|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
May 13, 2013 Click here to register!
In 1918, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia after serving 4 years in the Great War. Taking a job as a lighthouse keeper, he and his wife, Isabel, are determined to adapt to Tom's solitary life with their only contact with the mainland as a quarterly visit from the supply boat. Four years later, after Isabel has suffered two miscarriages and a stillbirth, an event occurs that forever changes them. A dinghy washes up on the beach carrying a dead man and a newborn baby girl, giving Isabel hope that she may become, at last, a mother. The choice they make as a couple comes to haunt them, their unexpected happiness replaced by guilt and mistrust. -Booklist |
| |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
June 10, 2013 Click here to register!
Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness-until she meets Ernest Hemingway and her life changes forever. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in the fabled "Lost Generation”. Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. |
| |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
July 8 , 2013 - Includes a live discussion with the author!
Click here to register!
Few works of literature are as universally beloved as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Now, in this spellbinding historical novel, we meet the young girl whose bright spirit sent her on an unforgettable trip down the rabbit hole-and the grown woman whose story is no less enthralling. Her life was permanently dog-eared at one fateful moment in her tenth year- the golden summer day she urged a grown-up friend to write down one of his fanciful stories. That story, a wild tale of rabbits, queens, and a precocious young child, becomes a sensation the world over. Its author, a shy, stuttering Oxford professor, does more than immortalize Alice- he changes her life forever. But even he cannot stop time, as much as he might like to. And as Alice's childhood slips away, a peacetime of glittering balls and royal romances gives way to the urgent tide of war.
|
| |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
August 12, 2013 Click here to register!
Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood attended grade school and Smith College together, spent nine months on a grand tour of Europe in 1910, and then, bored with society luncheons and chaperoned balls and not yet ready for marriage, they went off to teach the children of homesteaders in a remote schoolhouse on the Western Slop of Colorado. They traveled on the new railroad over the Continental Divide and by wagon to Elkhead, a tiny settlement far from the nearest town. Their students came to school from miles away in tattered clothes and shoes tied together with string. Dorothy Woodruff was the grandmother of New Yorker executive editor Dorothy Wickenden. Nearly 100 years later, Wickenden found the buoyant, detailed, colorful letters the two women wrote to their families. Through them, she has chronicled their trials in the classroom, the cowboys and pioneering women they met, and the violent kidnapping of a close friend.
|
| |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
September 9, 2013 Click here to register!
The tale begins in the rural village of Bonito, Italy, with a visionary young shoemaker named Salvatore Ferragamo and ends in New York City with a fictional socialite and trendsetter named Carrie Bradshaw. Along the way it stops in Hollywood, where Judy Garland first slipped on her ruby slippers; New Jersey, where Nancy Sinatra heard something special in a song about boots; and the streets of Manhattan, where a transit-worker strike propelled women to step into cutting-edge atheltic shoes. Fashion aficionado Rachelle Bergstein shares the stories behind these historical moments, interweaving the design innovations and social changes that gave each one its lasting significance and appeal. Bergstein shows how the story of shoes is the story of women, told from the ankle down.
|
| |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
October 14, 2013 Click here to register!
In February of 1861, just days before he assumed the presidency, Abraham Lincoln faced a "clear and fully-matured" threat of assassination as he traveled by train from Springfield to Washington for his inauguration. Over a period of thirteen days the legendary detective Allan Pinkerton worked feverishly to detect and thwart the plot, assisted by a captivating young widow named Kate Warne, America's first female private eye. As Lincoln's train rolled inexorably toward "the seat of danger," Pinkerton struggled to unravel the ever-changing details of the murder plot, even as he contended with the intractability of Lincoln and his advisors, who refused to believe that the danger was real. With time running out, Pinkerton took a desperate gamble, staking Lincoln's life-and future of the nation- on a "perilous feint" that seemed to offer the only chance that Lincoln would survive to become president. Shrouded in secrecy-and, later, mired in controversy-the story of the "Baltimore Plot" is one of the great untold tales of the Civil War era.
|
| |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
November 11, 2013 Click here to register!
When their father dies, teen sisters Antoinette, Marie, and Charlotte are left to fend for themselves, since their mother's meager wages often dissolve into absinthe. Knowing their best chance for advancement lies in the ballet, Antoinette, an extra at the Opera, gets her sisters auditions. Both are accepted as "petit rats," but to everyone's surprise, bookish Marie actually shows talent for dance, and pays for food and private lessons by modeling for the mysterious Edgar Degas. Meanwhile, Antoinette, who has been guardian to her sisters, begins a love affair with Emile Abadie, a young man of questionable character. As Marie's modeling for Degas leads to the interest of a patron of the ballet, Emile is arrested for the murder of a local tavern owner, driving a wedge between the devote sisters. Buchanan captures the story of these three sisters in this engrossing depiction of belle epoque Paris.
|
| |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
December 9, 2013 Click here to register!
Skipping Christmas
Imagine a year without Christmas. No crowded malls, no corny office
parties, no fruitcakes, no unwanted presents. That's just what Luther
and Nora Krank have in mind when they decide that, just this once,
they'll skip the holiday altogether. Theirs will be the only house on
Hemlock Street without a rooftop Frosty, they won't be hosting their
annual Christmas Eve bash, and they aren't even going to have a tree.
They won't need one, because come December 25 they're setting sail on a
Caribbean cruise. But as this weary couple is about to discover,
skipping Christmas brings enormous consequences--and isn't half as easy
as they'd imagined.
|
|
|
|