Today’s post by bestselling author Nichole Bernier | @NicholeBernier

Nichole Bernier

At a bookstore event a few weeks ago, celebrating the paperback incarnation of my novel THE UNFINISHED WORK OF ELIZABETH D, I was asked what it meant to me to be a New England author.

My first impulse was to look over my shoulder, because surely they were talking to Anita Shreve or Nathaniel Philbrick or Sue Miller. It was true that I was born in Boston, and so were all my children. But I’d grown up in Chicago and Connecticut, and first found my writing voice at a travel magazine in New York, and then on a novel written mostly in Washington DC. I had never thought of myself as a New England writer, because I’d rarely written about New England.

But a funny thing happened when I sat down to write a novel: When I picked a setting, my mind and heart went first to Boston and the Massachusetts islands, to the beaches where I’d learned to dig quahogs with the salt drying in white whorls across my shoulders, the places I’d rented summer bungalows so small I could see where the children were at all times. It was a place I could write with the authority that only comes with familiarity:

“The ferry’s cafeteria windows overlooked the Atlantic on three sides. The color of the sky matched the water, today more oyster than leaden. It had been overcast on almost every one of the ferry trips Kate had ever taken, and she’d come to associate gray with vacationing as people do navy with sailing or pink with baby girls. Gray was the shingled house they rented and the darkly opaque waves outside its windows. It was the sweatshirts the kids threw on over their bathing suits, and the steamers she ate several times a week dipped in dun-colored broth. Gray represented freedom from ordinary time, and gray was the uniform of the cavalry riding in, the child-care cavalry, Chris was with them most of the time.”

So when Literary New England approached me about being part of its fundraiser, supporting both its radio show and its forthcoming travel guide, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

A literary travel guide to locations featured in contemporary and classic books, with lists of the best New England bookstores, literary festivals, writing workshops, and retreats? Just the sort of thing a New England author would want to support, and own.

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Before there were blogs, there were journals. And in them we’d write as we really were, not as we wanted to appear. But there comes a day when journals outlive us. And with them, our secrets.

Summer vacation on Great Rock Island was supposed to be a restorative time for Kate, who’d lost her close friend Elizabeth in a sudden accident. But when she inherits a trunk of Elizabeth’s journals, they reveal a woman far different than the cheerful wife and mother Kate thought she knew. The complicated portrait of Elizabeth—her troubled upbringing, and her route to marriage and motherhood—makes Kate question not just their friendship, but her own deepest beliefs about loyalty and honesty at a period of uncertainty in her own marriage. When an unfamiliar man’s name appears in the pages, Kate realizes the extent of what she didn’t know about her friend, including where she was really going on the day she died. The more Kate reads, the more she learns the complicated truth of who Elizabeth really was, and rethinks her own choices as a wife, mother, and professional, and the legacy she herself would want to leave behind.

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Nichole Bernier is author of the novel THE UNFINISHED WORK OF ELIZABETH D. (Crown/Random House, 2012), which spent eight weeks on the Boston Globe bestseller list and was a finalist for the New England Independent Booksellers fiction award. A Contributing Editor for Conde Nast Traveler magazine for 14 years, she has also written for publications including Psychology Today, Elle, Health, Self, Salon, The Huffington Post, and Post Road Literary Magazine. Nichole lives outside of Boston with her husband and five children, and is at work on a second novel. She can be found online at nicholebernier.com.

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About the Literary New England Travel Guide

Written by Cindy Boynton and scheduled for release in September, the Literary New England Travel Guide will take actual and armchair travelers to more than 500 New England locations featured in contemporary and classic books and related to popular authors, as well as provide a list of the best New England bookstores, book fests, writing workshops, retreats, and more.

Produced in both print and e-form, the guide will also include maps, suggested itineraries and author interviews. Travel spots include:

- Wally Lamb’s Three Rivers

- The Matlock Paper’s Carlyle U

- Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary”

- The Gloucester port from “The Perfect Storm”

- Truman Capote’s high school

- Mark Twain’s home

- The Little Women house

- The apple orchards in Jodi Picoult’s Songs of the Humpback Whale

- William Styron’s and Arthur Miller’s graves

- The foghorn that appears in many Eugene O’Neill plays

- The Weissmanns’ Westport

- Where Linda Greenlaw set The Lobster Chronicles

- And many more

About Ariel Lawhon

Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, storyteller, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.

