Author: Guy Vanderhaeghe

A visit to a favourite thrift store in Courtenay always provides me with reading material. I’d heard of the author’s award-winning The Englishman’s Boy but I’d never read anything by him. Guy Vanderhaeghe was born in Esterhazy, SK and, according to the book cover, currently lives in Saskatoon.

Alec Monkman is estranged from his daughter Vera when, after the death of his wife, he forces her to quit school to take care of his younger son. Vera resents her father for this and, after a stint in the Army, she settles in the East. But when her son, about to become a teenager, seems to be getting out of hand she returns to her home town to live with her father. You just know that things aren’t going to go well.

Goodreads Rating * * * *

Author: Kate Quinn

When the library called to say I had a book in I wasn’t expecting this one; I don’t even remember placing an order for it.

I’ve read other novels about the role women played in spy networks during the first and second world wars. This one focuses on a particular network operating in France during the First World War, and more specifically on three women in that network. The book also follows the search for a missing person after the end of the Second World War. The two plots are interwoven and eventually become a plot for revenge. Although the Alice Network did exist, and several of the characters played parts in the network, most of this story is pure fiction and imagination.

Goodreads Rating * * * *

Author: Graham Greene

I only read this book because of the book “The Unquiet Daughter”. For the first couple of chapters I was trying to match the characters in the novel with the characters in the memoir. It was much more interesting when I gave up on that idea. The book was not really my kind of story – men in Vietnam reporting on war long before war “the” Vietnam War. As for a corresponding match between the two books, I didn’t see it.

Goodreads Rating * * *

Author: Liane Moriarty

Many years ago, in a small community, a young girl is murdered. Throughout the book we see the anguish this has caused her mother and the blame she places on the man (who was then a boy) whom she believes to be the murderer. In that same small town a young mother sails through life with everything neatly planned out for her husband and her three children. And returning to that small community is a young mother who is reeling from devastating news about her beloved husband. The stories connect before many chapters have passed and the reader is torn deciding what to do with the dilemmas that confront the women.

Goodreads Rating * * * *