February 11 2022
February 11, 2022
New Fiction
Violeta by Isabel Allende – Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family with five boisterous sons. From the start, her life is marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth. Because of her father’s prescience, the family will come through that crisis unscathed, only to face a new one as the Great Depression transforms the genteel city life she has known. Her family loses everything and is forced to retreat to a wild and beautiful but remote part of the country. There, she will come of age, and her first suitor will come calling. Violeta tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others, recounting times of devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy. Her life is shaped by some of the most important events of history: the fight for women’s rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and ultimately not one but two pandemics.
The Light of Luna Park by Addison Armstrong – New York City, 1926. Nurse Althea Anderson’s heart fractures further each time she witnesses another premature baby die at Bellevue Hospital. So when she reads an article detailing the amazing survival rates of babies treated in incubators in an exhibit at Luna park, Coney Island, it feels like the miracle she has been searching for. But the doctors at Bellevue dismiss Althea and this unconventional medicine, forcing her to make a choice between a baby’s life and the doctor’s orders – a choice that will change everything. Twenty-five years later, Stella Wright is falling apart. Her mother has just passed, she’s quit a job she loves, and her marriage is struggling. Then she discovers a letter that brings into question everything she knew about her mother, and everything she knows about herself.
Find Me by Alafair Burke – She calls herself Hope Miller, but she has no idea who she actually is. Fifteen years ago, she was found in a small New Jersey town thrown from an overturned vehicle, with no clue to her identity. Doctors assumed her amnesia was a temporary side effect of her injuries, but she never regained her memory. Hope eventually started a new life with a new name in a new town that welcomes her, yet always wondered what she might have left behind – or had been running from. Now, she’s leaving New Jersey to start over once again. Manhattan defense lawyer Lindsay Kelly, Hope’s best friend and the one who found her after the accident, understands why Hope wants a new beginning. But she worries how her friend will fare in her new East Hampton home, far away from everything familiar. Her worst fears are confirmed when she discovers Hope has vanished without a trace – the only lead a drop of blood found where she was last seen.
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead – After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There – after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes – Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in the wealthy bootlegger Barclay Macqueen, who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles. A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian’s disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, chafing at the claustrophobia of Hollywood and cult celebrity, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after getting fired from a romantic film franchise in the midst of scandal. Her immersion in the character of Marian unfolds alongside Marian’s own story, as the two women’s destinies – and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different places and times – intersect in astonishing ways.