Cootehill Library Reading Group gives 4.5 stars to

'I Let You Go' by Clare Mackintosh

Gripping... fantastic plot twists and turns... best book we've read in ages!

In a split second, Jenna Gray's world descends into a nightmare. Her only hope of moving on is to walk away from everything she knows to start afresh. Desperate to escape, Jenna moves to a remote cottage on the Welsh coast, but she is haunted by her fears, her grief and her memories of a cruel November night that changed her life forever.

Slowly, Jenna begins to glimpse the potential for happiness in her future. But her past is about to catch up with her, and the consequences will be devastating . . . 

Our Summer Reading List 2016 – Spectacular Summer Reads

Download the 2016 Summer Reading List!

This is our twelfth Summer Reading List and once again Library Staff has trawled through the library catalogue, and raided the shelves to bring you a selection of best reads for summer 2016.

Thank you to the Library Staff and our Library Reading Groups for their many recommendations.

Our selection includes novels, memoirs, non fiction and as Gaeilge titles. International and Irish authors, crime novels and award winners feature. There is something for everyone - 40 compelling reads that will take you near and far, from the present to the past. 

April's Read - Belturbet Reading Group

Elizabeth is missing by Emma Healey

Lately, Maud's been getting forgetful. She keeps buying peach slices when she has a cupboard full, forgets to drink the cups of tea she's made and writes notes to remind herself of things. But Maud is determined to discover what has happened to her friend, Elizabeth, and what it has to do with the unsolved disappearance of her sister Sukey, years back, just after the war.

Catch-up with Cootehill Reading Group

March-April 2016 - The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

Rachel catches the same commuter train every morning. She knows it will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She's even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. 'Jess and Jason', she calls them. Their life - as she sees it - is perfect. If only Rachel could be that happy. And then she sees something shocking. It's only a minute until the train moves on, but it's enough. Now everything's changed. Now Rachel has a chance to become a part of the lives she's only watched from afar. Now they'll see; she's much more than just the girl on the train.

February-March 2016 - This House is Haunted

1867. Eliza Caine arrives in Norfolk to take up her position as governess at Gaudlin Hall on a dark and chilling night. As she makes her way across the station platform, a pair of invisible hands push her from behind into the path of an approaching train. She is only saved by the vigilance of a passing doctor.

When she finally arrives, shaken, at the hall she is greeted by the two children in her care, Isabella and Eustace. There are no parents, no adults at all, and no one to represent her mysterious employer. The children offer no explanation. Later that night in her room, a second terrifying experience further reinforces the sense that something is very wrong.

From the moment she rises the following morning, her every step seems dogged by a malign presence which lives within Gaudlin’s walls. Eliza realises that if she and the children are to survive its violent attentions, she must first uncover the hall’s long-buried secrets and confront the demons of its past

April's Read: Bailieborough Reading Group

Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

In this striking literary debut, Carol Rifka Brunt unfolds a moving story of love, grief, and renewal as two lonely people become the unlikeliest of friends and find that sometimes you don’t know you’ve lost someone until you’ve found them.

1987. There’s only one person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus, and that’s her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can only be herself in Finn’s company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June’s world is turned upside down. But Finn’s death brings a surprise acquaintance into June’s life - someone who will help her to heal and to question what she thinks she knows about Finn, her family, and even her own heart.

At Finn’s funeral, June notices a strange man lingering just beyond the crowd. A few days later, she receives a package in the mail. Inside is a beautiful teapot she recognises from Finn’s apartment and a note from Toby, the stranger, asking for an opportunity to meet. As the two begin to spend time together, June realises she’s not the only one who misses Finn, and if she can bring herself to trust this unexpected friend, he just might be the one she needs the most.

16 Lives - A collection

The Easter Rising of 1916 was an attempt by armed revolutionaries to overthrow British rule in Ireland. A small group of Irishmen and Irishwomen seized key building in Dublin and fought a pitched battle with British soldiers for one week. The execution of sixteen men awakened a generation to the cause of Irish freedom.

