I WILL FIND YOU
by Harlan Coben
Five years ago, an innocent man began a life sentence for murdering his own son. Today he found out his son is still alive.David Burroughs was once a devoted father to his three-year-old son Matthew, living a dream life just a short drive away from the working-class suburb where he and his wife, Cheryl, first fell in love one fateful night, David woke suddenly to discover Matthew had been murdered in his bed. Half a decade later, David’s been wrongly accused and convicted of the murder, left to serve out his time in a maximum-security prison—a fate which, grieving and wracked with guilt, David didn’t have the will to fight. Then Cheryl’s sister, Rachel, makes a surprise appearance during visiting hours bearing a strange photograph. It’s a vacation shot of a bustling amusement park a friend shared with her, and in the background, is a boy bearing an eerie resemblance to David’s son. Even though it can’t be, David just knows: Matthew is still alive.David plans a harrowing escape, to save his son, clear his own name, and discover the real story of what happened. But with his life on the line and the FBI following his every move, can David evade capture long enough to reveal the shocking truth?
Link for Books: March 2023
THE POET’S HOUSE
by Jean Thompson
Carla is stuck. In her twenties and working for a landscaper, she’s been told she’s on the wrong path by everyone—from her mom, who wants her to work at the hospital, to her boyfriend.Then she is hired for a job at the home of Viridian, a lauded and lovely aging poet who introduces Carla to an eccentric circle of writers. At first she is perplexed by their predilection for reciting lines in conversation, the stories of their many liaisons, their endless wine-soaked nights. As she becomes enamored with this entire world: with Viridian, whose reputation has been defined by her infamous affair with a male poet, Mathias; with Viridian’s circle; and especially with the power of words, the “ache and hunger that can both be awakened and soothed by a poem,” a hunger that Carla feels sharply. When a fight emerges over a vital cache of poems that Mathias wrote about Viridian, Carla gets drawn in.A delightfully funny look at the art world—sometimes petty, sometimes transactional, sometimes transformative.
The Poet’s House is also a refreshingly candid story of finding one’s way, with words as our lantern in the dark.
Link for Books: February 2023
A Winter Grave
by Peter May
It's the year 2051. Warnings of climate catastrophe have been ignored, and vast areas of the planet are under water, or uninhabitably hot. A quarter of the world's population has been displaced by hunger and flooding, and immigration wars are breaking out around the globe as refugees pour into neighboring countries.By contrast, melting ice sheets have brought the Gulf Stream to a halt and northern latitudes, including Scotland, are being hit by snow and ice storms. It is against this backdrop that Addie, a young meteorologist checking a mountain top weather station, discovers the body of a man entombed in ice.The dead man, an investigative reporter, George Younger, has been missing for three months. Cameron Brodie, a veteran Glasgow detective, volunteers to be flown to investigate Younger's death. He has just been given a devastating medical prognosis by his doctor and knows the time has come to face his estranged daughter who has made her home in the remote Highland village.Arriving during an ice storm, Brodie and pathologist Dr. Sita Roy, find themselves the sole guests at the only hotel in town, where Younger's body has been kept refrigerated in a cake cabinet. But evidence uncovered during Dr. Roy's autopsy places the lives of both of them in extreme jeopardy.As another storm closes off communications and the possibility of escape, Brodie must face up not only to the ghosts of his past, but to a killer determined to bury forever the chilling secret that George Younger's investigations had threatened to expose.Link for Books: January 2023
THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG by Bob Dylan
The Philosophy of Modern Song is Bob Dylan’s first book of new writing since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One—and since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny. And while they are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition. Running throughout the book are nearly 150 carefully curated photos as well as a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem and add to the work’s transcendence.In 2020, with the release of his outstanding album Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan became the first artist to have an album hit the Billboard Top 40 in each decade since the 1960s. The Philosophy of Modern Song contains much of what he has learned about his craft in all those years, and like everything that Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement.Link for Book Requests: January 2023
THIS MONTH'S BOOK DISCUSSION GROUP Meets at Borough of Beach Haven Wednesday, March 29th • 2pm
Group meets every last Wednesday of the month at 2pm.All are welcome!For more info, call (609) 492-0111, Ext.219.
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PERSUASION by Jane Austen
Persuasion is the last novel fully completed by Jane Austen. It was published at the end of 1817, six months after her death. The story concerns Anne Elliot, a young Englishwoman of twenty-seven years, whose family moves to lower their expenses and reduce their debt by renting their home to an Admiral and his wife. The wife's brother, Navy Captain Frederick Wentworth, was engaged to Anne in 1806, but the engagement was broken when Anne was "persuaded" by her friends and family to end their relationship. Anne and Captain Wentworth, both single and unattached, meet again after a seven-year separation. The novel was well-received in the early 19th century. Its greater fame came later in the century and well into the 20th and 21st centuries. Much scholarly debate on Austen's work has since been published. Anne Elliot is noteworthy among Austen's heroines for her relative maturity. Persuasion was Austen's last completed work, accepted as her most maturely written novel. Her use of free indirect discourse in narrative was in full evidence by 1816.