Under The Lamplight
Beat the "It's Still Winter" blues with a book
Water Cooler Diaries: Women Across America Share Their Day At Work
Edited by Joni B. Cole and B. K. Rakhra
DaCapo Press $15.95
Most of our daily lives are at the workplace, but what are those lives really like? Last March, over 500 women chronicled their days, and the top 35 are now gathered in this addictively readable book. From a magician to a stay at home mom, these women’s fascinating diary entries mark off days from stumbling into slippers until falling into the sack. Funny, insightful and occasionally heart-wrenching (a teacher who recently lost her husband movingly writes about how her daily grind keeps the grief at bay), this is a book for anyone who ever took a coffee break.
Salvage
By Jane F. Kotapish
McAdam Cage $24.00
In this breathtakingly original novel, a nameless female narrator is attacked in a Manhattan subway and flees home to bucolic Virginia to recover. But home is anything but helpful. Her mother’s sanity begins to erode, and she soon finds herself conversing with the ghost of her dead sister and plumbing the complex depths of her own past. Spikily funny and darkly imaginative, Salvage is an unsettling look into a troubled psyche.
Hats & Eyeglasses: A Family Love Affair With Gambling
by Martha Frankel
Tarcher/Penguin $23.95
Frankel grew up in a family of gamblers, but her own gambling bug didn’t bite until her forties. Winning in gaming rooms was one thing, but she soon became addicted to online wagering, which lead to the state her uncle called “hats and eyeglasses,†a kind of drowning until all that’s left of you are your specs and your chapeau. Engaging and witty, this is a mesmerizer about a life hijacked by cards and rescued by writing.
Slip of the Knife
by Denise Mina
Little Brown $24.99
How can you not love a heroine who is a little pudgy, a lot feisty and undeniably smart? In Mina’s brilliant new thriller, reporter Paddy Meehan returns to the scene of a new crime, grappling with her former boyfriend’s gruesome murder. As the tension and lies escalate, seamy secrets rise to the surface, putting Paddy’s life in a web of danger. A sublimely written nail biter with a heart—and a heroine you can’t forget.
Mudbound
by Hillary Jordan
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill $22.95
Winner of Barbara Kingsolver’s prestigious 2006 Bellwether Prize, this is one of the most extraordinary novels I’ve read all year. Written in a fugue of six voices, Mudbound swirls around city-bred, newly married Laura scratching out a living on a rundown cotton farm in the Jim Crow South of the 1940s. As Laura’s marriage falters and she’s increasingly drawn to her brother-in-law, her father-in-law begins to target his racist ire against a black sharecropper just returned from the War. Set against the pull of the land—and of the lonely heart—the ensuing tragedy is both inevitable and heart shattering.
Caroline Leavitt is the author of 8 novels, most recently Girls in Trouble, and can be found ignoring March snow with a good book or six. She can be reached at http://www.carolineleavitt.com.
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