One Cavan, One Writer Survey

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Recommended Read of the week!

Click on the book cover to reserve a copy from our catalogue!

To the end of the land by David Grossman

Set in Israel between 1967 and 2000, To the End of the Land is the provocative and powerful story of how one family 's life has been shaped by war and fear. Managing to be at once epic and intimate, the novel weaves the details of domestic life into the tapestry of history and creates a humane and complex portrait of the generations traumatized by conflict.

Jennifer Johnston Visit

Change of Date: Jennifer Johnston will now be joining us in Johnston Central Library on Tuesday 3rd July at 7pm as part of our participation in Dialogues Through Literature initiative!

May Read: Cavan Reading Group

Belinda McKeon

Solace

As tender as it is heartbreaking, this is a brilliant debut from an exciting new voice in Irish fiction. Mark Casey has left home, the rural Irish community where his family has farmed the same land for generations, to study for a doctorate in Dublin, a vibrant, contemporary city full of possibility. To his father, Tom, who needs help baling the hay and ploughing the fields, Mark's pursuit isn't work at all, and indeed Mark finds himself whiling away his time with pubs and parties. His is a life without focus or responsibility, until he meets Joanne Lynch, a trainee solicitor whom he finds irresistible. Joanne too has a past to escape from and for a brief time she and Mark share the chaos and rapture of a new love affair, until the lightning strike of tragedy changes everything. "Solace" is a work to be admired for its spare, intense lyricism, its range, and its deeply compassionate portrayal of life as it is lived now.

Winner of the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Sunday Independent Best Newcomer of the Year Award for 2011 and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award for 2011.

May Read: Bailieborough Reading Group

Marcus Zusak

The book thief

This work is narrated in the all-knowing matter-of-fact voice of Death, witnessing the story of the citizens of Molching: When nine-year-old Liesel arrives outside the boxlike house of her new foster parents at

33 Himmel Street

, she refuses to get out of the car. Liesel has been separated from her parents - 'Kommunists' - for ever, and at the burial of her little brother, she steals a gravedigger's instruction manual which she can't read. It is the beginning of her illustrious career. In the care of the Hubermans, Liesel befriends blond-haired Rudy Steiner, her neighbour obsessed with Jesse Owens, and the mayor's wife, who hides from despair in her library. Together Liesel and Rudy steal books - from Nazi book burning piles, from the mayor's library, from the rich people for whom her foster mother does the ironing. In time, they take in a Jewish boxer, Max, who reads with Liesel in the basement. By 1943, the Allied bombs are falling, and the sirens begin to wail. Liesel shares out her books in the air-raid shelters.

May Read: Cootehill Reading Group

Wladyslay Szpilman

The pianist

This title received 4 stars from our Bailieborough group but what will our Cootehill readers think of it???

Originally published in Poland in 1945 but suppressed, this memoir of survival in the Warsaw Ghetto joins the ranks of Holocaust memoirs notable as much for their literary value as for their historical significance. The author brings realism and clarity to the banalities of ghetto life, especially the eerie normalcy of some social relations amid catastrophic upheaval.

Recommended Read of the Week!

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

Click on the book cover to reserve a copy from our catalogue!

From the author of the bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Hours, a beautiful novel about the uses of beauty and the place of love in our lives. Peter Harris is forty-four, prosperous, the owner of a big New York apartment and a player in the contemporary art scene. He has been married to Rebecca for close to twenty years.

Their marriage is sound, in the way marriages are. Peter might even describe himself as happy. But then Rebecca's much younger brother Mizzy shows up for a visit.

Beautiful, twenty-three years old, with a history of drug problems, Mizzy is looking for direction. And in his presence, Peter finds himself questioning his marriage, his desires, his career - the entire world he has so carefully constructed for himself. Making us think deeply about the uses of beauty and the place of love in our lives, By Nightfall is heartbreaking look at the way we live now.