Ange's Recommended Reads
Published on 02 February 2024
Ange from Timboon Library has shared some of her favourite reads over summer! All available to borrow at our libraries.
Marisha Pessl - Night Film
Suspense/Mystery Fiction | Ange's all time, read often novel!
Night Film is a breathtakingly suspenseful literary thriller that makes you question how you decide what is real and what isn't.
On a damp October night, beautiful, young Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan.
Her death is ruled a suicide, but veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. As he probes the strange circumstances surrounding her death, McGrath comes face-to-face with the legacy of Ashley's father: cult horror film director Stanislas Cordova. Rumored to be shuttered away in a remote Adirondack estate, Cordova remains an enigma. Though much has been written about his unsettling films, very little is known about the man himself.
With the help of two strangers, McGrath is slowly drawn into Cordova's eerie, hypnotic world as he pieces together the answers:
What really happened to Ashley?
Who is Cordova?
And once we face our deepest fears—what lies on the other side?
Stephen King - Fairy Tale
Fantasy/Paranormal Fiction
Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself - and his dad. Then, when Charlie is seventeen, he meets Howard Bowditch, a recluse with a big dog in a big house at the top of a big hill. In the backyard is a locked shed from which strange sounds emerge, as if some creature is trying to escape. When Mr. Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie the house, a massive amount of gold, a cassette tape telling a story that is impossible to believe, and a responsibility far too massive for a boy to shoulder. Because within the shed is a portal to another world - one whose denizens are in peril and whose monstrous leaders may destroy their own world, and ours.
Preston & Child - The Cabinet of Dr. Leng
Thriller Fiction
Astoundingly, Constance has found a way back to the place of her origins, New York City in the late 1800s, leaping at the chance, although it means leaving the present forever. Constance sets off on a quest to prevent the events that lead to the deaths of her sister and brother. But along the road to redemption, Manhattan's most infamous serial killer, Dr. Enoch Leng, lies in wait, ready to strike at the slightest provocation. Meanwhile, in contemporary New York, Pendergast feverishly searches for a way to reunite with Constance-but will he discover a way back to her before it's too late?
Louise Penny - How The Light Gets In
Detective/Mystery Fiction | Inspector Gamache Series
As a fierce, unrelenting winter grips Quebec, shadows are closing in on Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. When he receives a message about a mysterious case in Three Pines, he is compelled to investigate - a woman who was once one of the most famous people in the world has vanished. The investigation gathers momentum and Gamache is drawn into a web of murder, lies and unimaginable corruption at the heart of the city. Facing his most challenging, and personal, case to date, can he save the reputation of the Surete, those he holds dear and himself?
Eva Collins - Ask No Questions: A Migrants Tale
Poetry
With a third of Australians born and around half with one parent born overseas, migration stories are a crucial part of our national experience. In her verse novel, Ask No Questions, Eva Collins writes spare affecting lines about her own experience as a teenager when her parents decided to emigrate from Poland to Australia. She captures the loss and gain, grief and celebration with great poignancy
A.S King - Still Life with Tornado
Young Adult
Sixteen-year-old Sarah can't draw. This is a problem, because as long as she can remember, she has 'done the art.' She thinks she's having an existential crisis. And she might be right; she does keep running into past and future versions of herself as she wanders the urban ruins of Philadelphia. Or maybe she's finally waking up to the tornado that is her family, the tornado that six years ago sent her once-beloved older brother flying across the country for a reason she can't quite recall. After decades of staying together 'for the kids' and building a family on a foundation of lies and domestic violence, Sarah's parents have reached the end. Now Sarah must come to grips with years spent sleepwalking in the ruins of their toxic marriage. As Sarah herself often observes, nothing about her pain is remotely original-and yet it still hurts. Insightful, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful, this is a vivid portrait of abuse, survival, resurgence that will linger with readers long after the last page.