Staff Recommendations
Robert Anderson
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The anatomy of desire : a novel
by Dorn, L. R.
August 9, 2021
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At a secluded mountain lake, a young couple rent a canoe. A few hours later, the overturned canoe is discovered, and the body of a woman is found in the lake, drowned and showing evidence of head injuries. Her companion is soon arrested and charged with first-degree murder. If this sounds familiar, you have probably either read Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel An American Tragedy or seen the famous 1951 film adaptation A Place in the Sun, with Montgomery Clift, Shelley Winters, and Elizabeth Taylor. Dreiser based his story on a real-life case that occurred in New York’s... Read Full Review
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Never turn back : a novel
by Swann, Christopher, 1970-
December 7, 2020
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Author and teacher Christopher Swann once heard from his parents about an unnerving incident that occurred late in the evening at their home. A young woman came to the door, on the run from a bad situation she’d found herself in, and begged them to let her in. Fortunately for all concerned, her pursuers did not track her down and eventually went away, but the story made Swann think about how he would have reacted if he’d been there and events had taken a more violent turn. He has put his speculations to good use in this novel--his second thriller.Ethan Faulkner, the story’s protagonist, is a... Read Full Review
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Scandinavian noir : in pursuit of a mystery
by Lesser, Wendy
November 24, 2020
Call Number: 839.53 L638
In the course of the past thirty years, Scandinavian crime fiction has become an increasingly popular genre among English-speaking readers and television viewers, to the extent that a guidebook called Nordic Noir was published in 2013.Wendy Lesser, editor of the journal Threepenny Review, author of numerous books about literature and art, and confirmed Nordic noir fan, has approached the topic from a different angle in her latest book. In the... Read Full Review
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Five days gone : the mystery of my mother's disappearance as a child
by Cumming, Laura
May 18, 2020
Call Number: 362.70942 C971
It was a crisp autumn day in 1929 when Veda Elston took three-year-old Betty to the beach to play with her new pail and shovel in the seaside Lincolnshire village of Chapel St. Leonards on England’s east coast, just a short walk from their home. After turning her attention from the little girl for a few seconds, Veda looked up from her knitting to find that Betty had disappeared from view. Knowing that there hadn’t been time for her to wade into the water, Veda began a search of the area, soon enlisting neighbors and summoning her husband, George, back from his work as a traveling salesman.... Read Full Review
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The beneficiary : fortune, misfortune, and the story of my father
by Scott, Janny
April 28, 2020
Call Number: 709.2 S428Sc
We hear a lot these days about “the 1%” -- those Americans who are wealthier than 99% of the nation’s population. Janny Scott, a New York Times reporter, who has also written a biography of Barack Obama’s mother, knows about this group from the inside, because she grew up in a family that was definitely part of the 1%--the Montgomery/Scott clan of Villanova, Pennsylvania, in the posh Philadelphia suburbs known as the Main Line. In 1909, Janny’s great-grandfather, Col. R. L. Montgomery, an investment banker, purchased about 800 acres of land along the Main Line and built a 50-... Read Full Review
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Never Anyone but You
by Thomson, Rupert,
September 17, 2018
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Paris in the 1920s: for Americans this phrase tends to evoke the U.S. expatriates who spent time there, including Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. But most of the people who created the magical atmosphere that attracted all those foreigners were, of course, French natives. Rupert Thomson's tenth novel is a fictionalized portrait of two real-life Frenchwomen who participated in the artistic life of that place and time, and went on to play an equally significant part in the resistance to Nazi occupation.The central characters of this story--Lucie Schwob and Suzanne... Read Full Review
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Quicksand
by Persson Giolito, Malin, 1969-
August 7, 2017
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A young woman in Massachusetts was recently convicted of manslaughter after she urged her boyfriend, via cellphone, to carry out his suicide plans. The same deadly combination of social media and criminal behavior is at the center of Swedish writer and lawyer Malin Persson Giolito's recent novel Quicksand, which takes place in the wealthy suburb of Stockholm where the author grew up. The story's narrator is 18-year-old Maria "Maja" Norberg, who has become a national and even international celebrity for the worst of reasons. Nine months earlier Maja was involved in a... Read Full Review
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Addlands : a novel
by Bullough, Tom,
October 17, 2016
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On the day in 1941 that his nineteen-year-old wife gives birth to a son, middle-aged Welsh farmer Idris Hamer discovers a large, flat stone with unusual lettering on it while plowing one of his fields. Over the next 70 years, the stone will reappear periodically in the lives of the Hamers, serving as a sort of guardian talisman or tormenting demon in this bleak yet compelling family chronicle. Idris and his wife, Etty, live in Radnorshire, a rural area bordering England where the residents consider themselves neither Welsh nor English, but something altogether different. ... Read Full Review
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Twain's end
by Cullen, Lynn.
August 29, 2016
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In 1908, a couple of years before his death, Samuel Clemens, known around the world as novelist and humorist Mark Twain, decided to leave New York City and have a new home (eventually called Stormfield) built for him near the little town of Redding, Connecticut. He left most of the details of consulting with the architect and overseeing the construction to Isabel Lyon, who had been his secretary for six years. Isabel was given a cottage on the property for herself and her mother, and a room at Stormfield--right next to the master bedroom. Not long after moving to Connecticut... Read Full Review
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The scribe : a novel
by Guinn, Matthew.
September 14, 2015
Call Number: M
Matthew Guinn received an Edgar Award nomination for Best First Novel for The Resurrectionist( 2013). His second novel is a dark story of murder and race relations with black magic overtones, set in Atlanta in 1881.The central character, Thomas Canby, is a former member of the Atlanta police force, now living in bitter exile as sheriff of a tiny town in the hills of northern Georgia after being unjustly accused of taking a bribe four years... Read Full Review
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Amherst
by Nicholson, William,
July 6, 2015
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British author William Nicholson is well known as a screenwriter, playwright and novelist. Recently, Nicholson has been writing a series of novels about an extended British family between World War II and the present. Amherst brings back some of the characters from this series (though no knowledge of earlier episodes is necessary) and uses them to examine an improbable real-life literary romance: the 12-year love affair between Emily Dickinson's brother Austin and Mabel Loomis Todd, the much younger woman who edited the first volumes of Emily's poems after her death... Read Full Review
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In certain circles
by Harrower, Elizabeth, 1928-
March 31, 2015
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The revelation of a "rediscovered" Harper Lee novel is worldwide news. A similar case involving another octogenarian author, from Australia, has generated much less media buzz but is nevertheless a significant literary event. During the 1960s, Elizabeth Harrower was considered one of the most talented younger Australian novelists. Her four novels were praised in Britain and in Australia, which included acclaim and friendship from two stellar Australian novelists, Christina Stead and Patrick White. A couple of years ago, an Australian publisher decided to reissue the four... Read Full Review