16 Lives will record the full story of those executed leaders …

Click here to reserve titles on our Catalogue

March's Read: Bailieborough Library

The Scrap: a true story from the 1916 Rising by Gene Kerrigan

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Charlie Saurin, Frank Henderson, Oscar Traynor and Boss Shields lived on the north side of Dublin in 1916. The Scrap follows them through the week of the Easter Rising - from their F Company base in Fairview, where they fought one of the first skirmishes with the British, and into the centre of Dublin, where they were involved in increasingly bloody fighting. Using highly personal documents from the Bureau of Military History, the story is one of gripping detail, as we follow F Company into the GPO and see icons of Irish history as the rank and file Volunteers saw them. From there to the panic and pain of Moore Street, where the leaders began to consider surrender, and some of the members of F Company faced the ultimate test. Observing the rank and file Volunteers as they faced a turning point in history,  The Scrap is full of the dramatic, funny and contradictory detail of ordinary men and women dealing with extraordinary events.

March's Read - Cavan Library Reading Group

Wild: a journey from lost to found by Cheryl Strayed

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At twenty-six, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's rapid death from cancer, her family disbanded and her marriage crumbled. With nothing to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to walk the Pacific Crest trail - eleven-hundred miles of the west coast of America - from the Mojave Desert, through California and Oregon, and into Washington state - and to do it alone. She had no experience of long-distance hiking and the journey was nothing more than a line on a map. But it held a promise - a promise of piecing together a life that lay in ruins at her feet. Strayed's account captures the agonies - both mental and physical - of her incredible journey; how it maddened and terrified her, and how, ultimately, it healed her.

February's Read - Cavan Library

This month the group will be reading from George Eliots body of work...

Click on the image to review all George Eliot titles on our Catalogue...

February's Read - Bailieborough Library

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Marie-Laure has been blind since the age of six. Her father builds a perfect miniature of their Paris neighbourhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. But when the Nazis invade, father and daughter flee with a dangerous secret. Werner is a German orphan, destined to labour in the same mine that claimed his father’s life, until he discovers a knack for engineering. His talent wins him a place at a brutal military academy, but his way out of obscurity is built on suffering. At the same time, far away in a walled city by the sea, an old man discovers new worlds without ever setting foot outside his home. But all around him, impending danger closes in.

Currently Recommending

Children of the Rising: the untold story of the young lives lost during Easter 1916 by Joe Duffy. 

Children of the Rising is the first ever account of the young lives violently lost during the week of the 1916 Rising: long-forgotten and never commemorated, until now. Boys, girls, rich, poor, Catholic, Protestant - no child was guaranteed immunity from the bullet and bomb that week, in a place where teeming tenement life existed side by side with immense wealth. 

Drawing on extensive original research, along with interviews with relatives, Joe Duffy creates a compelling picture of these forty lives, along with one of the cut and thrust of city life between the two canals a century ago. This gripping story of Dublin and its people in 1916 will add immeasurably to our understanding of the Easter Rising. Above all, it honours the forgotten lives, largely buried in unmarked graves, of those young people who once called Dublin their home.

Why not reserve on our catalogue today!

Decembers Read - Cavan Library Reading Group

Anne Tyler's Body of Work

Click on the image to view all items on our catalogue by Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. Her eleventh novel Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

Her most recent novel A Spool of Blue Thread is brimming with the luminous insight, humour and compassion that are Anne Tyler's hallmarks, this capacious novel takes us across three generations of the Whitshanks, their shared stories and long-held secrets, all the unguarded and richly lived moments that combine to define who and what they are as a family.

A Spool of Blue Thread made it into Cavan Library Service’s Summer Reading list and was enjoyed thoroughly by Cavan Reading Group members

December's Read - Bailieborough Library

Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder

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One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: “Who are you?” and “Where does the world come from?” From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

November Read - Cavan Reading Group

Wonder by R.J. Palacio

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"Wonder" is the funny, sweet and incredibly moving story of Auggie Pullman. Born with a terrible facial abnormality, this shy, bright ten-year-old has been home-schooled by his parents for his whole life, in an attempt to protect him from the stares and cruelty of the outside world. Now, for the first time, Auggie is being sent to a real school - and he's dreading it. 

