I have just finished reading this - it is wonderful! Every second I wasn't reading it I was wishing I could - even went to bed early to finish it. Annie Barrows is the co-author of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (she finished the book for her aunt who was dying of cancer) and I loved this book even more than that. She creates a family you want to be part of, in spite of all its dysfunctions, and characters you can believe in. Where better to spend part of your life than in these pages?
There seems to be a lot of fiction about to be published with a theme of finding friends and oneself in a small community. Or perhaps those are the proofs I have chosen to read, accidentally. The Truth... is the one I have loved most, but they are all excellent, charming, comforting - perfect books to curl up with and escape life. The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is, again, a thoroughly American book set in a small town but written, oddly, by Katarina Bivald, a Swedish author who hadn't been to the States when she wrote the book. It has been a huge success in Sweden and it's easy to see why because it, too, while set in the present, harks back to an age and place where people know each other - rather like an American Archers. My third recent read is The Sunlit Night, a first novel by Rebecca Dinerstein who has previously published poetry - and it shows, too, because her prose is exquisite. In a reversal of The Readers, this novel takes the young American heroine and hero to the North of Norway and the midnight sun...
All three are published in June, in good time for the summer holidays.
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