Feel Good Reads
Chosen by our customers and reading group members during Mental Health Awareness Weeks – if you’re in need of a pick-me-up try these suggestions!
BorrowBox Recommendations
New eReads every month! Check out some of our September BorrowBox highlights.
The Night Ship by Jess Kid, available in eBook & eAudio
1628. Embarking on a journey in search of her father, a young girl called Mayken boards the Batavia, the most impressive sea vessel of the age. During the long voyage, this curious and resourceful child must find her place in the ship’s busy world, and she soon uncovers shadowy secrets above and below deck. As tensions spiral, the fate of the ship and all on board becomes increasingly uncertain.
1989. Gil, a boy mourning the death of his mother, is placed in the care of his irritable and reclusive grandfather. Their home is a shack on a tiny fishing island off the Australian coast, notable only for its reefs and wrecked boats. This is no place for a child struggling with a dark past and Gil’s actions soon get him noticed by the wrong people.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, available in eBook & eAudio
Demon’s story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking ‘like a little blue prizefighter.’ For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn’t an idea, it’s as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn’t an abstraction, it’s neighbours, parents, and friends. ‘Family’ could mean love, or reluctant foster care. For Demon, born on the wrong side of luck, the affection and safety he craves is as remote as the ocean he dreams of seeing one day. The wonder is in how far he’s willing to travel to try and get there.
Suffused with truth, anger and compassion, Demon Copperhead is an epic tale of love, loss and everything in between.
Nights of plague by Orhan Pamuk, available in eBook & eAudio
1901. Night draws in.
With the stealth of a spy vessel, the royal ship Aziziye approaches the famous vistas of Mingheria. ‘An emerald built of pink stone’. The 29th state of the ailing Ottoman Empire.
The ship carries Princess Pakize, the daughter of a deposed sultan, her doctor husband, and the Royal Chemist, Bonkowski Pasha. Each of them holds a separate mission. Not all of them will survive the weeks ahead. Because Mingheria is on the cusp of catastrophe. There are rumours of plague – rumours some in power will try to suppress.
But plague is not the only killer.
Soon, the eyes of the world will turn to this ancient island, where the future of a fragile empire is at stake, in an epic and playful mystery of passion, fear, scandal and murder, from one of history’s master storytellers.
The Love of my life by Rosie Walsh, available in eBook
I have held you every night for ten years and I didn’t even know your name. We have a child together. A dog, a house.
Who are you?
Emma loves her husband Leo and their young daughter Ruby: she’d do anything for them. But almost everything she’s told them about herself is a lie.
And she might just have got away with it, if it weren’t for her husband’s job. Leo is an obituary writer and Emma is a well-known marine biologist. So, when she suffers a serious illness, Leo copes by doing what he knows best: reading and writing about her life.
But as he starts to unravel her past, he discovers the woman he loves doesn’t really exist. Even her name is made-up.
When the very darkest moments of Emma’s past life finally emerge, she must somehow prove to Leo that she really is the woman he always thought she was. But first, she must tell him about the love of her other life . . .
A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz, available in eAudio
Very soon they discover that dark forces are at work.
Alderney is in turmoil over a planned power line that will cut through it, desecrating a war cemetery and turning neighbour against neighbour.
And the visiting authors seem to be harbouring any number of unpleasant secrets.
When the festival’s wealthy sponsor is found brutally murdered, Alderney goes into lockdown and Hawthorne knows he doesn’t have to look too far for suspects. There’s no escape. The killer is still on the island.
And there’s about to be a second death…
The Family Remains by Lisa Jewell, available in eAudio
London. Early morning, June 2019: on the foreshore of the river Thames, a bag of bones is discovered. Human bones.
DCI Samuel Owusu is called to the scene and quickly sends the bag for forensic examination. The bones are those of a young woman, killed by a blow to the head many years ago.
Also inside the bag is a trail of clues, in particular the seeds of a rare tree which lead DCI Owusu back to a mansion in Chelsea where, nearly 30 years previously, three people lay dead in a kitchen, and a baby waited upstairs for someone to pick her up.
The clues point forward too to a brother and sister in Chicago searching for the only person who can make sense of their pasts.
Four deaths. An unsolved mystery. A family whose secrets can’t stay buried for ever….
