Dora Damage by Belinda StarlingBook Description
London, 1860: the largest city in the world is pulsing with contrasts--filth and elegance, poverty and wealth, dissolute indulgence and proper manners. On the brink of destitution, Dora Damage takes over the family bookbinding business. Beset by debt collectors, an epileptic daughter, evil doctors and errant workmen, she is lured into binding expensive volumes of pornography commissioned by aristocratic roues. When a fugitive slave arrives at her door, she realizes that she has become entangled in a web of sex, money, deceit and the law.
Set against a backdrop of power, politics, conservatism and abolitionism in the Victorian era, The Journal of Dora Damage explores the restrictions of gender, class and race, and the ties of family and love, above all examining the price at which freedom can be obtained.
About Belinda Starling
BELINDA STARLING died in 2006. This was her first book.
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Good To A Fault by Marina EndicottBook Description
In a novel reminiscent of the work of Penelope Lively, Ann Tyler, and Alice Munro, acclaimed author Marina Endicott gives us one of the most satisfying, most profound, and most memorable reads of the year.
Absorbed in her own failings, Clara Purdy crashes her life into a sharp left turn, taking the young family in the other car along with her. When bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer, Clara—against all habit and comfort—moves the three children and their terrible grandmother into her own house.
We know what is good, but we don't do it. In Good to a Fault, Clara decides to give it a try, and then has to cope with the consequences: exhaustion, fury, hilarity, and unexpected love. But she must question her own motives. Is she acting out of true goodness, or out of guilt? Most shamefully, has she taken over simply because she wants the baby for her own?
What do we owe in this life, and what do we deserve? This compassionate, funny, and fiercely intelligent novel looks at life and death through grocery-store reading glasses: being good, being at fault, and finding some balance on the precipice.
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Sarah's Key by Tatiana de RosnayBook Description
A New York Timesbestseller.Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family’s apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.
Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France’s past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl’s ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d’Hiv’, to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah’s past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.
Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode.Tatiana de Rosnaywas born in the suburbs of Paris and is of English, French and Russian descent. She is the author of nine French novels. She also writes for French Elle, and is a literary critic for Psychologiesmagazine. Tatiana de Rosnay is married and has two children. Sarah’s Key is her first novel written in her mother tongue, English.Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family’s apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.
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