I'm a lifelong reader who has always been interested in the period of WWII. Stories of courage under fire are my favorites. As a little girl, I attended a one-room school without a library. Luckily, my enlightened teacher contracted with a Bookmobile, a travelling library. The first time I got inside the Bookmobile, I decided Iād like to live there and was only removed forcibly by the bus driver. I'm an educator turned author who worked for thirty-five years at the medical school at Michigan State University. Luckily, my circle of family and friends includes doctors, lawyers, and police officers who are consulted regularly for advice on my mysteries.
William
Brodrick is a British solicitor who became a lawyer after leaving a monastery
where he was a monk. Like Brodrick, I have re-invented myself as an author
after 40 years of working as a medical educator. Knowing what it took for me to succeed
in a new career, I admire what it cost the author to achieve such a radical
shift. Monk-turned-lawyer-turned-Novelist Brodrick has written a stunning story
about a guard at a WWII death camp who is being brought to trial fifty years
after the war. The story is told by Anselm, a lawyer who left the Old Baily in
London where he worked as a solicitor, to become a monk at Larkwood Priory
(the reverse of the authorās life).
Another reason this story speaks to me so
profoundly has to do with my background. I am the eldest child in an abusive
family that enforced silence about what we were experiencing. The back story of The Sixth Lamentation narrates the story of an elderly woman who presently has
ALS but who, as a young woman, transported Jewish children out of Paris to
safety. She, herself, became a prisoner at the death camps and knew the
defendant. However, she cannot testify due to her inability to speak or
write. My life has not been so constrained, but it was only after my
father died that I could bring myself to speak about his alcoholism, his
violence toward my mother, and its impact on me.
What should you do if the world has turned against you? When Father Anselm is asked this question by an old man at Larkwood Priory, his response, to claim sanctuary, is to have greater resonance than he could ever have imagined. For that evening the old man returns, demanding the protection of the church. His name is Eduard Schwermann and he is wanted by the police as a suspected war criminal. With her life running out, Agnes Aubret feels it is time to unburden to her granddaughter Lucy the secrets she has been carrying for so long. Fifty years earlier,ā¦
This is a 750+ page book and a tour de force. I have profound sympathy for the Jewish people, and the horrors they endured under Nazi rule. None of the things I have suffered in my life, including living with a violent alcoholic father, came even close to the fears and degradation experienced by the people in this book. My own survival techniques included hiding and avoidance of anything that would trigger my fatherās anger. As the eldest, I also tried to shield my younger siblings. Thus, I was as unobtrusive as possible, a survival technique minorities have used for centuries.
This story begins in 1937 with a young Hungarian Jewish man
who goes to Paris to study architecture. Asked to deliver a letter to a womanās
nephew, he falls into a complicated relationship with the letterās recipient
and eventually, despite her own dark secrets, they fall in love. As a Jew, he
is fearful of the increasingly terrifying strictures imposed upon him, his
brother who is studying medicine in Italy, and his family in a small Hungarian
town. He is conscripted several times and struggles to survive in the brutal
Carpathian winters. Using beautiful prose, the author compels her readers to
become one with this family of Jews in the darkest times of the last century.
Paris, 1937. Andras Levi, an architecture student, has arrived from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to Clara Morgenstern a young widow living in the city. When Andras meets Clara he is drawn deeply into her extraordinary and secret life, just as Europe's unfolding tragedy sends them both into a state of terrifying uncertainty.
From a remote Hungarian village to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the despair of Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in forced labour camps andā¦
Every picture tells a story, but itās not always the one we expect or remember. Christmas Actually is a festive drama about family and forgiveness and a snapshot of modern family life, addressing Instagram to motherhood and everything in between.
Why Christmas? My publisher wanted my new novel to haveā¦
Peekay is a little boy born in a South
Africa divided by racism and hatred. After being adored by a Zulu nanny during
his early childhood, he is sent away to a boarding school at a young age when
his mother has a mental breakdown. I, too, had a divided life as a child. I
spent the school year in my parentās home with its dire poverty and abuse and
then was set blissfully free to spend my summers at my grandmotherās farm, a
loving sacred haven. The two disparate sides of my life predispose me to feel
intensely for children who suffer from abuse.
I cried for Peekay who is called a Roonik,
a derogative term for the despised English who fought the Afrikaners during the
Boer War. He is tortured by the older students, German boys who have been
taught to idolize Adolph Hitler. Eventually, he meets Hoppie Groenewald, a
guard on a train who is a boxer. He thinks Peekay has talent and inspires his
dream of becoming the welterweight boxing champion of the world. He becomes a
professional boxer and eventually, because of his love for African Americans, is
hailed as the savior of the tribes in Africa.
