Book picks similar to
Sea Music by Sara MacDonald


fiction
historical-fiction
cornwall
novels

New York


Edward Rutherfurd - 2009
    From this intimate perspective we see New York’s humble beginnings as a tiny Indian fishing village, the arrival of Dutch and British merchants, the Revolutionary War, the emergence of the city as a great trading and financial center, the convulsions of the Civil War, the excesses of the Gilded Age, the explosion of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the trials of World War II, the near demise of New York in the 1970s and its roaring rebirth in the 1990s, and the attack on the World Trade Center. A stirring mix of battle, romance, family struggles, and personal triumphs, New York: The Novel gloriously captures the search for freedom and opportunity at the heart of our nation’s history.

Face the Winter Naked


Bonnie Turner - 1991
    The life of a freight-hopping, banjo-strumming hobo appeals to him more than he wants to admit. But he insists he's not a bum - he's a family man looking for work; a down-and-out victim of the Depression, whose war flashbacks and guilt for leaving his family accompany him through the hills of Missouri. Compassionate, humorous, and warm, despite the economic hardships of the era, Face the Winter Naked will appeal to readers who enjoy tales of survival in the Great Depression. Stories of desperate men who couldn't handle the realities of war or financial ruin. Men who dearly loved their families but hadn't the courage to stay and accept responsibility. The story pulls the reader back to a tragic period in history, where people either learned to cope with poverty - or perished.

We the Living


Ayn Rand - 1936
    It tells of a young woman’s passionate love, held like a fortress against the corrupting evil of a totalitarian state.We the Living is not a story of politics, but of the men and women who have to struggle for existence behind the Red banners and slogans. It is a picture of what those slogans do to human beings. What happens to the defiant ones? What happens to those who succumb? Against a vivid panorama of political revolution and personal revolt, Ayn Rand shows what the theory of socialism means in practice.

Breakout at Stalingrad


Heinrich Gerlach - 2016
    The original version of the classic novel of the epic World War II battle, confiscated by the Russian secret services in 1949, and now rediscovered in the Russian archives.

The Invisible Bridge


Julie Orringer - 2010
    Andras Lévi, a Hungarian-Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he promised to deliver. But when he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter's recipient, he becomes privy to a secret that will alter the course of his—and his family’s—history. From the small Hungarian town of Konyár to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the despair of Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in labor camps, The Invisible Bridge tells the story of a family shattered and remade in history’s darkest hour.

Nemesis


Philip Roth - 2010
    This is the startling theme of Philip Roth’s wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children. At the center of Nemesis is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges and disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor’s dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground—and on the everyday realities he faces—Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering, and the pain. Moving between the smoldering, malodorous streets of besieged Newark and Indian Hill, a pristine children’s summer camp high in the Poconos—whose “mountain air was purified of all contaminants”—Roth depicts a decent, energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic. Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantor’s passage into personal disaster, and no less exact about the condition of childhood. Through this story runs the dark questions that haunt all four of Roth’s late short novels, Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and now Nemesis: What kind of accidental choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand the onslaught of circumstance?

The Assault


Harry Mulisch - 1982
    A Nazi collaborator, infamous for his cruelty, is assassinated as he rides home on his bicycle. The Germans retaliate by burning down the home of an innocent family; only twelve-year-old Anton survives.Based on actual events, The Assault traces the complex repercussions of this horrific incident on Anton’s life. Determined to forget, he opts for a carefully normal existence: a prudent marriage, a successful career, and colorless passivity. But the past keeps breaking through, in relentless memories and in chance encounters with others who were involved in the assassination and its aftermath, until Anton finally learns what really happened that night in 1945—and why.--penguinrandomhouse.com

The Colour of Milk


Nell Leyshon - 2012
    But as she does so through four seasons of one extraordinary year, she discovers that nothing comes for free. Told by a narrator whose urgent, unforgettable voice will break your heart, The Colour of Milk is an astonishing novel.

