This month we are reviewing Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

An escaped convict with a false passport who flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of a city where he can disappear. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter Bombay’s hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere. As a hunted man without a home, family, or identity, Lin searches for love and meaning while running a clinic in one of the city’s poorest slums, and serving his apprenticeship in the dark arts of the Bombay mafia.

Reviews
“I cannot speak highly enough of Shantaram, a beautifully written, epic story. It’s one of those novels you just devour, but at the same time you know you should slow down and savour it. I found myself re-reading some passages twice, because the language and imagery was just so brilliant. I highly recommend it”. – Review by Melissa

Book of the Month
Every month we will be featuring a new book to be showcased in our Book of the Month. Staff members and friends will be reading the book and posting their reviews. We’d love to hear what you thought of these books as well. Post your comments and let us know.

Shantaram is available at London Drugs along with many other great titles and is on sale for the month of September.

This month we are reviewing A Hundred Summers by Beatriz Williams

A Hundred Summers by Beatriz Williams
Lily Dane has returned to Seaview, Rhode Island, where her family has summered for generations. It’s an escape not only from New York’s social scene but from a heartbreak that still haunts her. Here, among the seaside community that has embraced her since childhood, she finds comfort in the familiar rituals of summer.

But this summer is different. Budgie and Nick Greenwald – Lily’s former best friend and former fiancé – have arrived, too, and Seaview’s elite are abuzz. Under Budgie’s glamorous influence, Lily is seduced into a complicated web of renewed friendship and dangerous longing.

As a cataclysmic hurricane churns north through the Atlantic, and uneasy secrets slowly reveal themselves, Lily and Nick must confront an emotional storm that will change their world’s forever…

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This month we are reviewing the book Far to Go by Alison Pick

Far to Go by Alison Pick
Pavel and Anneliese Bauer are affluent, secular Jews, whose lives are turned upside down by the arrival of the German forces. Desperate to avoid deportation, the Bauers flee to Prague with their six-year-old son, Pepik, and his beloved nanny, Marta. Pepik manages to secure a place on a Kindertransport, but he never sees his parents or Marta again. And it is through the fascinating present-day strand in the story that the unexpected fates of each of the Bauers is slowly revealed.
Inspired by the harrowing journey Alison Pick’s own grandparents embarked upon from their native Czechoslovakia to Canada during the Second World War, Far to Go is an epic historical novel that traces one family’s journey through these tumultuous and traumatic events.

Reviews
“This novel failed to grab me.  The setting is pre-World War II Czechslovakia.  The story stumbles along jumping between past told by Marta, the housekeeper and present by an unidentified narrator.  The only thing that saves this story is Alison Picks vivid prose.” – Review by Shirley

Book of the Month
Every month we will be featuring a new book to be showcased in our Book of the Month. Staff members and friends will be reading the book and posting their reviews. We’d love to hear what you thought of these books as well. Post your comments and let us know.

Far to Go is available at London Drugs along with many other great titles and is on sale for the month of July.

This month we are reviewing the book And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
Begins with the heartbreaking unparalleled bond between two motherless siblings in an Afghan village. To three-year-old Pari, big brother Abdullah is more mother than brother. To ten-year-old Abdullah, little Pari is his everything. What happens to them – and the large and small manners in which it echoes through the lives of so many other people – is proof of the moral complexity of life. In a multigenerational novel revolving around not just parents and children but also brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which family members love, wound, betray, honor and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most. following its characters and the ramifications of their lives and choices and loves around the globe – from Kabul, to Paris, to San Francisco, to the Greek island of Tinos – the story expands gradually outward, becoming more emotionally complex and powerful with each turning page.

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