Talk About Books

A woman goes missing in the Australian wilderness. Agent Aaron Falk of the Federal Police is still recovering from his last case, and the fire that burned his hand badly, when he gets a call from his new partner, Carmen Cooper, that a woman named Alice Russell has gone missing in the Giralang Ranges three hours outside Melbourne, where she had been taking part in a corporate retreat with her colleagues from the Bailey Tennants accountancy firm. This sparks a grim memory for Falk: more than 20 years ago, when the policeman was a teenager, a killer named Martin Kovac littered the same area with the bodies of young women he’d murdered. Kovac couldn't have taken Alice, because he’s dead, but her disappearance dredges up some horrific memories in the collective consciousness, which adds a creepy dimension to an increasingly puzzling case. Falk and Cooper don’t work missing persons—they’re financial investigators, and Alice was helping them with a case on the down low, gathering inf...

A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power, Homegoing   traces three hundred years in Ghana. Along the way, the lives of Gyasi's characters are shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, Esi is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade. She is shipped off to America where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America, where they experience the plantations of the South, the Civil War, the Great Migration, coal...

The only thing certain about a journey is that it has a beginning and an end for you never know what may happen along the way. And so it is with this journey into the minds and souls of two very different men; one of them in search of the truth, the other a man who may have already found it. In Roland Merullo's novel, Breakfast with Buddha , Otto Ringling, a husband, father, and editor, departs on a cross-country drive from his home in a New York City suburb to the North Dakota farmhouse in which he grew up. H e is a man on a no-nonsense mission: to settle the estate of his recently deceased parents. However, when his flaky sister convinces him to give a ride to her guru, a crimson-robed Skovordinian monk, Otto knows there will be a few bumps in the road. As they venture across America, Otto and the affable, wise, irritating, and inscrutable holy man engage in a battle of wits and wisdom. Otto, a born skeptic, sees his unwanted passenger as a challenge: a man who assu...

In The Stars are Fire , Anita Shreve's sets her novel in Maine during the real-life disaster of 1947 when a severe drought caused a series of massive fires that burned out of control for 10 days. In Acadia National Park. 10,000 acres went up in flames, along with most of the mansions on Bar Harbor’s Millionaires’ Row. Fishermen and the Coast Guard rescued thousands from the shoreline. Firefighters and evacuees were trapped behind a burning wall that cut through Kennebunkport. Sixteen people were killed, thousands left homeless. In this story, when the fire arrives, Grace Holland and her neighbors head to the water’s edge. Twenty-four years old, a mother of two young children and pregnant with a third — Grace holds her children in the frigid sea overnight as the flames send smoke and burning debris onto the beach. In the midst of crisis, she finds a strength she didn’t know she had, but her losses are devastating, and she faces a precarious future.  When the fir...

Many people will remember Eric Liddell as the Olympic gold medalist from the film Chariots of Fire. Liddell refused to run on Sunday because of his strict observance of the Christian sabbath, so he could not compete in his signature event, the 100 meters , at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. He was the greatest sprinter in the world at the time, and his choice not to run confounded the British Olympic committee, his fellow athletes and most of the world press. Liddell ran, and lived, for the glory of God. After winning gold, he dedicated himself to missionary work. He traveled to China to work in a local school and as a missionary. When Liddell could see war coming, he sent his wife and children home while he remained, compelled to follow his conscience. Eventually, Liddell was interred along with thousands of Westerners. Here he did what he was born to do. He became the moral center of an unbearable world.

The book investigates a series of murders of wealthy Osage people that took place in Osage County, Oklahoma in the early 1920s—after big oil deposits were discovered beneath their land. Officially, the count of the murdered full-blood wealthy Osage native Americans reaches at least 20, but Grann suspects that hundreds more may have been killed because of their ties to oil. In the 1920's, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered in the soil beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage Woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. Since this was the Wild West where oil men such as J.P. Getty made fortunes and treacherous gangs roamed, many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. ...

A.J. Fikry's life is not at all what he expected it to be. He's not quite 40 and his wife has died; his bookstore is experiencing the worst sales in its history; and now his prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, has been stolen.  Slowly but surely, he is isolating himself from all the people of Alice Island. Even the books in his store have stopped holding pleasure for him. These days, he can only see them as a sign of a world that is changing too rapidly.  But, this is a tale of transformation and second chances, so unexpected developments arise that make this book an irresistible affirmation of why we read, and why we love. Zevin has her characters grow and prosper, in a narrative that is sometimes sentimental, sometimes funny, sometimes true to life and always entertaining.