This week’s book, The Song Book of Benny Lament by Amy Harmon, came highly recommended. I heard it just gets better and better as you read.
From the bestselling author of What the Wind Knows and From Sand and Ash comes a powerful love story about a musical duo who put everything on the line to be together.
New York, 1960: For Benny Lament, music is his entire life. With his father’s deep ties to the mob, the Bronx piano man has learned that love and family can get you in trouble. So he keeps to himself, writing songs for other musicians, avoiding the spotlight…until the night his father brings him to see Esther Mine sing.
Esther is a petite powerhouse with a gorgeous voice. And when Benny writes a hit song and performs it with her, their collaboration thrusts the duo onto the national stage…and stirs up old issues and new scrutiny that the mob—and Benny—would rather avoid.
It would be easier to walk away. But the music and the woman are too hard for the piano man to resist. Benny’s songs and Esther’s vocals are an explosive combination, a sound that fans can’t get enough of. But though America might love the music they make together, some people aren’t ready for Benny Lament and Esther Mine on—or off—the stage. – Amazon.com
For more information or to purchase this book, click HERE.
Are you longing for the days when trying a new restaurant was just so exciting and fun? Well today’s book club choice, Where Chef’s Eat : A Guides To Chef’s Favorite Restaurants by Joe Warwick is the book for all of us….
Eat around the world with 650 of the world’s best chefs. Wherever you are, you’ll never miss the best local diner for breakfast, the best restaurant for a business dinner, or the best place for a late-night snack – and everything in between.
This all-new, completely revised, third edition of the global restaurant guidebook that has sold more than 250,000 copies features more than 7,000 recommendations for more than 4,500 restaurants in more than 70 countries. Wherever you are, you’ll never miss the best local diner for breakfast, the best restaurant for a business dinner, or the best place for a late night snack ? and everything in-between.
With city maps, key information, reviews and recommendations from the chefs themselves, this is the guide for savvy restaurant-goers and arm chair foodies in major cities and towns worldwide.
WHERE: With recommendations in more than 70 countries – from the United States to Buenos Aires from Ireland to Estonia from Greece to South Africa, discover the best eateries for your destination.
CHEFS: Find out where and what the world’s best chefs eat including: Jason Atherton, Shannon Bennett, Helena Rizzo, Stephen Harris, Yotam Ottolenghi, Yoshihiro Narisawa, and hundreds more.
EAT: From breakfast to late night, bargain to high end – discover the best places to eat for just the right occasion.
This book can be purchased at one of my favorite local shops Navy Lobster in Greenwich. DM or call Mary Beth to get your copy.
This week’s book club choice is a Reece Witherspoon pick and an instant New York Times bestseller. And I know how much you all love thrillers so The Guest List by Lucy Foley is my pick.
On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one. The groom: handsome and charming, a rising television star. The bride: smart and ambitious, a magazine publisher. It’s a wedding for a magazine, or for a celebrity: the designer dress, the remote location, the luxe party favors, the boutique whiskey. The cell phone service may be spotty and the waves may be rough, but every detail has been expertly planned and will be expertly executed.
But perfection is for plans, and people are all too human. As the champagne is popped and the festivities begin, resentments and petty jealousies begin to mingle with the reminiscences and well wishes. The groomsmen begin the drinking game from their school days. The bridesmaid not-so-accidentally ruins her dress. The bride’s oldest (male) friend gives an uncomfortably caring toast.
And then someone turns up dead. Who didn’t wish the happy couple well? And perhaps more important, why? – Amazon.com
For more information or to purchase this book, click HERE.
A friend recommended this week’s book to me. It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover and I was at first hesitant to post about it. The storyline is tough and can be difficult to read but really grabs your heart and you will come away spellbound and loving it and also the characters, even the ones who are the most flawed.
Combining a captivating romance with a cast of all-too-human characters, Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us is an unforgettable tale of love that comes at the ultimate price.
Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up—she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life suddenly seems almost too good to be true.
Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating” rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place.
As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan—her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened. – Amazon.com
For more information or to purchase this book, click HERE.
