Ah… the joys of summer: mosquitos, sunburns, heat-stroke. Time to put up the hammock between those lovely shady trees, slather yourself with sunscreen and bug repellant, fill up a large glass with something cold, and lay back in the hammock and have a relaxing afternoon of reading books by your favourite authors. The Library is a great place to pick up the latest titles.
Did you know that the Library has an Adult Summer Reading Club? For your chance to win a Kobo Touch eReader, register online at www.tnrdlib.ca to submit a short weekly book log. Each week that you submit a book log you will be entered into the grand prize draw… but don’t wait to long, as this ends August 31.
A Place In The Country by Elizabeth Adler – Fifteen-year-old Issy, and her newly-single mother, Caroline Evans, are struggling to find their way alone, as well as together. At thirty-eight, Caroline is coming to terms with this new life, even though she has little money and all the responsibility for the two of them. When she decides to leave their well-off lives in Singapore (and her cheating husband and his long-time mistress and powerhouse), she ends up living in an English village pub, cooking dinners to earn enough to get by on; meeting unexpectedly quirky people, and making friends. But Issy still adores her father and secretly blames her mother for their change in life. When Caroline’s dream of restoring an old barn into a restaurant finally begins to come true, her chance at happiness hangs in the balance as whispers of murder and vengeance find their way to her. When Issy, hovering in that limbo between girl and young woman, begins to make some dangerous choices, the stakes are raised even higher.
The Sandcastle Girls by Christopher Bohjalian – When Elizabeth Endicott arrives in Aleppo, Syria she has a diploma from Mount Holyoke, a crash course in nursing, and only the most basic grasp of the Armenian language. The year is 1915 and she has volunteered on behalf of the Boston-based Friends of Armenia to help deliver food and medical aid to refugees of the Armenian genocide. There Elizabeth becomes friendly with Armen, a young Armenian engineer who has already lost his wife and infant daughter. When Armen leaves Aleppo and travels south into Egypt to join the British army, he begins to write Elizabeth letters, and comes to realize that he has fallen in love with the wealthy, young American woman who is so different from the wife he lost.
Fast forward to the present day, where we meet Laura Petrosian, a novelist living in suburban New York. Although her grandparents’ ornate Pelham home was affectionately nicknamed “The Ottoman Annex,” Laura has never really given her Armenian heritage much thought. But when an old friend calls, claiming to have seen a newspaper photo of Laura’s grandmother promoting an exhibit at a Boston museum, Laura embarks on a journey back through her family’s history that reveals love, loss – and a wrenching secret that has been buried for generations.
