13. The Pull of the Moon by Diane Janes

Kate Mayfield is just trying to lead a quiet, uneventful life away from public scrutiny. A retired schoolteacher, she is leading that sort of life until the day she receives a letter from a dying woman from her past requesting to see Kate. Over thirty years ago, during the long, hot summer of 1972, Kate had a very different life – a life she doesn’t want to remember.

The summer of 1972 starts out as the ultimate summer getaway. Kate’s parents think she is in France with a girlfriend, but actually she is spending it nearby in an isolated country house with her new boyfriend, Danny Ivanisovic, and his university friend, Simon. While at the beach one day, they meet a young woman named Trudie, who quickly offers to spend the summer with them. What the group doesn’t know is that Trudie has run away from home and is missing from her family. As tension among the four heats up because of the changing group dynamics, a terrible accident that the group must hide ends up destroying all those involved. When Danny’s mother reaches out to Kate to find out what really happened that summer, the mysteries begin to unravel.

Janes does a great job switching back and forth from Kate’s present life to Kate’s mysterious past. The building tension in the group adds to the mystery of what will happen to everyone, and a side story of a murder of a fellow student of Danny and Simon ties into the story neatly in the end. Perfect for readers who like Donna Tartt and Ruth Rendell, this is a great debut suspense novel.

12. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman

A map of the world on an IHOP placemat leads two young women on a frightening trip in Gilman’s latest memoir. In 1986, Susan Jane Gilman has just graduated from college and doesn’t know what to do with her life. One night, she and a distant friend, Claire, are drunkenly talking about traveling around the world once they see the placemat. They decide to start their world-wide journey in China, which has just opened up to tourists. Little do they know the drama that awaits them.

Once in China, Susan quickly realizes that the two are in over their heads. What starts off as an innocent rite of passage quickly deteriorates into an ultimately scary attempt to get out of the country. The women are confused as to where they are going, travel is hindered by delayed transportation, they are constantly hungry, and they are monitored at all times because they look so different from everyone else. Susan also realizes that she doesn’t know Claire as well as she should have probably known her before she agreed to travel around the world with her – as the trip progresses Claire becomes more and more paranoid, sick, and mentally ill. When she jumps off a bridge in a possible suicide attempt and the military police get involved, Susan realizes that she must quickly get Claire back to the United States.

Gilman does an excellent job in portraying the claustrophobic feeling of being on a doomed trip, trapped in a foreign country with a person she doesn’t know very well that clearly needs medical and psychiatric help. Even though her world-wide trip was cut short and most would agree was disastrous, Gilman surprises everyone, including herself, by traveling again shortly after she comes back to the U.S. Part travel memoir, part cautionary tale, this personal account of a trip gone wrong is ultimately uplifting.

11. Secrets of Eden by Chris Bohjalian

On the day that Alice Hayward is baptized by Reverend Stephen Drew in a Vermont pond, she is killed by her abusive husband in their home. What originally looks like a normal open and shut case of murder and suicide soon divides the small town of Haverill, Vermont and casts guilt on three different people. Did Alice’s husband, who was a successful small town business owner with a nasty temper and a history of abusing Alice, strangle her then shoot himself? Was the quiet Reverend Drew as innocent as he initially appeared, especially when Alice’s diaries show an affair between the two? Why was the famous author Heather Laurent, herself having been involved in a famous domestic abuse case when her father killed her mother and then himself, suddenly in town at the time of the murders?

Bohjalian, author of thirteen novels, including Midwives, returns to bestseller territory in this compelling new tale. The novel takes turns being narrated by different characters, including Reverend Drew, the hard-nosed Deputy State’s Attorney Catherine Benincasa, and the angel loving New Age author, Heather Laurent. Each section gives readers a different take on that fateful summer evening when the Hayward family violence erupts, including how much their teenage daughter, Katie, knew and saw. Bohjalian tackles some serious subjects that would be perfect for book discussion group topics, such as faith, truth, and domestic abuse and his expert character development will leave some readers guessing until the final pages. Highly recommended for those who love Jodi Picoult.

