Karen’s Suggestions

The Radleys

By Matt Haig

On a leafy street in the quiet village of Bishopthorpe there lives a very ordinary and averagely dysfunctional happy family. Peter Radley is the village doctor, and his wife Helen is part of the local book club. Their children, Clara and Rowan, may be experiencing all the hormonal anguish of being teenagers...but that's only a normal part of growing up. However, Peter and Helen have kept from the children a life-changing family secret.

One night, when Clara finds herself driven to committing a bloodthirsty act of violence, her parents react with resignation rather than horror. Peter and Helen must now explain things to their children: why it is that their skin is so sensitive to sunlight, why they all find garlic so repulsive, why Clara's recent decision to go vegan has been so detrimental to her health...and other disadvantages of being a family of abstaining vampires.

Reeling from their parents' revelation, and with the police closing in, Clara and Rowan are stunned by the further discovery that they also have an uncle, a smooth-talking and decidedly active vampire who has been kept away from them all their lives. But when he swoops into the village to save the day, he unleashes a host of shadowy and even darker secrets that will bring the whole Radley family either to reconciliation and readjustment...or to self-destruction.

We, The Drowned

By Carsten Jensen

An astonishing debut and international bestseller--a thrilling epic tale of the sea, in the tradition of Melville, Conrad, and Stevenson.

Carsten Jensen's debut novel has taken the world by storm. Already hailed in Europe as an instant classic, We, the Drowned is the story of the port town of Marstal, whose inhabitants have sailed the world's oceans aboard freight ships for centuries. Spanning over a hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War, and from the barren rocks of Newfoundland to the lush plantations of Samoa, from the roughest bars in Tasmania, to the frozen coasts of northern Russia, We, the Drowned spins a magnificent tale of love, war, and adventure, a tale of the men who go to sea and the women they leave behind.

Ships are wrecked at sea and blown up during wars, they are places of terror and violence, yet they continue to lure each generation of Marstal men, fathers and sons, away. Strong, resilient, women raise families alone and sometimes take history into their own hands. There are cannibals here, shrunken heads, prophetic dreams, forbidden passions, cowards, heroes, devastating tragedies, and miraculous survivals — everything that a town like Marstal has actually experienced, and that makes classic, We, the Drowned an unforgettable novel, destined to take its place among the greatest seafaring literature.

Kraken

By China Mieville

With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this, or any other, year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about, or prevent, the End of All Things.