Harbor / John Ajvide Lindqvist

After six-year-old Maja tragically and mysteriously disappears on a family winter hike to a nearby lighthouse, her father Anders falls into a pattern of drunken depression. Eventually returning to the island where it happened, he suddenly feels an eerie connection with his lost daughter and senses that she is not gone. Other strange and inexplicable occurrences begin to happen, villagers act as if they are possessed, houses are burnt down, and mysterious and frightening things happen after nightfall. Everything seems to be linked to an ominous presence inhabiting the sea surrounding the island, centered at the lighthouse at Gåvasten where Maja disappeared.

Harbor takes place mostly on the fictional island of Domarö in the sea of Åland east of Stockholm. The story spans several generations, so the reader is offered a historical and social context for the strange happenings that have taken place and continue to take place on the island. There are some flashbacks that offer an almost nostalgic look at island life in the twentieth century and give the reader a sense of Sweden of yesteryear. In spite of the sepia-tinted nostalgia, an overall sense of foreboding grows increasingly in this 500-page novel until a cataclysmic event obliterates everything.

John Ajvide Lindqvist is perhaps best known for Let the Right One In, made into a Swedish-language film and also as an English version film in 2010 with the title Let Me In. John Ajvide Lindqvist is frequently compared to Stephen King, and Harbor is his latest book to be translated into English. (The title in Swedish is Människohamn, which is Human Harbor, though I think a better title might have been The Depths).

The translation by Marlaine Delargy is fantastic and is part of why the novel is so compelling. It’s not a perfect novel, but very unique and one which I had trouble putting down.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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