Welcome to the website for Novel Novelties offered through OLLI at the the University of Delaware for Fall 2023. The instructor is Rebecca Worley (rworley@udel.edu)
For the fall 2023, two sections are available: one in person and one online with Zoom:
in person, Thursdays from 10:45 to 12 noon, in Arsht Hall, Room TBD
online, Tuesdays from 10:45 to 12 noon, on Zoom
Those of you who have taken my courses before know, all too well, that selecting books is always an arduous, angst-riddled task for me. That's my apology for taking so long to post the book list for Fall 2023. It's not complete, but will be shortly. Here's a couple that will be included in the fall course. And we have some "international flavor" here among the authors.
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Holly Ringland, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (373 pps.)
From Amazon's description:
An enchanting and captivating novel about how our untold stories haunt us — and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.
After her family suffers a tragedy, nine-year-old Alice Hart is forced to leave her idyllic seaside home. She is taken in by her grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak.
Under the watchful eye of June and the women who run the farm, Alice settles, but grows up increasingly frustrated by how little she knows of her family’s story. In her early twenties, Alice’s life is thrown into upheaval again when she suffers devastating betrayal and loss. Desperate to outrun grief, Alice flees to the dramatically beautiful central Australian desert. In this otherworldly landscape Alice thinks she has found solace, until she meets a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man.
Spanning two decades, set between sugar cane fields by the sea, a native Australian flower farm, and a celestial crater in the central desert, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart follows Alice’s unforgettable journey, as she learns that the most powerful story she will ever possess is her own.
NOTE: Yup! I'm back in Australia again. We'll have to talk about the "lure" of this literature. But this book is not quite like anything I've read before; it's part mystery, part melodrama, part history of flower symbolism, definitely Australian epic, and will keep you flipping page. Lots to discuss. And it's also a mini-series, available on Amazon Prime, starring Sigourney Weaver. But please read the book before watching.
Hernan Diaz, Trust (415 pps.)
From Amazon's description:
Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Also a NY Times Top 10 books of 2022, and a bestseller
Longlisted for the Booker Prize
Reviewers
"Buzzy and enthralling …A glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery…Fun as hell to read.” —Oprah Daily
"A genre-bending, time-skipping story about New York City’s elite in the roaring ’20s and Great Depression."—Vanity Fair
Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
Hernan Diaz’s Trust elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.
At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.
NOTE: It employs a literary structure that tells the same story from different perspectives--which many have used, including Robert Browning in The Ring and the Book.
Sulari Gentil, The Woman in the Library (270 pps)
From Amazon's description:
USA Today bestseller, Nominated for Mary Higgins Clark Award, Bookpage's Best Mysteries and Suspense 2022, Library Reads Top 10 Books of 2022, Crime Read's Best New Crime Fiction
"Investigations are launched, fingers are pointed, potentially dangerous liaisons unfold and I was turning those pages like there was cake at the finish line." —Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times must-read books for summer 2022
Ned Kelly award winning author Sulari Gentill sets this mystery-within-a-mystery in motion with a deceptively simple, Dear Hannah, What are you writing? pulling us into the ornate reading room at the Boston Public Library.
In every person's story, there is something to hide.
The tranquility is shattered by a woman's terrified scream. Security guards take charge immediately, instructing everyone inside to stay put until the threat is identified and contained. While they wait for the all-clear, four strangers, who'd happened to sit at the same table, pass the time in conversation and friendships are struck. Each has his or her own reasons for being in the reading room that morning—it just happens that one is a murderer.
Sulari Gentill delivers a sharply thrilling read with The Woman in the Library, an unexpectedly twisty literary adventure that examines the complicated nature of friendship and shows us that words can be the most treacherous weapons of all.
NOTE: This is another novel that uses multiple perspectives to tell the story. I will explain in class. She won the Ned Kelly (Australian prize for crime fiction, alias mystery) for Crossing the Lines, published in the US as After She Wrote Him. She is also the author of the Rowland Sinclair WWII mystery series, with 10 novels thus far.
Jane Harper, The Lost Man (352 pps)
From Amazon's description:
Two brothers meet in the remote Australian outback when the third brother is found dead, in this stunning new standalone novel from Jane Harper. Brothers Nathan and Bub Bright meet for the first time in months at the remote fence line separating their cattle ranches in the lonely outback.Their third brother, Cameron, lies dead at their feet.
In an isolated belt of Australia, their homes a three-hour drive apart, the brothers were one another’s nearest neighbors. Cameron was the middle child, the one who ran the family homestead. But something made him head out alone under the unrelenting sun. Nathan, Bub and Nathan’s son return to Cameron’s ranch and to those left behind by his passing: his wife, his daughters, and his mother, as well as their long-time employee and two recently hired seasonal workers.
While they grieve Cameron’s loss, suspicion starts to take hold, and Nathan is forced to examine secrets the family would rather leave in the past. Because if someone forced Cameron to his death, the isolation of the outback leaves few suspects.
NOTE: This ia another Australian novel, while we're on that theme with The Lost Flowers. And it's Jane Harper. A couple of years ago we read The Dry, her best known novel, but a number of us think this one is actually better. And it's a mystery.
Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words (402 pps)
From Amazon's description:
New York Times BESTSELLER, Winner of the Australian Book Industry Award (ABIA)
“Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress.”—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.
As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.
NOTE: Australia, again. And the "lost" theme, this time lost words instead of flowers. And it's about libraries, and printing, and language, and words. But beware, the novel does give you the lexicography of a couple of words relating to women that are not spoken in polite society. We know them, we just don't say them. It's only a small part and you can skip over if it bothers you..
Book Number 6--Class Vote
Please consider the following. We will talk about them in class and take a vote.
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (232 pps)
From Amazon's description:
Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Edith Wharton used her inside knowledge of upper class New York life in the early part of the 20th century as the basis for her 1905 novel, The House of Mirth”. The novel is the classic and tragic portrayal of Lily Bart, an intelligent New York socialite during the late Victorian era, who seeks to secure a husband and a place in the society life of New York’s upper class. Lily, who was raised to strive for a socially and economically prosperous marital union, finds herself at the edge of thirty, her youthful beauty fading and her matrimonial prospects dwindling. The novel follows Lily’s descent down the social ladder over a period of two years as she circles the margins of New York’s upper class drawing closer to what seems an inevitable loneliness. Central to the theme of the novel is how the Victorian era offered women relatively few other alternatives to achieve upward social and economic mobility than through marriage. A classic depiction of a bygone era, The House of Mirth is at once a detailed portrait of New York society life and a social satire which harshly criticizes the moral failings of the rich.
NOTE: This is of course an American classic, from roughly the same time period as Trust, which is why I thought of it. And the themes are similar. In American literary fiction, this time period is known as "the Gilded Age."
Madeline Martin, The Last Bookshop in London (322 pps)
From Amazon's description:(4.5 stars, with almost 17K ratings)
New York Times bestseller
“An irresistible tale which showcases the transformative power of literacy, reminding us of the hope and sanctuary our neighborhood bookstores offer during the perilous trials of war and unrest.”
August 1939: London prepares for war as Hitler’s forces sweep across Europe. Grace Bennett has always dreamed of moving to the city, but the bunkers and drawn curtains that she finds on her arrival are not what she expected. And she certainly never imagined she’d wind up working at Primrose Hill, a dusty old bookshop nestled in the heart of London.
Through blackouts and air raids as the Blitz intensifies, Grace discovers the power of storytelling to unite her community in ways she never dreamed—a force that triumphs over even the darkest nights of the war
Madeline Martin, The Keeper of Hidden Books (407 pps)
From Amazon's description:
A heartwarming story about the power of books to bring us together, inspired by the true story of the underground library in WWII Warsaw, by the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Bookshop in London.
All her life, Zofia has found comfort in two things during times of hardship: books and her best friend, Janina. But no one could have imagined the horrors of the Nazi occupation in Warsaw. As the bombs rain down and Hitler’s forces loot and destroy the city, Zofia finds that now books are also in need of saving.
With the death count rising and persecution intensifying, Zofia jumps to action to save her friend and salvage whatever books she can from the wreckage, hiding them away, and even starting a clandestine book club. She and her dearest friend never surrender their love of reading, even when Janina is forced into the newly formed ghetto.
But the closer Warsaw creeps toward liberation, the more dangerous life becomes for the women and their families – and escape may not be possible for everyone. As the destruction rages around them, Zofia must fight to save her friend and preserve her culture and community using the only weapon they have left - literature.
Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves (270 pps)
From Amazon's description: (4.4 stars with over 6K ratings)
New York Times bestseller.
"Blazing...Visceral" (Los Angeles Times) · "Exceptional" (Newsweek) · "Bold...Heartfelt" (New York Times Book Review) · "Thought-provoking and thrilling" (GMA) · "Suspenseful and poignant" (Scientific American) · "Gripping" (The Sydney Morning Herald)
From the author of the beloved national bestseller Migrations, a pulse-pounding new novel set in the wild Scottish Highlands.
Inti Flynn arrives in Scotland with her twin sister, Aggie, to lead a team of biologists tasked with reintroducing fourteen gray wolves into the remote Highlands. She hopes to heal not only the dying landscape, but Aggie, too, unmade by the terrible secrets that drove the sisters out of Alaska.
Inti is not the woman she once was, either, changed by the harm she’s witnessed—inflicted by humans on both the wild and each other. Yet as the wolves surprise everyone by thriving, Inti begins to let her guard down, even opening herself up to the possibility of love. But when a farmer is found dead, Inti knows where the town will lay blame. Unable to accept her wolves could be responsible, Inti makes a reckless decision to protect them. But if the wolves didn’t make the kill, then who did? And what will Inti do when the man she is falling for seems to be the prime suspect?
Propulsive and spell-binding, Charlotte McConaghy's Once There Were Wolves is the unforgettable story of a woman desperate to save the creatures she loves—if she isn’t consumed by a wild that was once her refuge.
NOTE: This isn't an easy book to read for many because it focuses on moral decisions, or the lack thereof. So the content can be unnerving, upsetting, distressing, at times. At bottom, it's about survival, and the decisions necessary to survive. But it's beautifully written.
Past Course Websites
Novels: Art, History, Mystery and Such (Spring 2023)
Pack your Bookbag (Fall 2021)