The thing is, Auggie's just an ordinary kid, with an extraordinary face. But can he convince his new classmates that he's just like them, underneath it all? Through the voices of Auggie, his big sister Via, and his new friends Jack and Summer, "Wonder" follows Auggie's journey through his first year at Beecher Prep. Frank, powerful, warm and often heart-breaking, "Wonder" is a book you'll read in one sitting, pass on to others, and remember long after the final page.

November Read - Belturbet Library

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

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A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

November Read - Cootehill Library

The Alchemist by Paul Coelho

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This story, dazzling in its powerful simplicity and inspiring wisdom, is about an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago who travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of a treasure buried in the Pyramids. Along the way he meets a Gypsy woman, a man who calls himself king, and an alchemist, all of whom point Santiago in the direction of his quest. No one knows what the treasure is, or if Santiago will be able to surmount the obstacles along the way. But what starts out as a journey to find worldly goods turns into a discovery of the treasure found within.

November Read - Bailieborough Library

Us by David Nicolls

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Douglas Petersen may be mild-mannered, but behind his reserve lies a sense of humor that, against all odds, seduces beautiful Connie into a second date.. and eventually into marriage. Now, almost three decades after their relationship first blossomed in London, they live more or less happily in the suburbs with their moody seventeen-year-old son, Albie. Then Connie tells Douglas that she thinks she wants a divorce. The timing couldn't be worse. Hoping to encourage her son's artistic interests, Connie has planned a month-long tour of European Capitals, a chance to experience the world's greatest works of art as a family, and she can't bring herself to cancel. And maybe going ahead with the original plan is for the best, anyway? Douglas is privately convinced that this landmark trip will rekindle the romance in the marriage, and may even help him to bond with Albie.

Awards:              

Longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize
UK National Book Awards, Author of the year, 2014

October Read - Belturbet Library

The lives of Stella Bain by Anita Shreve

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Hauled in a cart to a field hospital in northern France in March 1916, an American woman wakes from unconsciousness to the smell of gas gangrene, the sounds of men in pain, and an almost complete loss of memory: she knows only that she can drive an ambulance, she can draw, and her name is Stella Bain. A stateless woman in a lawless country, Stella embarks on a journey to reconstruct her life. Suffering an agonising and inexplicable array of symptoms, she finds her way to London. There, Dr August Bridge, a cranial surgeon turned psychologist, is drawn to tracking her amnesia to its source. What brutality was she fleeing when she left the tranquil seclusion of a New England college campus to serve on the Front; for what crime did she need to atone - and whom did she leave behind?

October Read - Cootehill Library

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson

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Here is a gorgeous, slowburning story of families growing up and tearing each other apart in rural Northern Ontario, where tragedy and hardship are mirrored in the landscape. Centre stage are the Morrisons whose tragedy is insidious and divisive. Orphaned young, Kate Morrison was her older brother Matt's protegee, her curious fascination for pond-life fed by his passionate interest in the natural world. Now a zoologist, she can identify organisms under a microscope, but seems blind to the tragedy of her own emotional life. She thinks she's outgrown her family, who were once her entire world - but she can't seem to outgrow her childhood or lighten the weight of their mutual past.

October Read - Bailieborough Library

Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín

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Set in the late 1960s in Wexford, Nora Webster is a woman struggling to come to terms with the loss of her husband Maurice. Living in a small community where well-meaning neighbours continually interrupt her to express their grief at her loss and provide unwanted 'advice' of what she must do now, Nora just wants to continue on in solitude. Raising four children alone and faced with making decisions independently, leads Nora to discover hidden strengths. Through unexpected gifts of new friendships and music, Nora may find a way to live a happy life again.