April
I look forward to reading and reviewing the following titles this month :)
Set in 1981, Let Me In is the horrific tale of Oskar and Eli. It begins with the grisly discovery of the body of a teenage boy, emptied of blood. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at long last -- revenge for all the bad things the bullies at school do to him, day after day. While Oskar is fascinated by the murder, it is not the most important thing in his life. A new girl has moved in next door—a girl who has never seen a Rubik’s cube before, but who can solve it at once. They become friends. Then something more. But there is something wrong with her, something odd. And she only comes out at night. . . .
Genre: Horror / Fiction / Paranormal
Author: John Ajvide Lindqvist
Paperback, 472 pages
Published: August 31st, 2010 (first published May 2004)
Publishing House: Martin's Griffin
I will be reading this in a group with the Reading Lists Completists over on Goodreads. It will be read over the next three months, so there is plenty of time to join in. I needed something truly different for me to try and I am hoping this is it!
From the first people to leave Africa to the first to leave the planet, the urge to explore the unknown has driven human progress. DK's Explorers tells the story of humanity's explorations, taking the reader into the lives of some of the most intrepid people ever known. Focusing on 50 of the world's greatest explorers, with shorter entries on 60 of their helpers and companions, the book is filled with first-person accounts in the explorers' own words, rare maps, specially commissioned photographs, and artworks re-create history's greatest expeditions. From trade and the search for lands to colonize, to scientific curiosity and missionary zeal, Explorers introduces history's most famous trail blazers-people whose courage opened frontiers, turned voids into maps, forged nations, connected cultures, and added to humankind's knowledge of the world by leaps and bounds.
Genre: Non-Fiction / Children’s
Authors: Nellie Huang, Barbara Hillary
Hardcover, 144 pages
Expected publication: September 3rd, 2019
Publishing House: DK Publishing (Dorling Kindersley)
It's been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put under quarantine. Since the Tox hit and pulled Hetty's life out from under her.
It started slow. First the teachers died one by one. Then it began to infect the students, turning their bodies strange and foreign. Now, cut off from the rest of the world and left to fend for themselves on their island home, the girls don't dare wander outside the school's fence, where the Tox has made the woods wild and dangerous. They wait for the cure they were promised as the Tox seeps into everything.
But when Byatt goes missing, Hetty will do anything to find her, even if it means breaking quarantine and braving the horrors that lie beyond the fence. And when she does, Hetty learns that there's more to their story, to their life at Raxter, than she could have ever thought true.
Genre: Young Adult /Mystery /Horror /LGBT
Author: Rory Power
Hardcover, 368 pages
Expected publication: July 9th, 2019
Publishing House: Delacorte Press
The Space Between Time is a dark comedy about love and loss. It’s also about memory and how a childhood remembered can years later falsely distort what we feel about those closest to us.
Emma Maria Rossini appears to be the luckiest girl in the world. She’s the daughter of a beautiful and loving mother and her father is one of the most famous film actors of his generation. Tom Cruise is almost an adopted uncle.
She’s also the granddaughter of a rather eccentric and obscure Italian astrophysicist whose theories on the universe have been much ridiculed.
The story centres on Emma’s childhood in Edinburgh and East Lothian, and the overpowering event of her mother’s death, apparently in a freak lighting strike.
However, the secret that only Emma knows is that her mother’s death was no accident. It precipitates a suicide attempt, and estrangement from her father.
Emma stumbles through university and finds work as a journalist in Edinburgh, although she is once more becoming mentally unstable and, following the death of her father, again tries to commit suicide.
It’s while she’s in a mental institution that her psychiatrist suggests she writes a memoir of her life, to help her make sense of everything that’s happened to her, and The Space Between Time is the story she writes.
The tragic-comic story, aimed at both male and female readers, has heart, humour and warmth. Its central message is that, even at the worst of times, a second chance can often be just around the corner.
In coming to terms with her life and the deaths of her parents, Emma finds ultimate solace in her once-derided grandfather’s Theorem on the universe – which offers the metaphor that we are all connected, even to those we have loved and not quite lost.
Genre: Contemporary Fiction/ Dark Comedy
Author: Charlie Laidlaw
Expected Publication Date: June 20th, 2019
Happy Reading in April :)
