The Invention of Wings Sue Monk Kidd Viking First Edition: January 7, 2014 ISBN 978-0-670-02478-0 Sarah Grimké, who is the main character in The Invention of Wings, was a very real person. Born in 1792, she was the second eldest daughter (from a family of 14!) of a wealthy plantation […]
Hild Nicola Griffith Farrar, Straus and Giroux First Edition: November 12, 2013 ISBN 978-0-374-28087-1 Seventh century Britain: a time when men’s ambitions were larger than their means, when life was simple and hard and brutal. There was beauty, too, but it rarely lasted. Illiterate kings warred, scheming religions undermined each […]
The House Girl Tara Conklin HarperCollins Publishers First Edition: February 12, 2013 ISBN 978-0-06-220739-5 Mister hit Josephine with the palm of his hand across her left cheek and it was then she knew she would run. She heard the whistle of the blow, felt the sting of skin against skin, […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.