Find me by Andre Aciman

In Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio's father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami's plans and changes his life forever.

Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic.

This is not as good story wise as his previous book, Call Me By Your Name, but the writing is as wonderful.

8/10

The Dominatrix by Emma Allen

Karen has never been very interested in sex but after seeing a video of her friend Barbara engaged in some strange games with her husband, Dan, she begins to realize what she's been missing. A willing dominatrix agrees to show Karen the ropes and she agrees to become her boss's personal dominatrix. 

It was supposed to be all about the sex scenes, but they were very repetitive. The best one was where she stumbled on her friends home video. The girl on girl was just boring and again repetitive.

4/10

Still Life With Breadcrumbs by Anna Quindlen

Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life. Brilliantly written, powerfully observed, Still Life with Bread Crumbs is a deeply moving and often very funny story of unexpected love, and a stunningly crafted journey into the life of a woman, her heart, her mind, her days, as she discovers that life is a story with many levels, a story that is longer and more exciting than she ever imagined.

Not a lot happens. It is just a quiet, pleasant read that left me feeling quietly contented.

I'd read more by this author if I came across them.

8/10

The Lightkeeper's Daughters by Jean E Pendziwol

Elizabeth's eyes have failed. She can no longer read the books she loves or see the paintings that move her, but her mind remains sharp and music fills the vacancy left by her blindness.

When her father's journals are discovered on a shipwrecked boat, she enlists the help of a delinquent teen, Morgan, to read to her. As an unlikely friendship grows between them, Elizabeth is carried back to her childhood home - the lighthouse on Porphyry Island, Lake Superior - and to the memory of her enigmatic twin sister Emily.

But for Elizabeth, the faded pages of her father's journals reveal more secrets than she anticipates.

I loved this book. The description of the scenery is breathtaking, the characters feel so real they are alive.

The story is told through the eyes of Elizabeth, elderly and hoping to find the secret that has been kept from her all her life, Morgan, a young girl in foster care after the death of her beloved grandfather and through the journals of the her father aver his years as light keeper.

The story was great, the ending WOW!

10/10

Star Gazing by Linda Gillard

Blind since birth, widowed in her twenties, now lonely in her forties, Marianne Fraser lives in Edinburgh in elegant, angry anonymity with her sister, Louisa, a successful novelist. Marianne's passionate nature finds solace and expression in music, a love she finds she shares with Keir, a man she encounters on her doorstep one winter's night. Whilst Marianne has had her share of men attracted to her because they want to rescue her, Keir makes no concession to her condition. He is abrupt to the point of rudeness, and yet oddly kind. But can Marianne trust her feelings for this reclusive stranger who wants to take a blind woman to his island home on Skye, to 'show' her the stars? 

Very likeable characters. I fell for Keir but did get a bit annoyed with Marianne. I loved the Keir described the world using music

7/10.

The Good People by Hannah Kent

Nóra Leahy has lost her daughter and her husband in the same year, and is now burdened with the care of her four-year-old grandson, Micheál. The boy cannot walk, or speak, and Nora, mistrustful of the tongues of gossips, has kept the child hidden from those who might see in his deformity evidence of otherworldly interference.

Unable to care for the child alone, Nóra hires a fourteen-year-old servant girl, Mary, who soon hears the whispers in the valley about the blasted creature causing grief to fall upon the widow's house.

Alone, hedged in by rumour, Mary and her mistress seek out the only person in the valley who might be able to help Micheál. For although her neighbours are wary of her, it is said that old Nance Roche has the knowledge. That she consorts with Them, the Good People. And that only she can return those whom they have taken ...

I loved the writing and the character descriptions were excellent. Too much misery and hopelessness for me to say I enjoyed the storyline.

7/10

The White Lioness by Henning Mankell

In 1992, in peaceful Southern Sweden, a young housewife, pillar of the Methodist church, disappears and is found murdered, execution style, and Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team are called in to investigate. But the chain of events leading to the murder began far away in South African, where Nelson Mandela has made his long walk to freedom, beginning South Africa's painful journey towards the end of Apartheid. The team find themselves caught up in a complex web involving renegade members of the South African secret service and a ruthless ex-KGB agent, all determined to halt Nelson Mandela's rise to power. Faced with an increasingly globalised world in which international terrorism knows no national borders, Wallander and his South African colleagues must prevent a crime that would change the face of history.

The first disappointing Henning Mankell book I've read. It got way too complicated between former KGB agents and South African assassins in Sweden.

6/10 - I'm feeling generous