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Today’s post by our own Marybeth Whalen | @MarybethWhalen

Spring has sprung and around these parts we’re more apt to fill our baskets with books, not flowers! So we thought we’d share some sweet stories you might want to tuck in a book basket yourself. Look for these books releasing in April and May!

While We Were Watching Downton Abbey by Wendy Wax

When the concierge of The Alexander, a historic Atlanta apartment building, invites his fellow residents to join him for weekly screenings of Downton Abbey, four very different people find themselves connecting with the addictive drama, and—even more unexpectedly—with each other…

Samantha Davis married young and for the wrong reason: the security of old Atlanta money—for herself and for her orphaned brother and sister. She never expected her marriage to be complicated by love and compromised by a shattering family betrayal.

Claire Walker is now an empty nester and struggling author who left her home in the suburbs for the old world charm of The Alexander, and for a new and productive life. But she soon wonders if clinging to old dreams can be more destructive than having no dreams at all.

And then there’s Brooke MacKenzie, a woman in constant battle with her faithless ex-husband. She’s just starting to realize that it’s time to take a deep breath and come to terms with the fact that her life is not the fairy tale she thought it would be.

For Samantha, Claire, Brooke—and Edward, who arranges the weekly gatherings—it will be a season of surprises as they forge a bond that will sustain them through some of life’s hardest moments—all of it reflected in the unfolding drama, comedy, and convergent lives of Downton Abbey.

Between Heaven and Texas by Marie Bostwick

In this luminous prequel to her beloved Cobbled Court Quilt series, New York Times bestselling author, Marie Bostwick, takes readers into the heart of a small Texas town and the soul of a woman who discovers her destiny there.

Welcome to Too Much — where the women are strong and the men are handsome but shiftless. Ever since Mary Dell and her twin sister Lydia Dale were children, their Aunt Velvet has warned them away from local boys. But it’s well known that the females in Mary Dell’s family share two traits – superior sewing skills and a fatal weakness for men.

While Lydia Dale grows up petite and pretty, Mary Dell just keeps growing. Tall, smart, and sassy, she is determined to one day turn her love of sewing into a business. Meanwhile, she’ll settle for raising babies with her new husband, Donny. But that dream proves illusive too, until finally, Mary Dell gets the son she always wanted — a child as different as he is wonderful. As Mary Dell is forced to reconsider what truly matters, she begins to piece together a life that, like the colorful quilts she creates, will prove vibrant, rich, and absolutely unforgettable.

The Apple Orchard by Susan Wiggs

Tess Delaney makes a living restoring stolen treasures to their rightful owners. People like Annelise Winther, who refuses to sell her long-gone mother’s beloved necklace—despite Tess’s advice. To Annelise, the jewel’s value is in its memories.

But Tess’s own history is filled with gaps: a father she never met, a mother who spent more time traveling than with her daughter. So Tess is shocked when she discovers the grandfather she never knew is in a coma. And that she has been named in his will to inherit half of Bella Vista, a hundred-acre apple orchard in the magical Sonoma town called Archangel.

The rest is willed to Isabel Johansen. A half sister she’s never heard of.

Against the rich landscape of Bella Vista, Tess begins to discover a world filled with the simple pleasures of food and family, of the warm earth beneath her bare feet. A world where family comes first and the roots of history run deep. A place where falling in love is not only possible, but inevitable.

And in a season filled with new experiences, Tess begins to see the truth in something Annelise once told her: if you don’t believe memories are worth more than money, then perhaps you’ve not made the right kind of memories.

Table For Seven by Whitney Gaskell

On New Year’s Eve, Fran and Will Parrish host a dinner party, serving their friends a gourmet feast. The night is such a success that the group decides to form a monthly dinner party club. But what starts as an excuse to enjoy the company of fellow foodies ends up having lasting repercussions on each member of the Table for Seven Dinner Party Club.

