Dick Estell continues reading from
Consumption
by Kevin Patterson
Nan A. Talese (Doubleday), N.Y., 2007
(since November 9)

Victoria Robinson, an Inuit Eskimo who lives in a small community on the western shores of Hudson Bay, is ten years old when she is diagnosed with tuberculosis (consumption) and is evacuated to a southern sanitarium in Canada. When she is returned home, healed six year later, she finds a radically different world, and Victoria has become a stranger to her fmaily and her culture.

Spanning counries, generations, and cultures, Consumption is an epic novel of the Arctic, and a penetrating portrait of generational division and cultural dissonance.

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Beginning December 18
Serena
by Ron Rash
Ecco (Harper Collins) N.Y, 2008

The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton travel from Boston to the North Carolina mountains where they plan to create a timber empire.

Although George has already lived in the camp long enough to father an illegitimate child, Serena is new to the mountains -- but she soon shows herself to be the equal of any man, overseeing crews, hunting rattlesnakes, even saving her husband's life in the wilderness.

Author Ron Rash's masterful balance of violence and beauty yields a riveting novel that, at its core, tells of love both honored and betrayed.

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