A Taste for Nightshade by Martine Bailey
Manchester 1787. When budding young criminal Mary Jebb
swindles Michael Croxon's brother with a blank pound note, he chases her into
the night and sets in motion a train of sinister events. Condemned to seven
years of transportation to Australia, Mary sends him a 'Penny Heart'-a token of
her vow of revenge.
Two years later, Michael marries naïve young Grace Moore.
Although initially overjoyed at the union, Grace quickly realizes that her
husband is more interested in her fortune than her company. Lonely and
desperate for companionship, she turns to her new cook to help mend her ailing
marriage. But Mary Jebb, shipwrecked, maltreated, and recently hired, has
different plans for the unsuspecting owners of Delafosse Hall.
A Taste for Nightshade is a thrilling historical novel that
combines recipes, mystery and a dark struggle between two desperate women, sure
to appeal to fans of Sarah Waters and Carolly Erickson. –Amazon Description
Fallen Land by Taylor Brown
Fallen Land is Taylor Brown's debut novel set in the final
year of the Civil War, as a young couple on horseback flees a dangerous band of
marauders who seek a bounty reward. Callum, a seasoned horse thief at fifteen
years old, came to America from his native Ireland as an orphan. Ava, her
father and brother lost to the war, hides in her crumbling home until Callum
determines to rescue her from the bands of hungry soldiers pillaging the land,
leaving destruction in their wake. Ava and Callum have only each other in the
world and their remarkable horse, Reiver, who carries them through the
destruction that is the South. Pursued relentlessly by a murderous slave
hunter, tracking dogs, and ruthless ex-partisan rangers, the couple race
through a beautiful but ruined land, surviving on food they glean from
abandoned farms and the occasional kindness of strangers. In the end, as they
intersect with the scorching destruction of Sherman's March, the couple seek a
safe haven where they can make a home and begin to rebuild their lives.
Dramatic and thrillingly written with an uncanny eye for glimpses of beauty in
a ravaged landscape, Fallen Land is a love story at its core, and an unusually
assured first novel by award-winning young author Taylor Brown. –Amazon Description
The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian
From the New York Times bestselling author of Midwives and
The Sandcastle Girls comes the spellbinding tale of a party gone horribly
wrong: two men lie dead in a suburban living room, two women are on the run
from police, and a marriage is ripping apart at the seams.
When Kristin Chapman agrees to let her husband, Richard,
host his brother’s bachelor party, she expects a certain amount of debauchery.
She brings their young daughter to Manhattan for the evening, leaving her
Westchester home to the men and their hired entertainment. What she does not
expect is this: bacchanalian drunkenness, her husband sharing a dangerously
intimate moment in the guest room, and two women stabbing and killing their
Russian bodyguards before driving off into the night.
In the aftermath, Kristin and Richard’s life rapidly spirals
into nightmare. The police throw them out of their home, now a crime scene,
Richard’s investment banking firm puts him on indefinite leave, and Kristin is
unsure if she can forgive her husband for the moment he shared with a
dark-haired girl in the guest room. But the dark-haired girl, Alexandra, faces
a much graver danger. In one breathless, violent night, she is free, running to
escape the police who will arrest her and the gangsters who will kill her in a
heartbeat. A captivating, chilling story about shame and scandal, The Guest
Room is a riveting novel from one of our greatest storytellers. – Amazon Description
Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt
A contemporary gothic from an author in the company of Kelly
Link and Aimee Bender, Mr. Splitfoot tracks two women in two times as they
march toward a mysterious reckoning.
Ruth and Nat are orphans, packed into a house full of
abandoned children run by a religious fanatic. To entertain their siblings,
they channel the dead. Decades later, Ruth’s niece, Cora, finds herself
accidentally pregnant. After years of absence, Aunt Ruth appears, mute and full
of intention. She is on a mysterious mission, leading Cora on an odyssey across
the entire state of New York on foot. Where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been?
And who — or what — has she hidden in the woods at the end of the road?
In an ingeniously structured dual narrative, two separate
timelines move toward the same point of crisis. Their merging will upend and
reinvent the whole. A subversive ghost story that is carefully plotted and
elegantly constructed, Mr. Splitfoot will set your heart racing and your brain
churning. Mysteries abound, criminals roam free, utopian communities show their
age, the mundane world intrudes on the supernatural and vice versa.
Making good on the extraordinary acclaim for her previous
books, Samantha Hunt continues to be “dazzling” (Vanity Fair) and to deliver
fiction that is “daring and delicious” (Chicago Tribune). –Amazon Description
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
A new book by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout is
cause for celebration. Her bestselling novels, including Olive Kitteridge and The
Burgess Boys, have illuminated our most tender relationships. Now, in My Name
Is Lucy Barton, this extraordinary writer shows how a simple hospital visit
becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all—the one between mother
and daughter.
Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been
a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes
to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy’s childhood in Amgash,
Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension
and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy’s life: her escape from her
troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her
two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant
storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly
unforgettable. – Amazon Description
Outline by Rachel Cusk
A luminous, powerful novel that establishes Rachel Cusk as
one of the finest writers in the English language
A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane.