Fran and Will face the possibility that their comfortable marriage may not be as infallible as they once thought. Audrey has to figure out how to move on and start a new life after the untimely death of her young husband. Perfectionist Jaime suspects that her husband, Mark, might be having an affair. Coop, a flirtatious bachelor who never commits to a third date, is blindsided when he falls in love for the first time. Leland, a widower, is a wise counselor and firm believer that bacon makes everything taste better.

Over the course of a year, against a backdrop of mouthwatering meals, relationships are forged, marriages are tested, and the members of the Table for Seven Dinner Party Club find their lives forever changed.

From The Kitchen of Half Truth by Maria Goodin

Meg May doesn’t know what’s true. And she needs to find out.

Imaginative and free-spirited, Meg’s mother created a life out of stories. Outlandish stories, really, the kind you can’t possibly believe—unless your mother won’t tell you anything else about your past. After all, how do you argue with someone who tells you that a spaghetti plant sprouted on your first birthday, that you used to take hot dogs for a walk, or that your father died in a tragic pastry-mixing accident?

But as charming as those stories are, they aren’t enough for Meg anymore. When her mother becomes ill, Meg decides she has to know the truth. As the two spend one last summer together, Meg can’t convince her mother to reveal a thing about who they used to be—or who they are now.

A delicious debut, full of warmth and quirky humor, From the Kitchen of Half Truth explores the stories we tell ourselves and others in order to create the lives we want.

The Lost Husband by Katherine Center

Dear Libby, It occurs to me that you and your two children have been living with your mother for—Dear Lord!—two whole years, and I’m writing to see if you’d like to be rescued.

The letter comes out of the blue, and just in time for Libby Moran, who—after the sudden death of her husband, Danny—went to stay with her hypercritical mother. Now her crazy Aunt Jean has offered Libby an escape: a job and a place to live on her farm in the Texas Hill Country. Before she can talk herself out of it, Libby is packing the minivan, grabbing the kids, and hitting the road.

Life on Aunt Jean’s goat farm is both more wonderful and more mysterious than Libby could have imagined. Beyond the animals and the strenuous work, there is quiet—deep, country quiet. But there is also a shaggy, gruff (though purportedly handsome, under all that hair) farm manager with a tragic home life, a formerly famous feed-store clerk who claims she can contact Danny “on the other side,” and the eccentric aunt Libby never really knew but who turns out to be exactly what she’s been looking for. And despite everything she’s lost, Libby soon realizes how much more she’s found. She hasn’t just traded one kind of crazy for another: She may actually have found the place to bring her little family—and herself—back to life.

About Marybeth Whalen

Marybeth Whalen is the co-founder of She Reads, mother of six, and life-long reader. She is also the author of two novels with a third out in July: The Mailbox, She Makes It Look Easy, and The Guest Book.

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Today’s post by this month’s featured author, Patti Callahan Henry | @pcalhenry

Patti Callahan Henry

Dear Reader,

Over two years ago, in the middle of an ordinary day, the extraordinary happened, and my family will never be the same.

Some twenty-one years ago my little sister placed her baby for adoption. It was the most heart-rending, courageous and difficult decision she had ever made, and we all wept with her when she handed her baby girl to an anonymous, yet hand-chosen family. Then . . . two years ago, I received a Facebook friend request from a young girl with the same birthday as my adopted niece. It was too much to hope for, almost too miraculous to believe. But it was true: my sister’s daughter, my niece, found us on Facebook.

Our family had often talked about my niece, using the name my sister had given her. We remembered her whenever we saw a girl who would be her age at that time. Every time my parents moved into a new house, they planted a tree for her and we all prayed for her happiness and safety. We knew nothing about her – all those years we didn’t know where she lived or with whom.  Although we knew that legally she could find us when she turned twenty-one, there was no way for us to find her. And then finally, all those years of unknowing and all those years of wondering culminated in a reunion that most dream about.

