August 2010

Teaser Tuesday and Room by Emma Donoghue Giveaway.

Room is one of the 13 books selected for the longlist of the 2010 Man Booker Award. I will featured all 13 in upcoming posts.

Here are the beginning lines of Room.

"Today I'm five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I'm changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero.

Author On the Bookcase
Michelle Hoover

Michelle Hoover, welcome to On the Bookcase! Michelle's book, The Quickening, is the story of two women stuggling to make a living in the upper Midwest in the early 1900s. For one, their hardscrabble life comes easily, while the other longs for the excitement of the city. Though they depend on one another for survival and companionship, their friendship proves as rugged as the land they farm.

Author On the Bookcase
Laura Morowitz

I'm thrilled to speak to Laura Morowitz, co-author with Laurie Lico Albanese, of The Miracles of Prato. Art in a book -- love these historical novels centered around real-live artists and their lifes! It helps me learn about past artists and the history and politics that surrounded them.

The Miracles of Prato brings to life glorious Italy in the era of the Medici —as it tells the story of an illicit love affair between the renowned painter Fra Filippo Lippi and his muse, a beautiful convent novitiate named Lucrezia Buti. Lippi, the chaplain for Convent Santa Margherita sees in Lucrezia's flawless face inspiration for countless Madonnas and he brings the her to his studio to serve as his model.

This is the second installment of the  Man Booker longlist book selections.

The first was Room by Emma Donoghue.

Today's selection

Parrot and Olivier In America by Peter Carey

First lines

I had no doubt that something cruel and catastrophic had happened before I was born, yet the comte and comtesse, my parents, would not tell me what it was. As a result my organ of curiosity was made irritable and I grew into the most restless and unhealthy creature imaginable -- slight, pale, always climbing, prying into every drain and attic of the Chateau de Barfleur.

Publisher Summary Olivier—an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville—is the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English printer.