No One You Know by Michelle Richmond

From Barnes and Noble

Michelle Richmond dazzled readers and critics alike with her luminous novel The Year of Fog. Now Richmond returns with an intensely emotional, multilayered family drama—a woman’s search for her sister’s killer that spirals into a journey of secrets, revelations, and damaged lives.

All her life Ellie Enderlin had been known as Lila’s sister. Until one day, without warning, the shape of their family changed forever. Twenty years ago, Lila, a top math student at Stanford, was murdered in a crime that was never solved. In the aftermath of her sister’s death, Ellie entrusted her most intimate feelings to a man who turned the story into a bestselling true crime book—a book that both devastated her family and identified one of Lila’s professors as the killer.

Decades later, two Americans meet in a remote village in Nicaragua. Ellie is now a professional coffee buyer, an inveterate traveler and incapable of trust. Peter is a ruined academic. And their meeting is not by chance. As rain beats down on the steaming rooftops of the village, Peter leaves Ellie with a gift—the notebook that Lila carried everywhere, a piece of evidence not found with her body. Stunned, Ellie will return home to San Francisco to explore the mysteries of Lila’s notebook, filled with mathematical equations, and begin a search that has been waiting for her all these years. It will lead her to a hundred-year-old mathematical puzzle, to a lover no one knew Lila had, to the motives and fate of the man who profited from their family’s anguish—and to the deepest secrets even sisters keep from each other. As she connects with people whose lives unknowingly swirled around her own, Ellie will confront a series of startling revelations—from the eloquent truths of numbers to confessions of love, pain and loss.

A novel about the stories and lies that strangers, lovers and families tell—and the secrets we keep even from ourselves—Michelle Richmond’s new novel is a work of astonishing depth and beauty, at once heartbreaking, provocative, and impossible to put down.

When her sister is murdered, Ellie thinks life will never be the same again. Especially since Lila was the “good” child. The one who excelled. But eventually Ellie’s heart began to heal and she made a life for herself as a coffee buyer. On one of her coffee trips she randomly runs into the person everyone thought was responsible for her sisters death – even though there was no concrete proof – and based info in a book that a “friend” of Lila & Ellie’s had written. While searching for the truth about her sister’s death Ellie finds out that not everyone is what they seem and not all the stories that they tell are the truth. While most of the math explanations (Lila was a math prodigy) can be confusing at times, the author does an excellent job of explaining them in “plain English”. And they all seem to have something to do with an aspect of the story that is being told. An emotional novel that grabs you from the start and keeps a hold of your heart until the truth is finally revealed. A

The Aviary Gate by Katie Hickman

Katie Hickman’s “The Aviary Gate” is a story within a story. In present day Oxford Elizabeth Staveley, a graduate student, is looking through the Bodleian Library archives in search of material for her thesis on captivity narratives. She finds a fragment of a manuscript which describes a shipwreck and the unfortunate aftermath when the ship is boarded by Turkish pirates. The captain of the ship is murdered and several of the women are taken captive by the pirates, among them the captain’s daughter, Celia.

 

Elizabeth immediately feels a connection with Celia and wants to find out more of her story. At the same time her personal life is experiencing upheaval. The man she is in love with is a wandering womanizer and as much as Elizabeth would like to break away, she is having trouble severing her ties to him. On an impulse, she abruptly leaves her life in Oxford and flies to Istanbul, not knowing what she is looking for but anxious to do SOMETHING. She seizes on following Celia’s trail as a way to force change in her own life.

Woven in to Elizabeth’s story are segments of Celia’s life in 1599 Constantinople. She is bought for the Sultan’s harem, intended to be his next “favorite” concubine. The reader sees the secretive world of the Ottoman harem. The female population is full of political maneuvering and infighting and Celia struggles to learn the hierarchy and her place in it. They even have a silent language they use amongst themselves when speaking is prohibited. For Celia it is a prison full of confusing rules, conflicting gossip, drama and backstabbing. When she discovers that her fiancee is in Constantinople on an errand for Queen Elizabeth I, she dreams of a chance to see him again.

The author paints a lush and beautiful picture of the secluded world of the harem and the women who inhabit it. Present day Istanbul is also described well. She presents an interesting peep into how that world might have been. I love books that transport you to a place which you can never visit, and make it seem like you have been there. I enjoyed the book and look forward to reading other titles by this author.

The Aviary Gate was released by Bloomsbury on May 27, 2008.

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

First time Canadian author Andrew Davidson’s novel The Gargoyle is an intriguing, unexpected story. The narrator, who is never given a name, is an unapologetic drug addict and pornographer who admits that he has never known love. He is driving in a drug-induced haze when his car sails off of a cliff into the ravine below. He is severely burned and narrowly escapes death. As he lays in his hospital bed he plans his suicide in detail, believing that he could never live with what his body has become.

Marianne Engel, a temporary patient in the psychiatric ward, enters his room one day and speaks to him as if she knows him, though he has never seen her before. She claims that she was born in the year 1300 and that they had been married when they both lived in Medieval Germany. She is a sculptor of stone gargoyles and she says that the talent does not belong to her but that she is guided by God to produce her statues. Though the narrator thinks that she must be mentally ill, he is nevertheless drawn to her and to the stories that she tells him. They become close and when he is released from the hospital she takes him into her home. Unfortunately he continues his addictions, this time to morphine, and has a hard time letting go of his lifetime habits.

This book centers on the gradual redemption of the narrator’s soul and the fulfillment of Marianne Engel’s life purpose. The author weaves in references to and instances from Dante’s Inferno that illustrate the narrator’s hellish journey from his pre-accident immoral life to the ultimate decision that redeems him.

I found this book well written with vividly described scenes and interesting historical detail. The storyline was fascinating, though the ending stops short of answering all of the reader’s questions. It is among the most unique novels that I have ever read.

The Gargoyle is scheduled to be published on August 5, 2008 by Doubleday.