My sister’s story was the inspiration for this novel, AND THEN I FOUND YOU.  It is my way of exploring the way we live with unknowing. We want certainty, We want solid ground under our feet. We want to be sure of our place in the world, and yet we rarely, if ever, have that certainty.  So then, how do we live? And what happens when the lost become found?

Although the personal facts are left for my sister to tell, the fictional story in AND THEN I FOUND YOU explores the emotions and extraordinary change that reunions bring to a life and to a family.

I hope this story touches your heart.

Warmly,

Patti Callahan Henry

About Ariel Lawhon

Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, storyteller, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.

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When I know Harlan Coben has a new book coming out, I get excited. Why? Because I know that a two-day reading fest is in my future. Once I start page one, I know I’m in for a thrilling reading experience that will last until the last page is turned– and not much else is going to happen in my life until that point.

I got to read Harlan Coben’s newest, Six Years, and I’m happy to say that I found it in keeping with his past books– once again I lost two days while reading it. Then I handed it over to my husband, who also lost two days and gave me a good-natured hard time for stealing that time from him by putting the book in his hands.

Six Years by Harlan Coben

In Six Years, a masterpiece of modern suspense, Harlan Coben explores the depth and passion of lost love…and the secrets and lies at its heart.

Six years have passed since Jake Fisher watched Natalie, the love of his life, marry another man. Six years of hiding a broken heart by throwing himself into his career as a college professor. Six years of keeping his promise to leave Natalie alone, and six years of tortured dreams of her life with her new husband, Todd.

But six years haven’t come close to extinguishing his feelings, and when Jake comes across Todd’s obituary, he can’t keep himself away from the funeral. There he gets the glimpse of Todd’s wife he’s hoping for…but she is not Natalie. Whoever the mourning widow is, she’s been married to Todd for almost two decades, and with that fact everything Jake thought he knew about the best time of his life—a time he has never gotten over—is turned completely inside out.

As Jake searches for the truth, his picture-perfect memories of Natalie begin to unravel. Mutual friends of the couple either can’t be found, or don’t remember Jake. No one has seen Natalie in years. Jake’s search for the woman who broke his heart, who lied to him, soon puts his very life at risk as it dawns on him that the man he has become may be based on a carefully constructed fiction.

Harlan Coben once again delivers a shocking page-turner that deftly explores the power of past love, and the secrets and lies that such love can hide.

Add SIX YEARS to your Goodreads Want-To-Read list.

And if you love Harlan Coben– or suspense/thriller/mystery type books, here are some other titles to check out.

Dark Tide by Elizabeth Haynes

Elizabeth Haynes, author of the bestselling debut Into the Darkest Corner, returns with a tense, gripping thriller about a woman caught in an underworld of corruption and murder…

Genevieve has finally achieved her dream: to leave the stress of London behind and start a new life aboard a houseboat in Kent. She’s found the perfect vessel: Revenge of the Tide. She already feels less lonely; as if the boat is looking after her.

But the night of her boat-warming party, a body washes up, and to Genevieve’s horror, she recognizes the victim. She isn’t about to tell the police, though; hardly anyone knows about her past as a dancer at a private members’ club, The Barclay. The death can’t have anything to do with her. Or so she thinks…

Soon, the lull of the waves against Revenge feels anything but soothing, as Genevieve begins to receive strange calls and can’t reach the one person who links the present danger with her history at the club. Fearing for her safety, Genevieve recalls the moment when it all started to go wrong: the night she saw her daytime boss in the crowd at The Barclay…

Dark, sexy, and exquisitely chilling, Dark Tide is another superb mystery from acclaimed rising star Elizabeth Haynes.

Add DARK TIDE to your Goodreads Want-To-Read list.

The Next Time You See Me by Holly Goddard Jones

“The lonely cast of outcasts in The Next Time You See Me has enough heartache for a whole jukebox full of country songs. Holly Goddard Jones spins a tight if heartbreaking tale, always keeping the reader leaning forward.” —Stewart O’Nan, author of Songs for the Missing

In The Next Time You See Me, the disappearance of one woman, the hard-drinking and unpredictable Ronnie Eastman, reveals the ambitions, prejudices, and anxieties of a small southern town and its residents. There’s Ronnie’s sister Susanna, a dutiful but dissatisfied schoolteacher, mother, and wife; Tony, a failed baseball star-turned-detective; Emily, a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with a dark secret; and Wyatt, a factory worker tormented by a past he can’t change and by a love he doesn’t think he deserves. Connected in ways they cannot begin to imagine, their stories converge in a violent climax that reveals not just the mystery of what happened to Ronnie but all of their secret selves.

