Best books of July 2018

Preface: Emma is thirteen years old when she first arrives at Camp Nightingale. Along with her three new friends she learns how to lie during a game of Two Truths and a Lie.

A few weeks later the camp is closed after Emma's friends disappear one night.

15 years later Emma is asked to come back to the camp and thinks that doing so might bring her closure. But is Emma's innocence the biggest lie of them all?

Our Review

Preface: Willa Drake can count has had few defining moments of her life: when she was eleven her mother disappeared, when she was proposed to at twenty-one, and the accident that made her a widow at forty-one.

After each moment Willa ended up on a path laid out for her by others. Then she receives a phone call telling her that her son's ex-girlfriend has been shot and needs her help, she drops everything to go to her. The spur-of-the moment decision will lead her into uncharted territory.

Preface: Every other weekend since their parents divorce Hope and Eden wait for their dad to pick them up. Only this weekend, he’s forgotten, and their world changes when a stranger lures them into his truck.

More than twenty years later, Hope is that classic New York failure: a playwright with only one play produced long ago, newly evicted from an illegal sublet, working a humiliating temp job. Eden has long since distanced herself from her family, and no one seems to know where she is. When the man who abducted them is up for parole, the sisters might be able to offer testimony to keep him jailed. Hope sets out to find her sister—and to find herself—and it becomes the journey of a lifetime, taking her from hippie communes to cities across the country. Suspenseful and moving, Eden asks: how much do our pasts define us, and what price do we pay if we break free?

Preface: Charlie Calloway has a life most people would kill for but she isn't interested in what most people want. She's a Calloway and she's been taught to want more. Then she's invited to join an exclusive secret society but behind their mysterious facade is the truth behind her mother's disappearance ten years ago.

Preface: Deborah’s son was killed four years ago.

Alice’s son is in prison for killing him.

Deborah would give anything to have her son back, and Alice would do anything to right her son’s wrongs.

Alice has started a support group for parents with troubled children. But as it grows she finds out how easy it is for one little lie to spiral out of control…

Our Review

Preface: Six year old Ben is the only survivor of a crime that killed his mother and many others.

Lucy, the doctor who tends to Ben, is dealing with her own personal upheaval but feels a profound connection to him. Will recovering his memory heal him, or damage him further?

Clare believes the lifetime of secrets she’s been keeping don’t matter to anyone now, until an unexpected encounter prompts her to tell her story.

Preface: After the loss of her baby Claire decides to walk out on a marriage she isn't sure she wants any longer. Instead she opts to have a life of travel and casual sex.

Preface: Arrested in 1962 activist Nelson Mandela had no idea that he would spend the next twenty-seven years in jail.

During his incarceration, Mandela wrote hundreds of letters to prison authorities, activists, government officials, to his wife and his five children.

Now, 255 of these letters, most of which were previously unseen, provide an intimate portrait of Mandela.