Remember When...

Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout, picks up where her last novel ends. Lucy Barton, has made a name for herself as a well-known author. She has escaped her impoverished childhood in Illinois and lives in New York. Book signings take her around the country and while in Chicago, she decides to return to Amgash--the hometown she left seventeen years ago. Find out how the townspeople and relatives who knew her when are doing today. Small-town USA and a curious cast of characters will keep your interest. DB

Take Me home, Country Roads

When trash coal is set on fire it turns rose and orange and lavender. What’s left is called red dog. The road where Drema grew up, in East Beckley, West Virginia was a red dog road. In her new book, Running on Red Dog Road: And Other Perils of An Appalachian Childhood, Drema Hall Berkheimer recalls life with her grandparents. They were devout Pentecostals. Her father was killed in a coal mining accident, and her mother was working in a war plant in New York. Drema writes about everyday life, carefully blending sweet memories with crazy characters and Appalachian charm. If you wish to meet faith healers, gypsies,or snake handlers please pick up this book. DB  

A walk on the wild side

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a remarkable girl, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of
them in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back.
     Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane written with skill and sensitivity, about the things that scare us. ML

Mothers and Daughters

Warning -- Domenica Ruta's With Or Without You does not have a nice, neat, happy ending . . . but it doesn't have a bad ending either.  In fact, it really doesn't have an ending at all, just the honest depiction of a life in progress.  In this memoir, Ruta explores her relationship with her narcissistic, drug-addicted mother and how that relationship ultimately led her to both destroy and attempt to redeem herself.  At the same time darkly humorous and heart-wrenching, With Or Without You brings home the point that in at least some ways, we are all just like our mothers.  HM

a sea voyage

Michael Ondaatje is prolific,he has written five novels,a memoir, poetry and non-fiction. His book The English Patient won the Booker Prize and was made into a wonderful film. His new novel, The Cat's Table, is the story of an ocean crossing in the fifties, from the viewpoint of an eleven-year old boy. "As the narrative moves between the decks and holds of the ship,it tells a spellbinding story about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood."(Book Jacket) I have read many novels by this author, my favorite is In the Skin of a Lion, with some of the most beautiful descriptions I have ever read. M.L.