Four Shires reading room Serena
Five new releases to tell you about this month writes Christine Bridger, plus one from last year that I have only just discovered but that I have enjoyed so much that I intend to recommend it to anyone whoʼll listen.
A Kind Man B
y Ron Rash, this was recommended to me by a friend from my book
group who told me that both she and her husband had read and liked it enormously. It is set in North Carolina in 1929 and tells of the owner of a logging company and his ambitious wife Serena who will let nothing and no one thwart her. It is a story of infatuation, love, big business and is also an insight
into the industrial development of the USA. Building with considerable tension to its conclusion this would make a great book group read as there is so much to discuss. The author, who I am pleased to have discovered, is a Professor of Appalachian Cultural studies and I now intend to read his other books. Serena costs £7.99
Ape House A
bout four years ago a book called Water for Elephants was very popular
in this shop. All the staff had read it, we did it in book group and sold many copies. The author, Sara Gruen has now written another novel called Ape House, only just out in hard back at £18.99 and is about big apes called bonobos and Isabel Duncan, a scientist at the ‘Great Ape Language Lab’ who doesn’t understand people, but does
understand the bonobos. Isabel feels more comfortable in their world than she’s ever felt among humans ...until she meets John Thigpen, a reporter who, braving animal protesters outside the lab makes it his mission to find out the real situation inside. Sara Gruen researched great apes and their ability with language in order to write this book and I feel sure it will be another winner.
The Man in the Wooden Hat M
arriage also comes under the spotlight in The Man in the
Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam who had a huge success with Old Filth about a barrister working in the Far East. In her latest book she revisits Filth and tells the story of his wife Betty with great humour and affection and charts their long life together. Witty and charming, I really enjoyed this. £7.99
the staff in the Old Hall Bookshop. This is about a happily married couple who are quietly struggling to cope with a bereavement and how grief affects Tommy, the kind man of the title, and its unexpected consequences. Susan Hill is known and enjoyed for her beautiful spare style of writing and she is on top form with this book. £10.99
S
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
T
he Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is about
a poor black tobacco farmer who died of cancer in the 1950s. Her cancer cells - taken without her knowledge - became a multimillion-dollar industry and one of the most important tools in medicine. Yet Henrietta’s family did not learn of her ‘immortality’ until more than twenty years after her death, with devastating
consequences...Balancing the beauty and drama of scientific discovery with dark questions about who owns the stuff our bodies are made of, ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ is an extraordinary journey in search of the soul and story of a real woman, whose cells live on today in all four corners of the world. £7.99
Bird Cloud O
ne of my favourite writers is Annie Proulx, she wrote The Shipping
News, the book I would take to a desert island, and Brokeback Mountain. In her memoir Bird Cloud, she tells of how she built her home to harmonise with the wilderness of Wyoming, as her sanctuary where she could write about and enjoy the stark beauty of her surroundings. £16.99
With Christine Bridger of Old Hall Bookshop in Brackley 32 March 2011
usan Hill has written A Kind Man, a novella, that has been widely enjoyed by
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