A recommendation for this week’s book, What Kind Of Woman by Kate Baer came across my email. This book is so unique because it is a collection of poems that are uplifting for all the roles that women’s play in today’s world. It is the type of book that my readers say that they keep on their nightstand and reread constantly….Here is the summary:
An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller
“If you want your breath to catch and your heart to stop, turn to Kate Baer.”–Joanna Goddard, Cup of Jo
A stunning and honest debut poetry collection about the beauty and hardships of being a woman in the world today, and the many roles we play – mother, partner, and friend.
“When life throws you a bag of sorrow, hold out your hands/Little by little, mountains are climbed.” So ends Kate Baer’s remarkable poem “Things My Girlfriends Teach Me.” In “Nothing Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels” she challenges her reader to consider their grandmother’s cake, the taste of the sea, the cool swill of freedom. In her poem “Deliverance” about her son’s birth she writes “What is the word for when the light leaves the body?/What is the word for when it/at last, returns?”
Through poems that are as unforgettably beautiful as they are accessible, Kate Bear proves herself to truly be an exemplary voice in modern poetry. Her words make women feel seen in their own bodies, in their own marriages, and in their own lives. Her poems are those you share with your mother, your daughter, your sister, and your friends. – Amazon.com
For More Information or to purchase this book, click HERE.
All year long I save covers of books in my photos that I want to read and recommend to my readers. Most of the time, I pick them for weekly Book Club posts but this year I had so many more. I decided to put them in one post in case you want to check them out, bookmark the pages or add them to your wishlists. I am hoping to go down this list within the next few months. They all have been described as cannot put down must reads.. I really cannot wait!!!!!!
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
From the author of Daisy Jones & The Six—an entrancing novel “that speaks to the Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor in us all” (Kirkus Reviews), in which a legendary film actress reflects on her relentless rise to the top and the risks she took, the loves she lost, and the long-held secrets the public could never imagine. – Amazon.com
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Two wildly different women—one a grifter, the other an heiress—are brought together by the scam of a lifetime in a page-turner from the New York Times bestselling author of Watch Me Disappear. – Amazon.com
The Book of Essie is the 2018 debut novel of American author Meghan MacLean Weir. It features a 17-year-old named Essie Hicks who is pregnant. To avoid embarrassing her conservative Christian family who are stars of a reality television show, Essie’s mother arranges for her to hastily marry an acquaintance of hers from school. – Wikipedia
The Hamilton Cookbook takes you into Hamilton’s home and to his table, with historical information, recipes, and tips on how you can prepare food and serve the food that our founding fathers enjoyed in their day. – Amazon.com
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect? – Amazon.com
When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days decades earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she’d been to her three, now-grown children. But to what consequence? – Amazon.com
In a historical debut evoking the style of The Crown, the daughter of an impoverished noble is swept into the fame and notoriety of the royal family and Princess Margaret’s fast-living friends when she is appointed as Margaret’s second Lady-in-Waiting. – Amazon
The iconic Olive struggles to understand not only herself and her own life but also the lives of those around her in the town of Crosby, Maine. Whether with a teenager coming to terms with the loss of her father, a young woman about to give birth during a hilariously inopportune moment, a nurse who confesses a secret high school crush, or a lawyer who struggles with an inheritance she does not want to accept, the unforgettable Olive will continue to startle us, to move us, and to inspire moments of transcendent grace – Good Reads
In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance. Her affluent parents send her to Manhattan to live with her Aunt Peg, who owns a flamboyant, crumbling midtown theater called the Lily Playhouse. There Vivian is introduced to an entire cosmos of unconventional and charismatic characters, from the fun-chasing showgirls to a sexy male actor, a grand-dame actress, a lady-killer writer, and no-nonsense stage manager. But when Vivian makes a personal mistake that results in professional scandal, it turns her new world upside down in ways that it will take her years to fully understand. Ultimately, though, it leads her to a new understanding of the kind of life she craves – and the kind of freedom it takes to pursue it. It will also lead to the love of her life, a love that stands out from all the rest. -Amazon.com