āThe Power of One has everything: suspense, the exotic, violence; mysticism, psychology and magic; schoolboy adventures, drama.ā āThe New York Times
āUnabashedly uplifting . . . asserts forcefully what all of us would like to believe: that the individual, armed with the spirit of independenceāāthe power of oneāācan prevail.ā āCleveland Plain Dealer
In 1939, as Hitler casts his enormous, cruel shadow across the world, the seeds of apartheid take root in South Africa. There, a boy called Peekay is born. His childhood is marked by humiliation and abandonment, yet he vows to survive and conceives heroic dreamsāwhich are nothing comparedā¦
This story appealed to me at the outset
because of my interest in people whose property was confiscated due to the
turmoil of war. I have a grandfather who was a famous artist. Because he was painting
in the 1930s, his original artworks were sold in their entirety to the major
magazines of the day. Nowadays, artists sell the rights to their work, but retain the original paintings. I have
spent much of my adult life tracking down his paintings that were lost to the
family.
Susan Wiggsā character, Tess Delaney, makes a living returning stolen
or lost objects to their rightful owners. At the beginning of the book, she
returns a valuable lavalier necklace to an elderly woman. Somewhat later, she
is shocked to learn she has a grandfather she never knew about and that she has
been named in his will to inherit half of Bella Vista, a hundred-acre apple
orchard. The other half goes to Isabel Johansen, a half-sister she didnāt know
about either. Going through her grandfatherās āget well soonā cards, she finds
one from the very woman whose lavalier necklace she returned at the beginning
of the story and learns her grandfather and the necklaceās owner were both sent
as children to a concentration camp called Theresienstadt in Denmark. The book
weaves back and forth between Copenhagen in the early 1940s, when Tessās
grandfather and his family owned one of the famous Romanov eggs, and the
present.
A NEW ORIGINAL HALLMARK MOVIE: THE SECRETS OF BELLA VISTA!
From #1 New York Times Bestselling Author Susan Wiggs
āā¦sweet, crisp and juicy.āāElin Hilderbrand
āA powerful story of love, loss, hope and redemption.āāKirkus, Starred Review
Tess Delaney makes a living restoring stolen treasures to their owners. People like Annelise Winther, who has just been reunited with her motherās long gone necklace, worth a sum that could change her life. To Annelise, whose family was torn apart during WWII, the necklace represents her history, and the value is in its memories.
But Tessās own history is filled with gaps: a fatherā¦
Disgraced British anthropologist Nigel Rowe hopes his YouTube adventure channel will be just the treat to redeem him, but vengeful treasure hunters have other plans! Seeking a legendary Jesuit mission in Baja, Nigel saves his producerās life when the man takes a bullet meant for him.
This
book is powerful to me because of the intense mother/daughter conflict she relates.
My mother was lovely, well-read, and held an important position at our state university.
However, she was also extremely critical of her children. Because I never
rebelled against my mother, I was entranced with Joanne Harrisā young character,
Framboise, who plans and carries out a rebellion against her mother that is
worthy of the French resistance. Many years later, when Framboise Simon returns
to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her
as the daughter of the infamous woman they hold responsible for a tragedy
during the German occupation.
The past and present are inextricably entwined in
a scrapbook of recipes and memories that Framboise inherited from her
now-deceased mother. The journal contains the key to the tragedy that indelibly
marked that summer of her ninth year. The mother and daughter were virtual
enemies during her childhood and Framboise used the juice of the orange to
trigger her motherās migraines, confining her to bed while she and her siblings
had free access to a small town under German occupation.
A gripping page-turner set in occupied France from international multi-million copy seller Joanne Harris. With the sensuous writing we come to expect from her, this book has a darker core. Perfect for fans of Victoria Hislop, Fiona Valpy, Maggie O'Farrell and Rachel Joyce, this fascinating and vivid journey through human cruelty and kindness is a gripping and compelling read.
'Her strongest writing yet: as tangy and sometimes bitter as Chocolat was smooth' -- Independent 'Harris indulges her love of rich and mouthwatering descriptive passages, appealing to the senses... Thoroughly enjoyable' -- Observer 'Outstanding...beautifully written' -- Daily Mail 'Very thought provoking.ā¦
One Dog Too Many is the first in a series of mysteries that follow Mae December, a young single woman who runs a dog-boarding facility and handsome Sheriff Ben Bradley, who is frustrated by Maeās digging into his murder investigation, but appreciates her as a woman. The other characters who work for the sheriffās office are Detective Wayne Nichols, a Native American man with a complicated past, and Dory Clarkson, an African American woman who keeps them all in line. One Dog is a cozy mystery set in a small town. There are 6 in the series.
*Lia Farrell changed her penname to Lyn Farrell in 2021. All recent books (Blind Switch, Blind Split, Cottonwoods) are published under Lyn Farrell.
Captain James Heron First Into the Fray
by
Patrick G. Cox,
Captain Heron finds himself embroiled in a conflict that threatens to bring down the world order he is sworn to defend when a secretive Consortium seeks to undermine the World Treaty Organisation and the democracies it represents as he oversees the building and commissioning of a new starship.
When King Priam's pregnant daughter was fleeing the sack of Troy, Stan was there. When Jesus of Nazareth was beaten and crucified, Stan was there - one crossover. Heās been a Hittite warrior, a Silk Road mercenary, a reluctant rebel in the Peasantās Revolt of 1381, and an information peddlerā¦