Diane Chamberlain

Friday, June 26th, 4:00 - 7:00 pm

Meet one of Coastal Carolina's best kept literary secrets! Diane Chamberlain will be visiting us Friday the 26th to talk about her new novel, Before the Storm.

About the book:

It's part suspense, part mystery, and one hundred percent family drama. It's about how far family members will go to protect one another. It's about the choices people make that come back to haunt them. And it's about the gradual unfolding of truths that keep the characters on edge and those pages turning.

Fifteen-year-old Andy Lockwood is special. Others notice the way he blurts out anything that comes into his mind, how he cannot foresee consequences, that he's more child than teenager. But his mother sees a boy with a heart as open and wide as the ocean.

Laurel Lockwood lost her son once through neglect. She's spent the rest of her life determined to make up for her mistakes, and she's succeeded in becoming a committed, protective parent-maybe even over-protective. Still, she loosens her grip just enough to let Andy attend a local church social-a decision that terrifies and infuriates her when the church is consumed by fire. But Andy survives...and remarkably, saves other children from the flames. Laurel watches as Andy basks in the role of unlikely hero and the world finally sees her Andy, the sweet boy she knows as well as her own heart.

But when the suspicion of arson is cast upon Andy, Laurel must ask herself how well she really knows her son...and how far she'll go to keep her promise to protect him forever.

About Diane:

I was an insatiable reader as a child, and that fact, combined with a vivid imagination, inspired me to write. I penned a few truly terrible "novellas" at age twelve, then put fiction aside for many years as I pursued my education.

In the mid-nineties, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a challenging disease to live with. Although my RA is under good control with medication and I can usually type for many hours a day, I sometimes rely on voice recognition technology to get words on paper. I'm very grateful to the inventor of that software! I lived in Northern Virginia until the summer of 2005, when I moved to North Carolina, the state that inspired so many of my stories and where I live with my significant other, photographer John Pagliuca. I have three grown stepdaughters, three sons-in-law, three grandbabies, and two shelties named Keeper and Jet.

For me, the real joy of writing is having the opportunity to touch readers with my words. I hope that my stories move you in some way and give you hours of enjoyable reading.

Latoya Lucas

Saturday, July 18th, 11:00 am

The Immeasurable Spirit-Lessons of a Wounded Warrior about Faith and Perseverance.

There have been several books written by and about service members that have served during the Iraq War. "The Immeasurable Spirit: Lessons of a Wounded Warrior about Faith and Perseverance", was superbly written by an author with the personal insight and experience of a person who has faced and overcome tremendous adversity. Latoya Lucas brings us face to face with our inner- selves while simultaneously sharing her experiences of perseverance and faith even after suffering severe wounds from her service with the U.S. Army in Iraq.

Why is it that some people are able to overcome their fears and persevere through life's adversities? By reading Latoya's story, you will come to understand how a person with faith and determination could rely on that faith when tested during an unbelievable hardship.

Tom Brokaw, journalist and NY Times bestselling author,says "The Immeasurable Spirit" is a remarkable story of patriotism, courage, near death, recovery and inspiration."

Ellen Hunter

Saturday, July 18th, 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm

Murder at the Bellamy Mansion!

During its one hundred and fifty year history not a single shot had been fired inside the stately Bellamy mansion. Not during the Civil War. Not in the aftermath of the war when Wilmington, the lifeline of the Confederacy, fell to Federal forces, and a Union general requisitioned Dr. Bellamy's splendid home as a headquarters for himself and his troops. Not even during Reconstruction when lawless Carpet Baggers roamed our impoverished streets, buying up properties for pennies on the dollar.

Indeed, the only sharpshooting attempted inside the house during those troubled times of Yankee occupation was the hawking of tobacco juice into the once pristine white marble fireplaces. And most times those missed their mark.

Set on high ground above the golden Cape Fear River at the intersection of Market Street and Fifth Avenue, the splendid, white, colonnaded residence symbolized the heart and soul of Wilmington's historic district. This had been the homeplace for the large Bellamy family, where members came together to celebrate weddings and to mourn passings. In recent times, the mansion has become a museum, a favorite tourist attraction where visitors might glimpse the grandeur of gracious times gone by. Certainly not a residence you'd suspect of hosting murder and mayhem.

But on New Year's Day that was exactly what occurred...

About Ellen:

Ellen Elizabeth Hunter is the author of a popular mystery series set in Wilmington, NC, that features historic preservationist and old-house restorer Ashley Wilkes and her realtor sister Melanie. Ellen has had a love affair with old houses since childhood. She grew up in a house similar to Ashley's Victorian home.

Every old house has a secret, Ellen believes, and what fun to create a gutsy, curious protagonist who reveals and resolves them all. The port city of Wilmington was selected for the setting because of her colorful history, her citizens who are dedicated to the preservation of historic homes, an active film industry, and breathtaking locales. Open one of Ellen's books and just smell the magnolias!

and many, many more...

