Friday Finds!

Hosted by MizB at shouldbereading

Have you ever noticed how often books with a similar theme come to your attention at the same time? It seems to happen to me quite regularly.

These first two I found when browsing my library's new books list. They were pages apart but were the only two I noted down. And considering I already have Angelology on hold..........

Ten Hail Marys by Kate Howarth ( a memoir)

An extraordinary story of courage and survival in the tradition of Angela's Ashes. Ten Hail Marys follows the first seventeen years of Kate Howarth's life in Sydney and country New South Wales. Raised by various Indigenous relatives, she is abandoned by her mother and then her grandmother, and through it all manages to believe that she will have a better life. In the mid-1960s, at the age of fifteen, she becomes pregnant and is sent to St Margaret's Home for unwed mothers in Sydney, where she resists intense pressure to give up her baby for adoption. She becomes one of the few women to ever leave the Home with her baby.

The Convent by Panos Karnezis

Those whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad...The crumbling convent of Our Lady of Mercy stands alone in an uninhabited part of the Spanish sierra, hidden on a hill among dense pine forest. Its inhabitants are devoted to God, to solitude and silence; six women cut off from the world they've chosen to leave behind. This is all to change, on the day that Mother Superior Maria Ines discovers a suitcase punctured with air-holes at the entrance to the retreat. Soon she is to find the box and its contents are to have consequences beyond her imagining, and that even in her carefully protected sanctuary she is unable to keep the world, or her past, at bay.

Then in Eva's library loot this one caught my eye.

The Sagas of Icelanders : ed Jane Smiley

A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world's greatest literary treasures — as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured further west — to Greenland and, ultimately, the coast of North America itself.

and finally last night a post on Royal Reviews

Ice Land by Betsy Tobin

Infused with the rich history and mythology of Iceland, Betsy Tobin's sweeping novel is an epic adventure of forbidden love, lust, jealousy, faith and magical wonder set under the shadow of a smoldering volcano.

That volcano has done a good deal more than smoulder recently!