NBS recommends dramatic reads

BY NIGHT FALL

by Michael Cunningham

P765

MANILA, Philippines – Peter and Rebecca Harris: mid-forties denizens of Manhattan’s SoHo, nearing the apogee of committed careers in the arts he a dealer, she an editor. With a spacious loft, a daughter who is in college in Boston, and lively friends, they are admirable, enviable contemporary urbanites with every reason to be happy. Then Rebecca’s much younger look-alike brother, Ethan (known in the family as Mizzy, “the mistake”) shows up for a visit. A beautiful, beguiling 23-year-old with a history of drug problems, Mizzy is wayward, at loose ends, looking for direction. And in his presence, Peter finds himself questioning his artists, their work, his career — the entire world he has so carefully constructed.

LEGACY

by Danielle Steel

P 699

At the age of 38, Brigitte Nicholson has a job she likes, a man she loves, and a book on the women’s suffrage movement that she will finish someday. “Someday” is Brigitte’s watchword. Someday she and Ted, a rising star in the field of archaeology, will clarify their relationship. Someday she will have children. Someday she will stop playing it so safe. Then, on a snowy day in Boston, Brigitte’s life is jolted. Suddenly everything she counted on has changed and she finds herself questioning every choice she has made along the way. As she struggles to regain her balance and plot a new course, Brigitte agrees to help her mother on a family genealogy project. In Salt Lake City at the Family History Library, she makes a stunning discovery — reaching back to the French aristocracy. How did Brigitte’s mysterious ancestor Wachiwi, a Dakota Sioux, travel from the Great Plains to the French court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette — and into the arms of a French marquis? How did she come to marry into Brigitte’s family? What is the truth behind the tantalizing clues in the fragmented, centuries-old records?

FREEDOM

by Jonathan Franzen

P 555

Freedom is Jonathan Franzen’s fourth novel and his first in nine years since The Corrections. Happy to say, it’s very much a match for that great book, a wrenching, funny, and forgiving portrait of a Midwestern family (from St. Paul this time, rather than the fictional St. Jude). Patty and Walter Berglund find each other early: a pretty jock, focused on the court and a little lost off it, and a stolid budding lawyer, besotted with her and almost burdened by his integrity. They make a family and a life together, and over time, slowly lose track of each other. Their stories align at times with big issues — among them mountaintop removal, war profiteering, and rock ‘n’ roll — and in some ways can’t be separated from them, but what you remember most are the characters, whom you grow to love the way families often love each other: not for their charm or goodness, but because they have their reasons, and you know them.

FALL OF GIANTS

by Ken Follett

P1,145

Thirteen-year-old Billy Williams enters a man’s world in the Welsh mining pits. Gus Dewar, an American law student rejected in love, finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson’s White House... two orphaned Russian brothers, Grigori and Lev Peshkov, embark on radically different paths half a world apart when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution. Billy’s sister, Ethel, a housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts, takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German embassy in London. These characters and many others find their lives inextricably entangled as, in a saga of unfolding drama and intriguing complexity, Fall of Giants moves seamlessly from Washington to St. Petersburg, from the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty. As always with Ken Follett, the historical background is brilliantly researched and rendered, the action fast-moving, the characters rich in nuance and emotion. It is destined to be a new classic.

SAFE HAVEN

by Nicholas Sparks

P549

When a mysterious young woman named Katie appears in the small North Carolina town of Southport, her sudden arrival raises questions about her past. Beautiful yet self-effacing, Katie seems determined to avoid forming personal ties until a series of events draws her into two reluctant relationships: one with Alex, a widowed store owner with a kind heart and two young children; and another with her plainspoken single neighbor, Jo. Despite her reservations, Katie slowly begins to let down her guard, putting down roots in the close-knit community and becoming increasingly attached to Alex and his family. But even as Katie begins to fall in love, she struggles with the dark secret that still haunts and terrifies her a past that set her on a fearful, shattering journey across the country, to the sheltered oasis of Southport. With Jo’s empathic and stubborn support, Katie eventually realizes that she must choose between a life of transient safety and one of riskier rewards and that in the darkest hour, love is the only true safe haven.