Friday Finds (March 20)

What great books have you added to your wish list this week? Share your Friday Finds at Should Be Reading.

I missed out on posting my Friday Finds last week because I was sick, so this week is a double-whammy.

I was in Indigo last week and came across two books that looked particularly interesting: Two Rivers by T. Greenwood (an author I hadn’t heard of before) and The Florist’s Daughter by Patricia Hampl (whose earlier book I Could Tell You Stories I absolutely loved). So the first thing I did when I got home (of course) was look up blog reviews of these books. Reading Is My Superpower has this to say about Two Rivers: “[It] just about slew me, in the best possible way.” (Read the rest of her review.) Donna at Story Circle Book Reviews says this about The Florist’s Daughter: “My attitude as I started reading The Florist’s Daughter, was that I’d need to be convinced that the media hype [Hampl] and her publisher had accomplished was actually valid. It is.” (Read the rest of her review.)

I first saw Keeping the World Away by Margaret Forster mentioned on the Random House website. Margaret at BooksPlease starts her review of the book by saying: “I expect a book by Margaret Forster to be good and this one is no exception.”

The Point of Rescue by Sophie Hannah is a thriller, which is not my genre of choice (as you may recall from this review), but it does sound like a good one. I came across the book while I was browsing an online bookseller’s site and then found a guest review of it on Vulpes Libris. The reviewer says: “Sophie Hannah’s mind must be something of a modern marvel: she plots with such incredible intricacy and foresight that when the ends all tied themselves together so neatly, I gasped with the cleverness of it all.” Just because I didn’t like one thriller doesn’t mean I won’t like any of them, right?

I couldn’t find any bloggers’ reviews of The Sisters Antipodes, a memoir by Jane Alison that is being released this month. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt calls it “a unique window on the intimate devastations of family betrayal, in equal measure unsettling and engrossing.”

Finally, I keep coming across The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (originally published in French as L’élégance du hérisson). Dorothy at Of Books and Bicycles has this to say about it: “One of the things that makes [this novel] so interesting, I think, is that it combines passages of abstract thought with a focus on the physical world and sections that capture the comedy of bodily life.” (Read the rest of her review.) I’m curious, but I really feel like I should read it in its original French...