Director's Picks - September
Amnesty : a novel
Adiga, Aravind, author author
2020
Danny, formerly Dhananjaya Rajaratnam, is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, Australia, denied refugee status after he fled from Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he's been trying to create a new identity for himself. But then one morning, Danny learns a female client of his has been murdered, and he suspects that a local doctor did the deed. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: Come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported? Or say nothing, and let justice go undone?
Code name Hélène
Lawhon, Ariel, author
2020
The Gestapo hears of a female operative with a remarkable ability to evade capture - putting a five-million-franc bounty on Nancy Wake's head. Escaping France, Nancy enters training with the Special Operations Executives, who transform her into Hélène. With a new mission in hand, Nancy is airdropped back into France as the deadly Madam Andrée - a powerful leader in the French Resistance. But no one can protect Nancy if the enemy finds out these different women are one and the same, and the closer to liberation France gets, the more exposed she will become.
The driftwood girls
Douglas-Home, Mark, author
2020
Kate and Flora Tolmie have always lived with a mystery: what happened to their mother, Christina? Twenty-three years ago, she vanished from coastal northern France, leaving her young daughters orphaned and alone. Now Flora is also missing. In desperation, Kate searches her Edinburgh house, and finds a piece of paper with a name: Cal McGill. Cal is a sea detective, an expert on the winds and the tides, and consequently an exceptionally gifted finder of lost things - and people. Kate hopes that Cal might not only find her sister, but also unlock the mystery of what happened to her mother all those years before?
House of Trelawney
Rothschild, Hannah, 1962- author.
2020
For more than 700 years, the vast, rambling Trelawney Castle in Cornwall--turrets, follies, a room for every day of the year, four miles of corridors and 500,000 acres--was the magnificent and grand "three dimensional calling card" of the Earls of Trelawney. By 2008, it is in a complete state of ruin due to the dulled ambition and the financial ineptitude of the twenty-four earls, two world wars, the Wall Street crash, and inheritance taxes. Still: the heir to all of it, Kitto, his wife Jane, their three children, their dog, Kitto's ancient parents, and his aunt Tuffy Scott, an entomologist who studies fleas, all manage to live there and keep it going. Three women dominate the story: Jane; Kitto's sister, the spinster, Blaze, who left Trelawney and made a killing in finance in London, and the wildly beautiful, seductive, and long-ago banished Anastasia whose 19 year old daughter, Ayesha-- a complete replica of her mother--arrives unannounced at Trelawney. When Ayesha marries very well and buys the house to avenge her mother's memory, she makes Blaze's plan to save Trelawney completely unnecessary. But both Blaze and Jane are about to discover that the house itself is really only a very small part of what keeps the family together.
Remembrance
Woods, Rita, author
2020
Ohio, present day. An elderly woman warns against rising racism as a young woman grapples with her life. Haiti, 1791. slave Abigail is forced from her children to take her mistress to safety, she discovers New Orleans has its own powers. New Orleans, 1857. House girl Margot is sold just before her 18th birthday and her promised freedom. Remembrance. It's a rumour, a whisper passed in the fields and veiled behind sheets of laundry. A hidden stop on the underground road to freedom, a safe haven protected by more than secrecy - if you can make it there.
Strangers in the house : a prairie story of bigotry and belonging
Savage, Candace, 1949- author
2019
Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin built a house in Saskatoon in the 1920s, an era when French-speakers like him were deemed "undesirable" by the political and social elite, who sought to populate the Canadian prairies with WASPs only. Renowned author Candace Savage scours public records and historical accounts and interviews several of Napoléon's descendants to reveal a family story marked by challenge and resilience. In the process, she examines a troubling episode in Canadian history, one with surprising relevance today.