@ Your Library
The Library staff wish you and yours a very happy Thanksgiving. We hope you all have plenty of time to read amongst your giving thanks for family, friends, and the amazing creativity of authors and illustrators.
Novels with World War II as a backdrop (ok, sometimes in the forefront) are prolific right now. Here are four new ones. A Prince and a Spy by Rory Clements is a spy thriller set in the early days of the Third Reich. Prince George, brother of the King of England dies in a plane crash and the story is that it is a tragic accident, but not everyone believes it is an accident, including American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Professor Tom Wilde, a Cambridge don is asked to uncover the truth – what he finds is far deadlier than he imagined.
Michelle Gable, author of the bestselling A Paris Apartment returns with a story about Nancy Mitford and her days at the Heywood Hill bookshop in London during the War. Thousands of letters that she wrote during her life were saved, but very few from her time at the bookshop. The question as to why leads authors to explore what happened during that time, Ms. Gable’s answer is The Bookseller’s Secret.
Colm Toibin explores the life of author Thomas Mann in The Magician. Begin at the turn of the last century in a provincial German city then to Munich, Switzerland, France then exile in America, first Princeton, New Jersey then Los Angeles as the world moves through war.
The Forest of Vanishing Stars by Kristin Harmel centers on Yona, a young woman who had been stolen from her wealthy German parents and raised in the wilderness of Eastern Europe. In the early days of World War II she happens upon a group of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution and helps them learn her survival skills. When betrayed, she runs away and encounters a German-occupied village where past and present collide.
A few more historical novels with these set between the great wars. Kristin Hannah sets The Four Winds in Texas, during the transition from abundance to starvation. The Martinelli farm moves from plenty to death from the haves to the have-nots. Elsa Martinelli is in a desperate batth against nature and a fight to keep her children alive.
Gill Paul explores the world of archaeology and the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. Lady Evenlyn Herbert ‘Eve’ is the first person in three thousand years to see the riches of the tomb, making it the greatest moment of her life, followed soon afterward by a string of tragedies. Fifty years later an Egyptian academic comes asking what really happened all those years ago as she entered the tomb, making her ask if there might be truth behind the stories of a curse.
The library will be closed on Thursday, November 25th. Regular hours will resume on Friday, November 26th (10 am – 6 pm) and Saturday, November 27th (10 am – 3 pm).