currently reading the novel American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson, and I think you might also enjoy it!

Christine

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On the very first page of American Spy, narrator Marie Mitchell, a former FBI agent, hears a noise in her house. Deciding it's best to be cautious, she grabs her handgun, right before her worst fear is confirmed - a man with a gun enters her bedroom. There's a struggle; Marie ends up with a few broken blood vessels in her cheeks, and the stranger ends up with a bullet in his head.

Clearly, Lauren Wilkinson doesn't believe in wasting time. Her first novel starts off with a literal bang, and never once lets up. American Spy is a beautifully paced spy thriller as well as a promising debut from a writer who's not content to rely on the settled tropes of any literary genre.

American Spy is framed as a letter from Marie to her young twin sons, who are in the house at the time of their mother's attempted assassination. After the attack, she whisks the boys away to Martinique, the Caribbean island where her own mother lives. She knows her sons will one day wonder how their mother found herself in this situation; the letter is meant to address that: "I'm writing this to give you honest answers to the questions I hazard to guess you'll ask while you're growing up. I'm writing it all down here just in case I'm not around to tell you."

The novel goes back and forth in time, alternating between Marie's upbringing in New York in the 1960s, her career as an FBI agent in the late '80s, and her retreat to Martinique in 1992. She and her beloved sister, Helene, were raised mostly by their police officer father; her mother had abandoned the family when the two girls were young.

Marie decides to join the FBI out of college, influenced by her sister's lifelong dream of being a spy. Marie is good at her job, but is stymied in her attempts at career advancement by the white men in charge who are suspicious of her as a black woman. "A sense of self-importance permeated the culture," Marie explains. "So did machismo and knee-jerk conservatism. ... Very few of those men understood having no choice about whether they were political or not: Unlike me, they weren't people who'd had their existence politicized on their behalf."

She sees a possible way out of the bureau when a CIA officer recruits her to cozy up to Thomas Sankara, the leftist president of Burkina Faso, whose administration the American government is trying to overthrow. The CIA wants Marie to ascertain how much Sankara (a real-life figure) knows about America's involvement in his opposition, and possibly seduce him - Marie has misgivings, doubting the CIA's motives, but accepts the job anyway. She doesn't expect, however, to be charmed by the revolutionary politician: "It wasn't enough to call what he had magnetism," she explains. "The way he could make you feel. It was like he saw a version of you that was even more perfect than the version you saw of yourself. It was very generous. And it made you feel special, that reminder of your better angels."

Wilkinson packs a lot of plot into American Spy - Marie's mission is complicated by lingering questions about the mysterious death of her sister, whose close friend becomes her boss in the operation that takes her to Burkina Faso. But Wilkinson handles the several threads in the novel deftly, and she has a real gift for pacing - never once does the book flag or get bogged down, and it's never needlessly complex or confusing.

Wilkinson doesn't shy away from the moral ambiguity of American adventurism in the 1980s, and neither does her unforgettable narrator.

She also provides a unique spin on the Cold War spy thriller. There's no shortage of novels featuring the red-blooded American heroes trying to save the world from the dastardly Soviets, a well-worn trope that became a literary cliché sometime in the 1960s. But American Spy is the opposite of that - Wilkinson doesn't shy away from the moral ambiguity of American adventurism in the 1980s, and neither does her unforgettable narrator, Marie, who tells her sons, "One thing I can say for sure is that I don't want you to be moral absolutists. If what I'm telling you of our story means to you that the people it involves are either saved or damned, then you'll have misunderstood me."

American Spy works on so many levels - it's an expertly written spy thriller as well as a deeply intelligent literary novel that tackles issues of politics, race and gender in a way that's never even close to being heavy-handed or didactic. Above all, it's just so much fun to read - like the best of John le Carré, it's extremely tough to put down. It marks the debut of an immensely talented writer who's refreshingly unafraid to take risks, and has the skills to make those risks pay off.

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'American Spy' Is A Unique Spin On The Cold War Thriller

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On the very first page of American Spy, narrator Marie Mitchell, a former FBI agent, hears a noise in her house. Deciding it's best to be cautious, she grabs her handgun, right before her worst fear is confirmed - a man with a gun enters her bedroom.