The Book of Dreams


Nina George - 2016
    On his way to see his son, Sam, for the first time in years, Henri steps into the road without looking and collides with oncoming traffic. He is rushed to a nearby hospital where he floats, comatose, between dreams, reliving the fairytales of his childhood and the secrets that made him run away in the first place.After the accident, Sam--a thirteen-year old synesthete with an IQ of 144 and an appetite for science fiction--waits by his father's bedside every day. There he meets Eddie Tomlin, a woman forced to confront her love for Henri after all these years, and twelve-year old Madelyn Zeidler, a coma patient like Henri and the sole survivor of a traffic accident that killed her family. As these four very different individuals fight--for hope, for patience, for life--they are bound together inextricably, facing the ravages of loss and first love side by side.A revelatory, urgently human story that examines what we consider serious and painful alongside light and whimsy, The Book of Dreams is a tender meditation on memory, liminality, and empathy, asking with grace and gravitas what we will truly find meaningful in our lives once we are gone.

The Dig


John Preston - 2007
    But on a riverside farm in Suffolk there is excitement of another kind: Mrs Pretty, the widowed farmer, has had her hunch proved correct that the strange mounds on her land hold buried treasure. As the dig proceeds against a background of mounting national anxiety, it becomes clear though that this is no ordinary find ... and soon the discovery leads to all kinds of jealousies and tensions.John Preston's recreation of the Sutton Hoo dig - the greatest Anglo-Saxon discovery ever in Britain - brilliantly and comically dramatizes three months of intense activity when locals fought outsiders, professionals thwarted amateurs, and love and rivaly flourished in equal measure.

No Angel


Penny Vincenzi - 2000
    Celia Lytton is the beautiful and strong-willed daughter of wealthy aristocrats and she is used to getting her way. She moves through life making difficult and often dangerous decisions that affect herself and others-her husband, Oliver, and their children; the destitute Sylvia Miller, whose life is transformed by Celia's intrusion; as well as Oliver's daunting elder sister, who is not all she appears to be; and Sebastian Brooke, for whom Celia makes the most dangerous decision of all. Set against the tumultuous backdrop of London and New York in the First World War, No Angel is, as British Good Housekeeping wrote, "an absorbing page-turner, packed with believable characters and satisfyingly extreme villains, eccentrics, and manipulators." Readers of Maeve Binchy, Barbara Taylor Bradford, and Anita Shreve will fall in love with this epic, un-put-downable novel.With more than 3.5 million copies sold, Penny Vincenzi is one of the world's preeminent writers of popular fiction-and American readers no longer have to miss out on the fun. With the publication of No Angel, a novel introducing the engaging cast of characters in the Lytton family, Overlook opens a thrilling new dimension to this author's already illustrious career.

The Alexandria Quartet


Lawrence Durrell - 1960
    The lush and sensuous series consists of Justine(1957) Balthazar(1958) Mountolive(1958) Clea(1960).Justine, Balthazar and Mountolive use varied viewpoints to relate a series of events in Alexandria before World War II. In Clea, the story continues into the years during the war. One L.G. Darley is the primary observer of the events, which include events in the lives of those he loves, and those he knows. In Justine, Darley attempts to recover from and put into perspective his recently ended affair with a woman. Balthazar reinterprets the romantic perspective he placed on the affair and its aftermath in Justine, in more philosophical and intellectual terms. Mountolive tells a story minus interpretation, and Clea reveals Darley's healing, and coming to love another woman.

Little Boy Lost


Marghanita Laski - 1949
    Is the child really his? And does he want him?

Pictures At An Exhibition


D.M. Thomas - 1993
    A stunning and powerful achievement in which each character's identity is in some way hidden, and the suspense of unmasking them is unmercifully sustained.

The Debutante


Kathleen Tessaro - 2010
    Cate is sent to Devon with Rachel's colleague Jack to value the contents of Endsleigh, the grand Georgian home of a former socialite. But inside, its once elegant interiors are now worn with age and dust. Then Cate discovers hidden in the back of one of the bookshelves, an old shoebox containing an exquisite pair of silk dancing shoes from the 1930's along with a mysterious collection of objects - a diamond brooch, a photograph of a handsome young sailor, a dance card, and a beautiful pearl and emerald bracelet from Tiffany's. Unable to solve the questions in her own life, Cate quickly becomes engaged in solving the mystery of the shoe box and begins to unravel the story of Baby Blythe; bright, beautiful and reckless, she was the most famous debutante of her generation. The clues in the box reveal a tale of a dark, addictive love, a tale that will lead Cate to uncover some secrets of her own. A timeless novel from the bestselling author of Elegance.