I flew for the first time since the pandemic last week and I'd forgotten how much reading I can get done when I'm trapped in my seat on a crowded plane. Almost one book on the way out and another on the way home. In the first of them, a blurb describes The Housekeepers as a cross between Downton Abbey and Ocean's 8 - a description that appealed to me on all fronts.
“In the back corner of the little synagogue in the shtetl that was so small and out of the way it was only called Shtetl, there was a table where an angel and a demon had been studying Talmud together for some two hundred years.”
From two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead, a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s.
Aphrodite Du Bell hates her name. The eponymous heroine of J. J. McAvoy’s romance Aphrodite and the Duke certainly has the beauty and bearing reminiscent of the Greek goddess, but ever since she was jilted by Evander Eagleman, Duke of Everely, she’s been reluctant to reenter society. An ultimatum from her formidable mama means she must find a husband this year, but the discovery that the now-widowed Evander will be present this season gives Aphrodite a sliver of hope she might be able to rekindle the love she knows Evander genuinely held for her.
Shannon Chakraborty is back with a new magical adventure (after her Daevabad trilogy) set on the Indian Ocean and introducing a bold, smart, and notorious female pirate, Amina al-Sirafi. Let the sea voyages and the hunt for a kidnapped girl commence.
In 1952 San Francisco, police detective Evander "Andy" Mills has been able to keep his sexual orientation, as a gay man, under wraps, until now. A raid on a gay nightclub has caught him in its web and he's lost his job and every "friend" he thought he had on the force. At a loss as to what comes next, he's contemplating a very bad decision while half-tanked in a bar, when he's approached by a glamorous woman named Pearl. She offers a deal he can't pass up. Pearl tells him that her wife, soap magnate, Irene Lamontaine has died and Pearl thinks her death was murder.
In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car.
"Everyone knows this is a dangerous business, but between you and me, being a woman is a dangerous business, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise."
Making a Faustian bargain to live forever but never be remembered, a woman from early eighteenth-century France endures unacknowledged centuries before meeting a man who remembers her name.
An unforgettable and sweeping novel about one classic film actress's relentless rise to the top, the risks she took, the loves she lost, and the long-held secrets the public could never imagine.