They get to talking―about their destination, their careers, their families.
Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces
analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own
fictions about their lives.
Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare
and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during
one oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling
exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner and discourse. She goes
swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. The people she
encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet
theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of
the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a
great loss.
Outline takes a hard look at the things that are hardest to
speak about. It brilliantly captures conversations, investigates people's
motivations for storytelling, and questions their ability to ever do so
honestly or unselfishly. In doing so it bares the deepest impulses behind the
craft of fiction writing. This is Rachel Cusk's finest work yet, and one of the
most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years.
Short-listed for the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize, finalist for the
2014 Folio Prize
Named one of the best fiction books of 2014 by The New
Yorker, The Guardian, The Independent and Glamour A Publishers Weekly Pick of
the Week and Flavorwire Staff Pick –Amazon Description
Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica
A chance encounter sparks an unrelenting web of lies in this
stunning new psychological thriller from the New York Times bestselling author
of The Good Girl, Mary Kubica
She sees the teenage girl on the train platform, standing in
the pouring rain, clutching an infant in her arms. She boards a train and is
whisked away. But she can't get the girl out of her head…
Heidi Wood has always been a charitable woman: she works for
a nonprofit, takes in stray cats. Still, her husband and daughter are horrified
when Heidi returns home one day with a young woman named Willow and her
four-month-old baby in tow. Disheveled and apparently homeless, this girl could
be a criminal—or worse. But despite her family's objections, Heidi invites
Willow and the baby to take refuge in their home.
Heidi spends the next few days helping Willow get back on
her feet, but as clues into Willow's past begin to surface, Heidi is forced to
decide how far she's willing to go to help a stranger. What starts as an act of
kindness quickly spirals into a story far more twisted than anyone could have
anticipated.
Don't miss this thrilling follow-up to The Good Girl by
master of suspense, Mary Kubica. – Amazon Description
The Children’s Home by Charles Lambert
For fans of Shirley Jackson, Neil Gaiman, Roald Dahl, and
Edward Gorey, a beguiling and disarming debut novel from an award-winning
British author about a mysterious group of children who appear to a disfigured
recluse and his country doctor—and the startling revelations their behavior
evokes.
In a sprawling estate, willfully secluded, lives Morgan
Fletcher, the disfigured heir to a fortune of mysterious origins. Morgan spends
his days in quiet study, avoiding his reflection in mirrors and the lake at the
end of his garden. One day, two children, Moira and David, appear. Morgan takes
them in, giving them free reign of the mansion he shares with his housekeeper
Engel. Then more children begin to show up.
Dr. Crane, the town physician and Morgan’s lone tether to
the outside world, is as taken with the children as Morgan, and begins to spend
more time in Morgan’s library. But the children behave strangely. They show a
prescient understanding of Morgan’s past, and their bizarre discoveries in the
mansion attics grow increasingly disturbing. Every day the children seem to
disappear into the hidden rooms of the estate, and perhaps, into the hidden
corners of Morgan’s mind.
The Children’s Home is a genre-defying, utterly bewitching
masterwork, an inversion of modern fairy tales like The Chronicles of Narnia
and The Golden Compass, in which children visit faraway lands to accomplish
elusive tasks. Lambert writes from the perspective of the visited, weaving
elements of psychological suspense, Jamesian stream of consciousness, and
neo-gothic horror, to reveal the inescapable effects of abandonment, isolation,
and the grotesque—as well as the glimmers of goodness—buried deep within the
soul. –Amazon Description
The Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner
A riveting, deeply affecting true story of one girl’s
coming-of-age in a polygamist family.
RUTH WARINER was the thirty-ninth of her father’s forty-two
children. Growing up on a farm in rural Mexico, where authorities turn a blind
eye to the practices of her community, Ruth lives in a ramshackle house without
indoor plumbing or electricity. At church, preachers teach that God will punish
the wicked by destroying the world and that women can only ascend to Heaven by
entering into polygamous marriages and giving birth to as many children as
possible. After Ruth’s father―the man who had been the founding prophet of the
colony―is brutally murdered by his brother in a bid for church power, her
mother remarries, becoming the second wife of another faithful congregant.
In need of government assistance and supplemental income,
Ruth and her siblings are carted back and forth between Mexico and the United
States, where Ruth’s mother collects welfare and her stepfather works a variety
of odd jobs. Ruth comes to love the time she spends in the States, realizing
that perhaps the community into which she was born is not the right one for
her. As she begins to doubt her family’s beliefs and question her mother’s
choices, she struggles to balance her fierce love for her siblings with her
determination to forge a better life for herself.
Recounted from the innocent and hopeful perspective of a
child, The Sound of Gravel is the remarkable memoir of one girl’s fight for
peace and love. This is an intimate, gripping tale of triumph, courage, and
resilience. –Amazon Description
All these are available for checkout through the Lake County Library System.
