Book of the Week: ‘Ethel and Ernest: A True Story’
Ethel & Ernest: A True StoryRaymond Briggs1999, 104 pagesGraphic novel Raymond Briggs is best known on this side of the Atlantic for his wordless picture book, The Snowman. In Ethel and Ernest: a True Story, he uses his narrative art to tell the story of his parents’ life together in London, from their courtship in 1928 until their deaths in 1971.We meet Ethel as a shy lady’s maid, when she is first courted by Ernest, a handsome...
Book of the Week: ‘Journey to Munich: A Maisie Dobbs Novel’
Journey to Munich Jacqueline Winspear 2016, 300 pages Fiction It is 1938. Maisie Dobbs has returned to England from Spain. She is mourning the devastating loss of her husband. But it is time to return home, and she feels she might be ready to work again.Before she can get settled in, she is contacted by Brian Huntley and Robert MacFarlane of the Secret Service. They want her to do an undercover mission for them. A famous inventor and...
Book of the Week: ‘The Immortalists’
The ImmortalistsChloe Benjamin2018, 346 pagesFiction When siblings Varya, Daniel, Klara and Simon Gold are bored during their 1969 summer vacation, they visit New York City’s Lower East Side to meet with a traveling psychic who tells each of them the date they will die. The siblings leave the psychic in a daze of confusion, sadness, and anger but do not share with one another the dates they’ve been given nor discuss the experience for...
Book of the Week: ‘Fire and Hemlock’
Fire and HemlockDiana Wynne Jones2012, 415 pagesJuvenile Fantasy While packing her books for her second year of college, Polly, a young woman from 1980s England, discovers that she has two sets of memories of growing up, and that these memories diverge at the moment when she gate-crashed a funeral on Halloween when she was 10 years old. There she met a young man, Tom Lynn, who helped her escape outdoors for some air, and joined her in...
Book of the Week: ‘Manhattan Beach’
Manhattan BeachJennifer Egan2017, 438 pagesHistorical Fiction Twelve-year-old Anna Kerrigan has a special relationship with her father that she understands is markedly different than what she shares with her younger, disabled sister and her beautiful, tired mother. When she accompanies her father on one of his always-mysterious business outings and meets Dexter Styles at his Manhattan Beach home, she has a feeling that this meeting is...
