Friday Finds!

What great books did you hear about / discover this past week? Share with us your FRIDAY FINDS!


Hosted by shouldbe reading.



From the ALA 2010 Reading List awards announced this week.

Three titles shortlisted for the Historical Fiction section.

Etta by Gerald Kolpan

Beautiful, elusive, and refined, Etta Place captivated the nation at the turn of the last century as she dodged the law with the Wild Bunch, led by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Her true identity and fate have remained a mystery. Kolpan envisions this remarkable woman's life in a stunning debut novel.
         

Grace Hammer: A novel of the Victorian Underworld by Sara Stockbridge
 
This first novel reads like early Dickens, with every character name aptly fitting its owner, and each scene piquantly described: Grace's sons line up at the door 'like a row of sparrows on a chimneystack,' and lovers are like 'mice in a newspaper hat, afloat on their own private sea.' Then there is the unforgettable Miss Spragg, who steals little children and fondles a severed ear tucked in her pocket.... Stockbridge captures the mood of Dickensian London perfectly in this gripping debut.

The Owl Killers by Karen Maitland

England, 1321. Deep in the heart of countryside lies an isolated village governed by a sinister regime of Owl Masters - theirs is a pagan world of terror and blackmail, where neighbour denounces neighbour and sin is punishable by murder. This dark status quo is disturbed by the arrival of a house of religious women, who establish a community outside the village. Why do their crops succeed when village crops fail; their cattle survive despite the plague? But petty jealousy turns deadly when the women give refuge to a young martyr.