10. Lullaby by Clair Seeber

Jess Finnegan is finally more relaxed about being a new mother to her eight-month-old son. On a lazy summer afternoon, she and her husband take the baby to the Tate Museum, where the day quickly changes their lives. After getting separated from her husband and son, Jess thinks they are still in the museum, yet after a few hours of not seeing them, realizes that something horrible has happened. Her husband’s cell phone is mysteriously answered, then switched off, and when she arrives back to their home, no one is waiting for her. Her husband is found later, severely beaten and unconscious in the hospital, with their son still missing.

This debut thriller from a British journalist starts out with a great plot and lots of intrigue and speculation, but it eventually grows outlandish. Possible kidnappers include the brother of Jess, who mysteriously appears after years of drug abuse and being estranged from the family. The Finnegan’s nanny, a young French woman, suddenly might have been having an affair with Jess’s husband and when pictures of her and the family’s young son are found, suspicions point to her. Add a cold, calculating ex-wife into the story, and unfortunately the book begins to meander. While the beginning is suspenseful and the modern London setting perfectly described, hopefully Seeber will use more realistic characters, such as a mother who seems truly upset at having her son go missing, in her next mysteries.

9. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Re-reading favorite or special books is very important to me when I think of what books I want to read in the future. While I love exploring new books and authors, as well as keeping up with certain authors and series that I have fallen in love with, some books always call me back. Lolita is a prime example, and a book I read every year, without fail. It is also a book that I find something new with every time I read or listen to it.

When Humbert Humbert meets naïve widow, Charlotte Haze, his sexual obsession with young girls, or nymphets as he calls them, finally is fulfilled. Her daughter, Dolores, or Lolita, quickly becomes his only focus, so much so that he marries Charlotte just to be near Lolita. When Charlotte finds out his true intentions, she tries to expose his secret by mailing letters showing his devious behavior, yet is killed on the way to the mailbox. Humbert is now Lolita’s only relative and their cross country journey after her mother’s death begins their tortured affair.

While the Village Voice called Lolita “three hundred pages of sex in the head”, this brilliant novel is fully of comic observations on American society and beautiful language that allows readers to feel a range of emotions while reading it. Tragic, haunting, original, amusing, horribly sad, and often misunderstood, this is a classic that deserves to be essential reading for those who love literature.

This is what I thought of the book in 2007 when I read it: http://tcpl.org/sarah/2007/11/64-lolita-by-vladimir-nabokov.html

8. Lunch in Paris: a Love Story, With Recipes by Elizabeth Bard

Bard is working as a journalist in London and taking weekend trips to Paris when she meets her future husband, Gwendal. Besides a physical attraction to Gwendal (Bard famously writes on the first page that she slept with her husband halfway through their first date), she also is slowly growing in love with the famous city. She is soon spending more and more time in Paris spending leisurely afternoons at cafes and the street markets, and when Gwendal puts her name on the gas bill for his Parisian apartment, she knows that she is meant to live there.

Part love story and part food story, this book comes complete with relevant recipes at the end of each chapter. Bard starts out as an unsure American living in a foreign city with no job, no heat during the winter, and cooking on a tiny two-burner stove, and progresses into a wife that helps her husband grieve over the death of his beloved father and bring their two different families together. A quick, fun read for those who liked Amanda Hesser’s Cooking for Mr. Latte and the traveling writings of Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes, or lovers of everything French.

7. Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich

Irene America is struggling in life. She is trying to complete her doctorate thesis about the painter George Catlin, while raising her family of three children, and dealing with her demanding, jealous, and possessive husband, Gil. Gil is somewhat famous for his increasingly raw and brutal portraits of Irene, and while he realizes that his wife doesn’t love him anymore, he cannot let her and their family go. Both Irene and Gil are alcoholics and their children are caught in the middle of constant fighting, hitting, and other abuses. When Irene realizes that Gil is reading her diary, she starts a new, hidden diary that she keeps locked in a bank deposit box where she writes her true feelings about her life and dissolving marriage, and manipulates her other diary writings to manipulate Gil into leaving her and their children.

While bleak and heartbreaking, Erdrich’s newest novel is also a gripping, emotional tale of a family gone wrong. Native American beliefs and culture are present throughout the short novel, as customary in most of Erdrich’s novels. Most readers probably will realize that someone is not going to make it out of the marriage alive, but the end is still shocking when readers finally get to that point. A tale of love, control, frustration, and survival make this a mesmerizing read.