Fall Fiction part 1

The most wonderful time of the year? Ha! I think not. My favorite month is July. I love that it is finally really summer and all the glory that goes with it....including vacations. But school is back and Fall officially starts September 22nd. So here I am pondering fall books. No, not the season Fall, rather books that include fall in the title. There is no other real connection between the books, but hopefully a story listed here will pique your reading interest?

Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears. This is a love story mixed with a tale of murder and high finance. Elizabeth, Lady Ravenscliff, hires a young crime reporter, Matthew Braddock, to investigate her husband’s tragic death. Braddock finds himself in a world of espionage, arms dealing and stock-market manipulation. As "The Independent" states " Pears has a knack of creating drama about high finance....This is a splendid return to the grand 19th century novel in its inclusive vision of society".


Long Fall by Walter Mosley. A departure from the usual historical novel that Mosley writes as it is set in present day New York. Race is a much more complex issue now than it was in earlier Mosley novels. Leonid McGill is a complicated character who is struggling between his upbringing, his criminal past and being a private detective. The question is: will his past allow him to become a bad guy turning good.


The Fall of the House of Usher is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The house of this novel is as much of a character as the humans, Roderick and Madeline Usher. A gloomy house that is inhabited by siblings that are unhealthy in body, psyche and spirit. One has to wonder which is effecting the other. Is the house making the siblings ill or is their illness affecting the house? Either way the family and the house both fall.


Fall on Your Knees by Anne Marie MacDonald. Now what good Maritimer would not think of this wonderful book. We must support our local authors. It was an Oprah book choice, the winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, and has been translated into 17 languages. Pretty good for a novel set in New Waterford, Cape Breton, eh! The four Lebanese Piper sisters depend on each other in their troubled relationship with their father, James. Can they escape their family history? Fall into this wonderful family epic to find out.


Fall of Giants by Ken Follett. This is the first of Follett’s new family saga trilogy, The Century. It focuses on five inter-related families - one English, one American, one Russian, one German and one Welsh - as they deal with the events of the First World War and the Russian revolution. Follett was also an Oprah book choice for his novel, The Pillars of the Earth.


Tune in tomorrow for part two...