Library Loot (Aug 10, 2011)

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they've checked out from the library.  If you'd like to participate, just write up your post - feel free to steal the button - and visit the above 2 blogs to see who has the Mr. Linky this week. Don't forget to check out what others are checking out!

Die For Me

by Amy Plum

My life had always been blissfully, wonderfully normal.  But it only took one moment to change everything.

Suddenly, my sister, Georgia, and I were orphans.  We put our lives into storage and moved to Paris to live with my grandparents.  And I knew my shattered heart, my shattered life, awould never feel normal again.  Then I met Vincent.

Mysterious, sexy, and unnervingly charming, Vincent Delacroix appeared out of nowhere and swept me off my feet.  Just like that, I was in danger of losing my hdeart all over again.  But I was ready to let it happen.

Of course, nothing is ever that easy.  Because Vincent is no normal human.  He has a terrifying destiny, one that puts his life at risk every day.  He also has enemies. . . immortal, murderous enemies who are determined to destroy him and all of his kind.

While I'm fighting to piece together the remnants of my life, can I risk putting my heart -- as well as my life and my family's -- in jeopardy for a chance at love?

Hereafter

by Tara Hudson

Can there truly be love after death?

Drifting in the dark waters of a mysterious river, the only thing Amelia knows for sure is that she's dead.  With no recollection of her past life -- or her actual death -- she's trapped alone in a nightmarish existence.  All of this changes when she tries to rescue a boy, Joshua, from drowning in her river.  As a ghost, she can do nothing but will him to live. Yet in an unforgettable moment of connection, she helps him survive.

Amelia and Joshua grow ever closer as they begin to uncover the strange circumstances of her death and the secrets of the dark river that held her captive for so long.  But even while they struggle to keep their bond hidden from the living world, a frightening spirit named Eli is doing everything in his power to destroy their newfound happiness and drag Amelia back into the ghost world. . . forever.

The Tiger's Wife

by Tea Obreht

Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Tea Obreht, the youngest of The New Yorker's twenty best American fiction writers under forty, has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation.

In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphange by the sea.  By the time she and her lifelong friend Zora begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her.  Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her.  Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards.  Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.

But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own:  the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather's recent death.  After telling her grandmother he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone.  A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he was too ill to travel.  Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is compelled to unravel.

Grief struck and searching for clues to her grandfather's final state of mind, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a child.  On their weekly trips to the zoo he would read to her from a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, which he carried with him everywhere; later, he told her stories of his own encounters over many years with "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal and appeared never to age.  But the most extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told her, the one Natalia must discover for herself.  One winter during the Second World War, his childhood village was snowbound, cut off even from the encroaching German invaders but haunted by another, fierce presence: a tiger who comes ever closer under cover of darkness. "These stories," Natalia comes to understand, "run like secret rivers through all the other stories" of her grandfather's life.  And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives that she will find the answer she is looking for.

Husband and Wife

by Leah Stewart

Sarah Price is thirty-five years old.  She doesn't feel as though she's getting older, but there are some noticeable changes:  a hangover after two beers, the stray gray hair, and most of all, she's called "Mom" by two small children.  Always responsible, Sarah traded her MFA for a steady job, which allows her husband Nathan, to write fiction.  But Sarah is happy and she believes Nathan is too, until a truth is revealed: Nathan's upcoming novel, Infidelity, is based in fact.

Suddenly Sarah's world is turned upside down.  Adding to her confusion, Nathan abdicates responsibility for the fate of their relationship and of his novel's publication -- a financial lifesaver they have been depending upon -- leaving both in Sarah's hands.  Reeling from his betrayal, she is plagued by dark questions.  How well does she really know Nathan?  And, more important, how well does she know herself?

For answers, Sarah looks back to her artistic twenty-something self to try to understand what happened to her dreams.  When did it all seem to change?  Pushed from her complacent plateau, Sarah begins to act -- for the first time not so responsibly -- on all the things she has let go of for so long: her blank computer screen; her best friend, Helen; the volumes of Proust on her bookshelf.  And then there is that e-mail in her inbox: a note from Rajiv, a beautiful man from her past who once tempted her to stray.  The struggle to find which version of herself is the esesntial one -- artist, wife, or mother -- takes Sarah hundreds of miles away from her marriage on a surprising journey.

Wise, funny, and sharply drawn, Leah Stewart's Husband and Wife probes our deepest relationships, the promises we make and break, and the consequences they hold for our lives, revealing that it's never too late to step back and start over.

Remedies

by Kate Ledger

Simon and Emily Bear look like a couple who have it all.  Simon is a respected doctor, while Emily shines professionally as a partner in a premier public relations firm.  They have a beautiful house in Baltimore and a healthy daughter. But their marriage is scarred by old, hidden wounds.  Even as Simon tends his patients' ills, and Emily spins away her clients' mistakes, they can't seem to do the same for themselves or their relationship.

Simon becomes convinced he's discovered a cure for chronic pain, a finding that could be a major medical breakthrough.  As he yearns to prove he's a good doctor and to make amends for a missed diagnosis years before, he is oblivious of the pain he's causing at home.  Emily, still struggling to move beyond the devastating loss that she and Simon suffered fifteen years ago, comes to realize she hasn't felt anything for a very long time -- that is, until a lover from her past resurfaces and forces her to examine her marriage anew.

In a debut novel on a par with today's top women writers, Remedies explores the extraordinarily complicated facets of pain, in the nerves of the body and the longings of the heart.

What would you endure in order to avoid feeling pain? And would you believe in a cure?  Depicting modern-day marriage with a razor-sharp eye, Remedies is about what it takes, as an individual and as a couple, to recover from profound loss.