January Reads
It's a new year ripe with the promise of great reading ahead!
I've rounded up 5 new books by new authors. These are all getting rave reviews, and while I haven't read all of them yet, I can say with surety that these will be absorbing, entertaining reads to start your year of reading off right.
1. Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper
Otto finds a note left by his wife in the kitchen of their farmhouse in windswept Saskatchewan. Eighty-three-year-old Etta will be walking 3,200 kilometers to see the ocean, but somehow, Otto understands. Critics have said that Etta and Otto and Russell and James is an astounding literary debut about friendship and love, hope and honor and the romance of last-great-adventures.
2. Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Rachel sees something shocking from the train. It's only a minute until the train moves on, but it's enough. Now everything's changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel offers what she knows to the police, and becomes inextricably entwined in what happens next. Critics say The Girl on the Train is compulsively readable, an emotionally immersive, Hitchcockian thriller and an electrifying debut.
3. Black River by S.M. Hulse
A tense Western and an assured debut, Black River tells the story of a man marked by a prison riot as he returns to the town, and the convict, who shaped him. With spare prose and stunning detail, S. M. Hulse drops us deep into the heart and darkness of an American town.
4. One Step Too Far by Tina Seskis
An intricately plotted, thoroughly addictive thriller that introduces a major new voice in suspense fiction--a mesmerizing and powerful novel that will keep you guessing to the very end. No one has ever guessed Emily's secret. Will you? what makes Emily Coleman get up one morning and walk right out of her life--to start again as someone new?
5. Happy are the Happy by Yasmina Reza
The twenty short chapters that make up this unusual book deal with both marital and extramarital vicissitudes, the elusiveness of intimacy, the fear of loneliness, and the desire to be loved or at least understood just once in our lives.
