Author: Marian Engel

This is a rather odd book although it won the Governor General’s Award for Literature in 1976. Basically it is the story of the summer Lou, a librarian, spent on a remote island cataloguing a personal library that was donated to the Institute. Part of her duties while living and working in the home was looking after the bear that lived in one of the shacks behind the house. Over the summer the relationship between the bear and Lou moves from fear and indifference to something completely different.

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Author: Ken Follett

I’ve had this one on my bookshelf for a long time. It’s almost 1000 pages so I really wanted to be in the right mood for it and that mood hadn’t struck me yet. I recently rearranged my bookshelf from the largest book down to the smallest and this ended up being the first in the row.

I don’t know why I waited so long to read it; I liked all the characters and, having watched Downton Abbey, I could see where everyone fit into the many social circles described in the book.

This is the first book in a trilogy; I’ve already checked for book two at the library but it is currently on loan so I’ll have to wait.

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Author: Justin Go

It took me a long time to get through this book but not because I didn’t find it interesting – I was busy with other things.

There are actually two intertwined stories; the chapters alternate between the two. Tristen is a young man who has just learned he might inherit a fortune if he can prove he is a descendant of Ashley, a man who died while trying to summit Mount Everest. One of the storylines follows Tristen and the other storyline follows Ashley and Imogen’s troubled relationship.

I like a clean ending and in this I was disappointed but I enjoyed the book.

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Author: JB Rowley

This second book in the Whisper My Secret series was less interesting than the first. I expected to learn more about the author’s search to find her lost half-brothers and sister but there wasn’t much about the search. The author goes into detail about her family’s life (she had six full-siblings) in the Australian bush and the eventual realization that her mother had three children that were taken from her.

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