Looking for Something New to Read?

Here are a few write-ups from the Edmonton Public Library's website on some of the books I've read lately. If you're looking for some new reading material, here's a few to think about. 

Station Eleven

Mandel, Emily St. John

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time - from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains - this novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.

The Housemaid's Daughter

Mutch, Barbara

Duty and love collide on the arid plains of central South Africa. Previously released as 'Karoo Plainsong' this is a fully revised debut novel. Cathleen Harrington leaves her home in Ireland in 1919 to travel to South Africa and marry the fiance she has not seen for five years. Isolated and estranged in a harsh landscape, she finds solace in her diary and the friendship of her housemaid's daughter, Ada. Cathleen recognises in her someone she can love and respond to in a way that she cannot with her own husband and daughter. Under Cathleen's tutelage, Ada grows into an accomplished pianist, and a reader who cannot resist turning the pages of the diary, discovering the secrets Cathleen sought to hide. When Ada is compromised and finds she is expecting a mixed-race child, she flees her home, determined to spare Cathleen the knowledge of her betrayal, and the disgrace that would descend upon the family. Scorned within her own community, Ada is forced to carve a life for herself, her child, and her music. But Cathleen still believes in Ada, and risks the constraints of apartheid to search for her and persuade her to return with her daughter. Beyond the cruelty, there is love, hope - and redemption.

All the Light We Cannot See

Doerr, Anthony

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 near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure's reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum's most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure's converge. Doerr's "stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors" ( San Francisco Chronicle ) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he 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 a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer "whose sentences never fail to thrill" ( Los Angeles Times ).

These ones need a little beefing up because apparently the  librarians didn't read them...

Yes Please

Poehler, Amy

An autobiography of comedian, Amy Poehler, known for her work on the television programs, Saturday Night Live and Parks and Recreation.

If you like her comedy, or if you're a woman/mother/friend you'll relate to this book and probably laugh out loud a few times. She talks about her rise in the comedy world, her marriage, divorce, kids, parents, friendships, and so much more.I don't even watch her shows or really relate to her quirky humour but it made me laugh.

Dark Places

Flynn, Gillian

Thanks to Libby Day, her older brother Ben has been in prison for twenty-five years, since he was fifteen and Libby testified that she watched him kill their mother and two sisters. But there are those who believe that Ben is innocent, that Libby lied on the stand.

This is the same author that wrote Gone Girl. It was wildly popular and this one was pretty similar. Keep in mind, if you haven't read or seen Gone Girl, her books are pretty out there, but interesting. Did you know there are people who actively stalk cold cases and try to solve them? Apparently there are.... Creepy, but interesting.