It’s time once again for staff of Halifax Public Libraries to share their favourite books published in 2013. As always I’m impressed by the diversity of their reading interests and the fact that the same book is never nominated twice.
(part one was posted yesterday)
A Spear of Summer Grass (M)
by Deanna Raybourn
“Exiled to Kenya after her latest scandalous exploit, Delilah Drummond, now the mistress of her step-father’s crumbling estate, falls into the decadent pleasures of society until she meets Ryder White who becomes her guide to the beauty of this complex world. Set in 1920s British Kenya.”
The Rosie Project (M)
by Graeme Simsion
“A classic screwball romance about a handsome but awkward genetics professor and the woman who is totally wrong for him. A first-date dud, socially awkward and overly fond of quick-dry clothes, genetics professor Don Tillman has given up on love, until a chance encounter gives him an idea. He will design a questionnaire – a sixteen-page, scientifically researched questionnaire – to uncover the perfect partner.”
The Painted Girls (M)
by Cathy Marie Buchanan
“A heartrending, gripping novel set in belle époque Paris and inspired by the real-life model for Degas’s Little Dancer Aged 14 and by the era’s most famous criminal trials. Following their father’s sudden death, the Van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without his wages, and with the small amount their laundress mother earns disappearing into the absinthe bottle, eviction seems imminent. With few options for work, Marie is dispatched to the Paris Opéra, where she will be trained to enter the famous Ballet and meet Edgar Degas. Her older sister, Antoinette, finds employment—and the love of a dangerous young man—as an extra in a stage adaptation of Émile Zola’s Naturalist masterpiece L’Assommoir. Set at a moment of profound artistic, cultural, and societal change,The Painted Girls is a tale of two remarkable sisters rendered uniquely vulnerable to the darker impulses of “civilized society.””
Speaking from Among the Bones (M)
by Alan Bradley
“Eleven-year-old amateur detective and ardent chemist Flavia de Luce is used to digging up clues, whether they’re found among the potions in her laboratory or between the pages of her insufferable sisters’ diaries. What she is not accustomed to is digging up bodies. Upon the five-hundredth anniversary of St. Tancred’s death, the English hamlet of Bishop’s Lacey is busily preparing to open its patron saint’s tomb. Nobody is more excited to peek inside the crypt than Flavia, yet what she finds will halt the proceedings dead in their tracks…”
The Ocean at the End of the Lane (M)
by Neil Gaiman
“Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she’d claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.”
The Orenda (M)
by Joseph Boyden
“An epic story of first contact between radically different worlds, steeped in the natural beauty and brutality of our country’s formative years. A visceral portrait of life at a crossroads, The Orenda opens with a brutal massacre and the kidnapping of the young Iroquois Snow Falls, a spirited girl with a special gift. Her captor, Bird, is an elder and one of the Huron Nation’s great warriors and statesmen. It has been years since the murder of his family, and yet they are never far from his mind. In Snow Falls, Bird recognizes the ghost of his lost daughter and sees that the girl possesses powerful magic that will be useful to him on the troubled road ahead. Bird’s people have battled the Iroquois for as long as he can remember, but both tribes now face a new, more dangerous threat from afar…”
The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die (M)
by Colin Cotterill
“When a murdered woman suddenly reappears in her Lao village home with clairvoyant powers and is enlisted by a ghost to help find his remains at the bottom of a river, national coroner Siri Paiboun oversees the excavation.”