A couple of weeks ago, I received a box of books from my mother, which turned out to be a an unexpectedly moving experience. One of the books in the box was by a Dutch author I'd never heard of. My mother is almost the only person on the planet who can send me books by authors I don't recognize, but am certain to love.

That The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker was included was evidence of how simpatico mom and I are in our literary inclinations, even when we aren't trying to be. She told me about finding the book and picking it up because of the unusual size (it was almost square) and because of the subject-about a man forced to return home to the family farm when his twin brother is killed in an accident. Mom likes novels about people and their relationship to the land. This story, about a man who must come to terms with a life he never planned on living and how he learns to make it his own, is exactly the sort of thing both she and I would like. But as she was talking about it, I had perked up and was scrolling through my own "wish list" of books. "It was square?" I asked. "Foreign author?" Mom said yes, a Dutch writer she never heard of. It just so happened that a large part of my reading that moment was dominated by the Three Percent Best Translated Books of 2008 (long list), and I had discovered the publisher Archipelago Books, which specializes in bringing high quality foreign fiction into English. Most of their books have a distinctive square format. I told mom I knew the publisher, and was in fact reading some other books they had done. The Three Percent blog that had done such a number on my pocketbook with its recommended long list was a product of the University of Rochester. The name, I told her, comes from the estimate that less than three percent of the books published in the United States were originally written in a language other than English. And it just so happens that they have a review of The Twin up right now. (Which I am refusing to read until I've finished the book!)

But The Twin is only the most recent book in translation to find a place on my bedside reading stack. A little while ago it was Cesar Aira's compelling and eerie little novel called Ghosts. I've been into Aira since I came across another novel of his, Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, a fictionalized account of a 19th century landscape artist and contemporary of Humboldt, who is struck by lightning while traveling in Argentina and never paints the same way again. That story was vivid and a little disturbing. But vivid and disturbing seem to be Aira's metier because Ghosts gave me an odd, unsettled feeling for days.

Ghosts takes place over the course of a single day at the site of a half-finished apartment building in Buenos Aires. It is, in fact, the last day of the year, and the future owners of the incomplete condominiums have come by to meet with the developer, take stock of their future new homes and take measurements for their future new carpets and drapes. While the owners are meeting, the construction workers are winding up their half-day of work and looking forward to lunch and an extended siesta. On the top floor of the complex, the family of the night watchman stays out of the way of the hubbub in a temporary make-shift apartment they have occupied while construction continues. The children of the family play in the empty, wall-less rooms on the upper floors, racing their plastic toy cars and inventing elaborate games of hide and seek. Floating along between floors and ceilings, hovering like half-filled helium balloons, are the ghosts that haunt the building site. Although "haunt" doesn't really describe it-"haunt" implies something menacing, scary. These ghosts (all men, all naked, all covered in the same cement dust that coats everything else at the building site) don't seem to do much of anything except float and grumble to themselves. They are unseen by the developer and condo owners, and seen but ignored by the construction workers and the children-who seem to accept their presence in the same way that New Yorkers accept the existence of pigeons.

And that is the sum total of the book. A single ordinary day among very ordinary people. Even the ghosts are ordinary-so ordinary that we never wonder why they are there, or who they are, or why they are naked. Ghosts is the kind of story, one might say, where nothing really happens-if it weren't for the fact that after a mere thirty pages you feel like everything is happening, all the time...I wrote a review that might be longer than the book itself here.

The Waitress Was New by Dominique Fabre is a quiet little novel that packs an existential punch. It is a story about a week in the life of an aging bartender at a small, unexceptional café in the outskirts of Paris. Like the waitresses used to do at the diner I worked in college, like wait staff does in any restaurant, Pierre lives his life watching. He watches patrons come and go, allowing them to float in and out of his life as he must drift in and out of theirs. His day is meted out by the small rituals of running a business, from the time he opens the doors and wipes down the tables to the final moment he locks up for the evening. It is an easy, undemanding existence, only occasionally punctuated by something a little more interesting, like the patron who, when he drinks too much, will take off his clothes and dive into the Seine unless he is stopped. Pierre lives his life passively (he says that he decided to divorce his wife during a melancholic moment when he went to buy a pack of cigarettes), letting whim and chance blow him where they will. The people who come and go seem to have little impact on Pierre, and he almost none at all upon them. Whim and chance have blown him to this café, where he has landed like a dry autumn leaf caught in a corner. It is a curious state of non-existence, and one that seems to satisfy the bartender, until the day that the new waitress arrives.

The unsettling thing about the new waitress is what she implies by her mere presence. For if there is a new waitress, then what has become of the old waitress?

The appearance of the new waitress is the beginning of a series of events that theaten to unravel Pierre's peaceful, undemanding existence. In fact, it is a lesson to all of us just how precarious and fragile our simple, ordered lives actually are. The winds that blew Pierre to the little cafe can just as easily blow him away. (Longer review here)