Isabel Allende “The House of the Spirits”

The House of the Spirits" is a very good novel about the life of a family through three generations, a powerful history of characters. You can hate some characters and you admire some, but they are all interesting. Isabel Allende shows good times and bad times of the family, times of poverty and other times of wealth, love and hate, betrayal, accidents, life and death. It’s not a political novel but also connects with situation in Chile during the 20th Century, with revolution and dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

I enjoyed this book very much. It’s beautifully written and captivating to read. The language of the novel is simple.

Olga.

Bram Stoker "Dracula"

Dracula recounts the struggle of a group of men and a woman – Dr Seward, Dr Van Helsing and Jonathan Harker and his wife Mina – to destroy the vampire, whose sinister earth-filled coffins are discovered by Harker in a ruined chapel adjoining Dr Seward’s asylum. Cruel and noble, evilly and fatally desirable to women, Dracula possesses a terrifying lust for power and, like Dr Jekyll or Conan Doyle’s Moriarty, is one of the immortal fictional monsters.


Few readers will ever forget the nightmare atmosphere of Count Dracula’s sinister castle in Transylvania, the prowlings of the Un-dead, the blood-curdling tension as Bram Stoker’s tale races towards a thrilling climax.

Dracula is a unique horror masterpiece and the most famous of all vampire tales.

Bob

Robb Forman Dew “The Evidence Against Her”

This is one of those books you must read slowly. Be prepared for a lot of description and character development, to study other people, to understand why people behave the way they do. You will meet 3 kids being born on the same day and know how that influences their relationships with other people in their lives. Dew takes ordinary people and, by showing us events through their eyes, helps us to understand them.

I thought the story was pretty good.

Ann.

 

Reynolds Price “Kate Vaiden”

A sweet, sad story… The readers follow through the life of the main character, Kate Vaiden. I love and accept her, sometimes I don’t understand her or why she makes the decisions she makes. She is forgiving, loving and awful all at the same time. She runs away from those who would love and give her the most, and she doesn't regret it. Life taught her hard lessons: she had survived the murder of her mother by her father and his suicide, the accidental death of her favorite lover, the suicides of two of her lovers, abandonment of her infant son.

Reynolds Price’s a wonderful story teller.

Galya.

 

Ha Jin “Waiting”

This is the story of Lin Kong, a man living in two worlds. Every summer once a year he visits his family home in village, where his wife nurses first his mother and then his father, and takes care of Lin’s daughter. Caught in a loveless marriage, Lin has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu.  According to local Party rules, Lin cannot divorce his wife without her permission until they have been separated for 18 years.  Every summer, his wife agrees to a divorce but then backs out…

This touching story about love, honor, duty, and family.

Simple prose, simple plot, very complex characters.

Lena.

 

John Banville “The Sea”

“The Sea” is one of the best novels I have read. This novel is about love, loss, regret and the role of memory. John Banville introduces us to Max Morden. After his wife’s death he returned to the seaside town where his family had vacation in his youth. Something happened there, and the novel only reveals what that was at the end. Max went back to events of his childhood, he needed of going back in his life in order to go forward.

It's a strong and a good book, beautifully written.

Olga.

David Baldacci “Stone Cold”

Baldacci's books are great and this one is no exception. The book carries you along with different stories, fun characters, and, of course, Baldacci's very clear writing style. In this book there are several plots and subplots going on.  Baldacci, as a good storyteller, brings all of these plots into riveting thriller.  In one plot we find Oliver Stone, who is an ex-government assassin who now lives and works in a small graveyard outside of Washington D.C. with a terrible mistake that he made years ago……

A good story full of revenge, conspiracy and murder.

Highly recommend it to anyone who likes action and great characters.

Ann.

Amazon Kindle

Dear friends, Sumy WOA Center received 4 E-book Readers “Amazon Kindle”. Now you have an opportunity to read books in our center in E-format. For the reading are available speeches and books of American politicians and writers. Among them are Barack Obama, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Henry Melville and others. Everybody is welcomed to come and read! 

Book trailer: Boris Akunin "Turkish Gambit"

Charles Frazier "Cold Mountain"

One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory. Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain is a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished America in all its savagery, solitude and splendor.

Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, Inman, a Confederate soldier, decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains and to Ada, the woman he loved there years before. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, Ada is trying to revive her father’s derelict farm and learn to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic American Odyssey – hugely powerful, majestically lovely and keenly moving.

Richard