Add THE NEXT TIME I SEE YOU to your Goodreads Want-To-Read list.

Invisible by Carla Buckley

Perfect for fans of Jodi Picoult, Carla Buckley’s Invisible is a stunning novel of redemption, regret, and the complex ties of familial love.

Growing up, Dana Carlson and her older sister, Julie, are inseparable—Dana the impulsive one, Julie calmer and more nurturing. But then a devastating secret compels Dana to flee from home, not to see or speak to her sister for sixteen years.

When she receives the news that Julie is seriously ill, Dana knows that she must return to their hometown of Black Bear, Minnesota, to try and save her sister. Yet she arrives too late, only to discover that Black Bear has changed, and so have the people in it.

Julie has left behind a shattered teenage daughter, Peyton, and a mystery—what killed Julie may be killing others, too. Why is no one talking about it? Dana struggles to uncover the truth, but no one wants to hear it, including Peyton, who can’t forgive her aunt’s years-long absence. Dana had left to protect her own secrets, but Black Bear has a secret of its own—one that could tear apart Dana’s life, her family, and the whole town.

“Beautifully written and unsettling . . . leaves you with a lingering sense of dread long after you close the last page.”—Chevy Stevens

Add INVISIBLE to your Goodreads Want-To-Read list.

About Marybeth Whalen

Marybeth Whalen is the co-founder of She Reads, mother of six, and life-long reader. She is also the author of two novels with a third out in July: The Mailbox, She Makes It Look Easy, and The Guest Book.

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Today’s post by professional sommelier Caitlin Stansbury | @Wineocology | Caitlin will be reading our featured books this year and pairing the stories with a specially selected wine for those books clubs that meet in person to discuss the novel. And we couldn’t think of a better way to end our time with Rita Leganski this month than with this post. We hope you enjoyed the book and we’re certain you’ll savor the wine!

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Caitlin Stansbury

Magical Realism. If there is a literary genre that embodies the mystical connectedness that is the very soul of wine, this is it. Wine connects us to the physical reality of the world around us on a deeper, more sensual level. The heightened and multi-layered sense experience that wine offers is a gateway to the endless possibilities for sensual pleasure that surround us daily. And tuning in to our exterior world more keenly opens the inner doors that lead to more meaningful connections with ourselves, and with those we love. Magical indeed.

If our sensory superhero and sage Bonaventure Arrow (protagonist of the marvelous book The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow) were to tune his extraordinary powers of hearing to a glass of wine, what would he want to drink? A wine as bloody and dark as his father’s demise, as deep as his mother’s love, as endless as his grandmother’s guilt, as powerful as his Creole housekeeper’s Voodoo, and as beautiful, vivid, mysterious and thickly intoxicating as the world of Bayou Cymaline itself. He’d drink a wine that speaks to him of the old and elegant French history of New Orleans, and that vibrates with the balmy, sweaty, sultry exoticness of the South. He’d drink a Madiran.

Madiran is an appellation in the South-West of France in the foothills of the Pyrénées mountains that, like our hero Bonaventure Arrow, was conceived out of love in the late 1940’s. The wines of Madiran are made from the wild, dark, and impossibly bold grape variety Tannat. They are black and saturated at the core with vivid magenta highlights and have spicy, heady, earthy aromas and flavors of brambly berries and gamy meat. These intense wines are famed for their high levels of procyanidins, compounds that can reduce blood pressure and cholesterol and promote healthy blood clotting. So just like Bonaventure himself, they possess the mystical power to heal.

Look for: Madiran, Château Montus, “Cuvée Prestige,” Pyrénées, France, 2011

About Ariel Lawhon

Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, storyteller, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.

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