A Crooked Tree
This spur-of-the-moment decision will have far-reaching and devastating consequences not just for 12-year-old Ellen Gallagher but for her four siblings, an unruly family growing up in the mountains of rural Pennsylvania in the 1980s.
Welcome to A Crooked Tree, the rich and atmospheric debut novel from Una Mannion, a writer who was born in Philadelphia but now lives in County Sligo in Ireland, and who thrills us with this resonant, moving and gripping coming-of-age tale set in the days when playtime meant roaming free, and the obsession with technology had not started to erode childhood experience.
Written through the eyes of Ellen’s 15-year-old sister Libby, and with a tenderness and compassion that will take your breath away, this acutely perceptive and haunting story of domestic dysfunction captures all the uncertainty, emotion, frustration and yearnings of adolescence as a group of free-range youngsters are forced to peer into the cruel realities of the adult w
Thrillers Spiked With Malice and Dread
Credit.Nishat Akhtar
Published Jan. 15, 2021Updated Jan. 18, 2021
It’s still dark! But here are some thrillers to help with all the time we are spending indoors.
The title of the Australian writer Jane Harper’s latest novel,
THE SURVIVORS (Flatiron, 374 pp., $27.99), refers to two things. The first is a sculpture memorializing a shipwreck whose ghostly remains lie off the coast of Evelyn Bay, a tiny summer community in Tasmania. The second are the traumatized, secrets-harboring residents left behind when a devastating storm killed three of the town’s young people 12 years ago.
After a long exile, Kieran Elliott has returned to Evelyn Bay with his girlfriend and their baby to help his parents move out of the family house. But it is a complicated homecoming. Kieran was indirectly responsible for two of the storm deaths one of the victims was his brother and there are those who will never forgive him. Also, there’s a new body to