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Marianne Fredriksson, Hanna’s Daughters

Anna has returned from visiting her mother. Restless and unable to sleep, she wanders through her parents’ house, revisiting the scenes of her childhood. In a cupboard drawer, folded and pushed away from sight, she finds a sepia photograph of her grandmother, Hanna, whom she remembers as old and forbidding, a silent stranger enveloped in a huge pleated black dress. Now, looking at the features Anna recognises as her own, she realises she is looking at a different woman from the one of her memory. Set against the majestic isolation of the Scandinavian lakes and mountains, this is more than a story of three Swedish women. It is a moving testament of a time forgotten and an epic romance in every sense of the word.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   299 pages )

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Jean Little, Little By Little

This memoir by the prize-winning Canadian children’s author invites comparison with Beverly Cleary’s recent A Girl from Yamhill. But, even though both authors started writing at early ages and both loved to read, partly to shield themselves from pain, they led profoundly different lives. Born nearly blind in 1932 (among other visual impairments, her eyes were crossed), Little was ostracized by classmates and longed for a close friend. Fortunately, her parentsmedical doctorswere attentive and well-informed about her condition but careful not to be too protective. In high school, Little began “sorting out when and whether belonging really mattered,” a theme that has nearly universal appeal. This is one of the better children’s books about becoming a writer, but it is also a poised account of growing up with a disability, and no line separates the two. Little makes a gift of herself to readersfunny, spirited and whole.

( Courtesy of Publishers Weekly,   233 pages )

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Gwyn Hyman Rubio, Icy Sparks

Icy Sparks is the sad, funny and transcendent tale of a young girl growing up in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky during the 1950’s. Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s beautifully written first novel revolves around Icy Sparks, an unforgettable heroine in the tradition of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird or Will Treed in Cold Sassy Tree. At the age of ten, Icy, a bright, curious child orphaned as a baby but raised by adoring grandparents, begins to have strange experiences. Try as she might, her “secrets”—verbal croaks, groans, and physical spasms—keep afflicting her. As an adult, she will find out she has Tourette’s Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder, but for years her behavior is the source of mystery, confusion, and deep humiliation.

Narrated by a grown up Icy, the book chronicles a difficult, but ultimately hilarious and heartwarming journey, from her first spasms to her self-acceptance as a young woman. Curious about life beyond the hills, talented, and energetic, Icy learns to cut through all barriers—physical, mental, and spiritual—in order to find community and acceptance.

( Courtesy of GoodReads ,  paperback  308 pages )

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Beth Powning, The Hatbox Letters

In this muted, measured debut, Powning captures the sorrow of a grieving widow as she revisits the past to heal present-day wounds. For 30 years, Kate’s one constant has been Tom—her husband and best friend. A year after his death, 51-year-old Kate, alone in her lovely Victorian house in the Canadian countryside, is still having trouble acknowledging that he’s gone. Distraction arrives in the form of a number of hatboxes from her grandparents’ attic, full of letters smelling of apples and smoke that take Kate back to the simplicity of her childhood and Shepton, the family’s rambling Connecticut home. But when Kate reads of a family tragedy, she sees a parallel between it and her own sorrow, and she begins to work through her feelings. Meanwhile, she grows close to Gregory, an old family friend who can’t recover from his son’s suicide, though she struggles with her feelings of pity and disgust for him when he makes some clumsy advances. Only a final calamity forces Kate to finally let go of the past and to start living in the present. The novel’s leisurely pace takes some getting used to, but Powning does an excellent job of portraying Kate’s sadness, divulging the tales of her family and focusing on the quiet beauty of her surroundings. Agent, Jackie Kaiser.

( Courtesy of Jackie Kaiser,  Publishers Weekly,   352 pages )

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Reynolds Price, The Promise Of Rest

In this stunning and fully independent conclusion to A Great Circle, Reynolds Price tells the complex, moving story of a man’s return home to die of AIDS and of the unexpected effect that his arrival — and his death — has on his family.

Wade Mayfield’s parents are separated, but for the remaining months of his life they and their friends come together to care for Wade with the love they can muster. They are unprepared, however, for the astonishing mystery Wade has prepared to reveal once he is gone — a mystery that initiates the possible reunion of his parents and promises to continue the proud traditions of a complex, multiracial family

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   353 pages )

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Reynolds Price, The Source Of The Light

Here is the second volume of “A Great Circle”, the highly acclaimed Mayfield family trilogy, from one of America’s literary treasures. Though a novel independent from “The Surface of Earth, The Source of Light” continues the saga of the Mayfield family, here focusing on Hutchins Mayfield, whose desire for self-knowledge removes him from his secure existence as a prep school teacher and takes him on a journey to Oxford and Italy to study and write. Hutchins comes back home for a family crisis but ultimately returns to England, where he achieves a maturity that enables him to cope with commitments, abandonments, and the creation of an honest personal agenda.

In “The Source of Light”, Reynolds Price combines gravity and buoyancy, a mythic sense of the past with the mysteries of place, to forge an encompassing portrait of the strange and various world one travels through in the quest for self-fulfillment.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   318 pages )