Quick Lit April 2024 Archives

Fruit of the Dead

by Rachel Lyon

From the publisher: "Camp counselor Cory Ansel, eighteen and aimless, afraid to face her high-strung single mother in New York, is no longer sure where home is when the father of one of her campers offers an alternative. The CEO of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, Rolo Picazo is middle-aged, divorced, magnetic. He is also intoxicated by Cory. When Rolo proffers a childcare job (and an NDA), Cory quiets an internal warning and allows herself to be ferried to his private island. Plied with luxury and opiates manufactured by his company, she continues to tell herself she’s in charge. Her mother, Emer, head of a teetering agricultural NGO, senses otherwise. With her daughter seemingly vanished, Emer crosses land and sea to heed a cry for help she alone is convinced she hears. Alternating between the two women’s perspectives, Rachel Lyon’s Fruit of the Dead incorporates its mythic inspiration with a light touch and devastating precision. The result is a tale that explores love, control, obliteration, and America’s own late capitalist mythos. Lyon’s reinvention of Persephone and Demeter’s story makes for a haunting and ecstatic novel that vibrates with lush abandon. Readers will not soon forget it."

The Woman on the Ledge

by Ruth Mancini

I recommended this British standalone mystery to Tara on episode 425 of WSIRN as a plotty thriller, for fans of an intricately paced story where the character's motivations are important to the story. In the opening pages, a woman falls to her death from a fancy high-rise bank. Another woman on the scene is arrested for her murder. As readers, we're watching this unfold, convinced she's innocent of the crime. And yet, it becomes clear to the detective on the case (and readers) that she's hiding something. She seems to be protecting someone, but we don't know who. Something weird is happening and we don't know what it is; it doesn't make sense, but she's not guilty. As the story progresses, we bring in more characters and visit different timelines in the highly textured London setting, we slowly come to see what really happened, and more importantly, why. This is great on audio, narrated by Annabel Scholey.

The Berlin Letters: A Cold War Novel

by Katherine Reay

This is the first historical I've read from Katherine Reay, though her last several novels have been of that genre. I picked this up because I was certain we would pop over to Berlin when we were in Germany two years ago. While we didn't make it to that great city, I'm thankful I at least got to visit on the page. The story revolves around a German family that was separated when the Berlin Wall went up overnight in 1961. Many years later, in 1989, Luisa puts the decoding skills she's been taught from a young age to use for the CIA in the DC area. She lives with her grandparents, since her parents were killed in a car accident when she was three—or so she was told. But after her grandfather dies, she finds a secret stash of his letters that leads her to question everything she's been told about her family, and eventually leads her to Berlin to catch up for lost time. I listened to the audio version, narrated by Saskia Maarleveld, Ann Marie Gideon, and P. J. Ochlan. Whispersync narration available.

How to Walk into a Room: The Art of Knowing When to Stay and When to Walk Away

by Emily Freeman

From the publisher: "What do you do when you start to feel a shift and must decide if it’s time to make a change? When it comes to navigating big decisions about when to stay and go, how can we know for sure when the time is right? Though we enter and exit many rooms over the course of our life—jobs, relationships, communities, life stages—knowing how and when it’s time to leave is a decision that rarely has a clear answer. For anyone standing in a threshold, here’s a book to help discern the how, when, and what now of walking out of rooms and into new ones with peace, confidence, and a whole heart."

This Could Be Us (Skyland Book 2)

by Kennedy Ryan

From the publisher: "Soledad Barnes has her life all planned out. Because, of course, she does. She plans everything. She designs everything. She fixes everything. She’s a domestic goddess who's never met a party she couldn't host or a charge she couldn't lead. The one with all the answers and the perfect vinaigrette for that summer salad. But none of her varied talents can save her when catastrophe strikes, and the life she built with the man who was supposed to be her forever, goes poof in a cloud of betrayal and disillusion. But there is no time to pout or sulk, or even grieve the life she lost. She's too busy keeping a roof over her daughters' heads and food on the table. And in the process of saving them all, Soledad rediscovers herself. From the ashes of a life burned to the ground, something bold and new can rise. But then an unlikely man enters the picture—the forbidden one, the one she shouldn't want but can't seem to resist. She's lost it all before and refuses to repeat her mistakes. Can she trust him? Can she trust herself? After all she's lost . . .and found . . .can she be brave enough to make room for what could be?"

Piglet

by Lottie Hazell

From the publisher: "An elegant, razor-sharp debut about women's ambitions and appetites—and the truth about having it all. Outside of a childhood nickname she can’t shake, Piglet’s rather pleased with how her life’s turned out. An up-and-coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, she’s got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she’s always cooking. But when Kit confesses a horrible betrayal two weeks before they’re set to be married, Piglet finds herself suddenly…hungry. The couple decides to move forward with the wedding as planned, but as it nears and Piglet balances family expectations, pressure at work, and her quest to make the perfect cake, she finds herself increasingly unsettled, behaving in ways even she can’t explain. Torn between a life she’s always wanted and the ravenousness that comes with not getting what she knows she deserves, Piglet is, by the day of her wedding, undone, but also ready to look beyond the lies we sometimes tell ourselves to get by. A stylish, uncommonly clever novel about the things we want and the things we think we want, Piglet is both an examination of women’s often complicated relationship with food and a celebration of the messes life sometimes makes for us."

Quick Lit April 2024

Fruit of the Dead

The Woman on the Ledge

The Berlin Letters: A Cold War Novel

How to Walk into a Room: The Art of Knowing When to Stay and When to Walk Away

This Could Be Us (Skyland Book 2)

Piglet

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