The Guest List by Lucy Foley

 

This was an interesting read about secrets and motives set on a remote Irish island and told from various perspectives of the guests on the guest list (hence the title).  It definitely holds your interest and the author does a good job in handling all that jumping around in and out of those various perspectives.  She also does a good job in gradually revealing who is murdered and how all these various perspectives lead to the final reveal of who and why.  It was a Reese's Book Club pick and received the Gold Dagger Award from the Crime Writer's Association of the UK for best crime novel of the year.  In these days of social isolation, perhaps people are reading it and thinking to themselves "could be worse, I could be stuck in the middle of nowhere with these folks!"  A nice distracting read that will keep you guessing until the end.

The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd

 

I am a fan of Sue Monk Kidd's writing and certainly enjoyed this novel about the fictional wife of Jesus as much as her other books.  I especially found the Author's Note at the end of the book interesting as she explains to us why she wrote the book and what she hoped to take from the experience.  The quote she kept on her desk throughout the four and a half years it took her to write the book truly spoke  to me as well:  "Everything is the proper stuff of fiction." --Virginia Woolf.  After reading this section I had a better feel for why she named it The Book of Longings.  Women's voices are sometimes silenced in history.  With meticulous research and written reverentially, this is an account of what might have been.  Just one woman's struggle, living in a time and place and culture that would have tried to silence her.  I appreciate the voice she was given.

Tell Me a Story by Cassandra King Conroy

 

If I had to pick an all time favorite author, I guess Pat Conroy would be at the top of the list.  He was witty, sarcastic, funny and would have you laughing one moment and crying the next.  And nobody writes family relationships and dynamics like he did.  So I was looking forward to reading this by Cassandra King, his widow.  It is told straight from the heart and gives you an intimate glimpse into their lives together.  As an adjunct you can go to Cassandra's website, CassandraKingConroy.com for photos of their life together by clicking on the Tell Me a Story book image.  If you are a Conroy fan (as I am), read this book.

American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

I found this book so very interesting.  It had been advertised as a blend of science, philosophy, and spirituality--and it's a pilgrimage of sorts.  When Marie inherited the family farm from her father and Japanese mother she accompanies a group of evangelical christian wheat farmers through the heartland for a thoughtful examination of not only food production but the growing divide between rural and urban America.  It is an examination of landscape, ourselves, others, and faith in an attempt to better understand that divide and perhaps form a bridge across it.  A thought-provoking read.

The Dry by Jane Harper

The small town big secrets nature of this debut novel from Harper is what drew me in, and obviously a lot of other people. It has sold more than one million copies worldwide. And a film is set to be released soon. It is an Australian novel with a sense of place that is very vivid. In the grip of the worst drought in a century, the farming community of Kiewarra is facing life and death choices daily when three members of a local family are found brutally slain. When Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk returns to Kiewarra for the funerals, he is loath to confront the people who rejected him twenty years earlier. But when his investigative skills are called on, the facts of the Hadler case start to make him doubt this murder-suicide charge. And as Falk probes deeper into the killings, old wounds start bleeding into fresh ones. For Falk and his childhood friend Luke shared a secret… A secret Falk thought long-buried… A secret which Luke’s death starts to bring to the surface. A well written page turner of a mystery that David Baldacci calls one of the most stunning debuts he's ever read.