I grew up in a quiet farming valley in Connecticut, but I moved to a wilderness farm in the maritime provinces of Canada, surrounded by spruce forests and close to the Bay of Fundy. My favourite places are those where there is more sky, seemingly, than land; more birds than people; more wind-blown fields than houses. My favourite books take us to landscapes where people must come to terms with environments whose extreme circumstances are challenges in and of themselves.
The young couple in The Light Between Oceans live on the barren premises of a lighthouse, in the harsh light of a treeless island. Between the polarities of sea and sky, they evade a moral dilemma. I can feel their quandry as clearly as I can see the glittering waves in an extraordinary place whose beauty cloaks danger.
The years-long New York Times bestseller and Goodreads Best Historical Novel that is “irresistible…seductive…with a high concept plot that keeps you riveted from the first page” (O, The Oprah Magazine)—soon to be a major motion picture from Spielberg’s Dreamworks starring Michael Fassbender, Rachel Weisz, and Alicia Vikander, and directed by Derek Cianfrance.
After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season, Tom brings a young,…
Sisters, mother, and father travel to Africa as missionaries. I love the different voices and points of view of the sisters as they hiss and blather and rage about their extreme situation, which becomes inexorably worse. The army ant scene so traumatized a friend of mine who had read this novel that she left her cottage in the middle of the night, since a stream of ants was pouring down the wall. Such is the power of fiction….
**NOW INCLUDING THE FIRST CHAPTER OF DEMON COPPERHEAD: THE NEW BARBARA KINGSOLVER NOVEL**
**DEMON COPPERHEAD IS AVAILABLE NOW FOR PRE-ORDER**
An international bestseller and a modern classic, this suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and their remarkable reconstruction has been read, adored and shared by millions around the world.
'Breathtaking.' Sunday Times 'Exquisite.' The Times 'Beautiful.' Independent 'Powerful.' New York Times
This story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959.
They carry with them everything they believe they will…
Ramon Ramirez’s Dog is a collection of essays written over the years about the adventures and misadventures, mostly outside but occasionally inside the diplomatic career of a U.S. ambassador. Common threads weaving the stories together are a desire for a life well-lived, balancing career with family and friends, keeping physically…
This book inspired my own writing with its detailed rendering of 19th century life. It has all of my favourite things: lighthouses, ships, horses, buggies, wharves, and whales. “Captain Ahab was neither my first husband or my last.” How can you resist this first sentence? The novel’s massive lighthouse, and the child who has lived there all her life, inform some deep part of my world view.
From the opening line--"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last"--you will know that you are in the hands of a masterful storyteller and in the company of a fascinating woman hero. Inspired by a brief passage in Melville's Moby-Dick, where Captain Ahab speaks passionately of his young wife on Nantucket, Una Spenser's moving tale "is very much Naslund's own and can be enjoyed independently of its source." (Newsday)
The daughter of a tyrannical father, Una leaves the violent Kentucky frontier for the peace of a New England lighthouse island, where she simultaneously falls in love with two…
I love this book because I have lived parts of it myself — been shocked by the savage winds of winter, looked wistfully southwards towards the home I left, planted and harvested potatoes with cold fingers— as do the women in Bernice Morgan’s novel about the first immigrants to Newfoundland. This vividly told and emotional novel deserves a much wider readership. Published in 1992, it was made into a film.
A new edition of Bernice Morgan’s classic, best-selling family saga. Forced to flee England, the Andrews family books passage from Weymouth, England to unknown prospects, only to discover a barren, inhospitable land at the end of their crossing: a fresh start in a distant country, New Found Land. There, on the island of Cape Random, the Vincent family introduces them to their way of life. To the pensive, seventeen-year-old Lavinia Andrews, uprooted from everything familiar, it seems a fate worse than the one they left behind. Driven by loneliness she begins a journal. Random Passage satisfies the craving for those…
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
An astonishing book whose main character is known only as “the widow” until far into the narrative, and whose flight across the western wilderness, in 1903, is as lyrical, brutal, and visceral as a reader could want. This is a book whose writing stops you dead, even while you can’t wait to turn the page.
On a moonlit night in 1903, a mysterious young woman flees alone across the Canadian wilderness, one quick step ahead of her pursuers. Mary Boulton is nineteen years old, half mad, and widowed - by her own hand. Tearing through the forest with dogs howling in the distance, she is desperate, her nerves burning, and she is certain of one thing only - that her every move is being traced. Two red-headed brothers, rifles across their backs, lurch close behind her: monstrous figures, identical in every way, with the predatory look of hyenas. She has murdered their brother, and their…
Growing up on the Bay of Fundy in the 1860s, Azuba Galloway is determined to escape the confines of her town and live at sea. When she captures the heart of Captain Nathaniel Bradstock, she is sure her dreams are about to be realized, only to have pregnancy intervene. But when Azuba becomes embroiled in a scandal, Nathaniel must bring his young family abroad to save his reputation. Azuba gets her wish, but at what price?
Alone in a male world, and juggling the splendor of foreign ports with the terror of the open seas, Azuba must fight to keep her family together. The Sea Captain's Wife will captivate readers and critics alike.
What kind of minds get to vote? Microbial aliens, or a world-sized AI?
In Minds in Transit, Chrysoberyl is an artist whose brain hosts a million microbial minds. Chrysoberyl’s microbes design fantastic buildings and a whole new city for her AI patron. But her design blows up with a…
Diary of a Citizen Scientist
by
Sharman Apt Russell,
Citizen Scientist begins with this extraordinary statement by the Keeper of Entomology at the London Museum of Natural History, “Study any obscure insect for a week and you will then know more than anyone else on the planet.”
As the author chases the obscure Western red-bellied tiger beetle across New…
