Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King

EXCERPT: Taken from the title story, Five Tuesdays in Winter –

Mitchell’s daughter, who was twelve, accused him of loving his books but hating his customers. He didn’t hate them. He just didn’t like having to chat with them or lead them to very clearly marked sections – if they couldn’t read signs, why were they buying books? – while they complained that nothing was arranged by title. He would have liked to have a bouncer at the door, a man with a rippled neck who would turn people away or quietly remove them when they revealed too much ignorance.

ABOUT ‘FIVE TUESDAYS IN WINTER’: Told in the intimate voices of unique and endearing characters of all ages, these tales explore desire and heartache, loss and discovery, moments of jolting violence and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. A bookseller’s unspoken love for his employee rises to the surface, a neglected teenage boy finds much-needed nurturing from an unlikely pair of college students hired to housesit, a girl’s loss of innocence at the hands of her employer’s son becomes a catalyst for strength and confidence, and a proud nonagenarian rages helplessly in his granddaughter’s hospital room. Romantic, hopeful, brutally raw, and unsparingly honest, some even slipping into the surreal, these stories are, above all, about King’s enduring subject of love.

MY THOUGHTS: Every now and then I come across an author who can take the every day, the mundane, and transform it into something beautiful. Lily King is one such author. Her stories, all but one, enchanted me.

The emotions of her characters, their reactions to the situations in which they find themselves, is refreshingly real: from the sulky teenage daughter of recently separated parents to the bookseller who finally recognizes the feelings he has for his assistant, these are people we could know or who could live in our town.

My absolute favourite from this collection is Waiting for Charlie, the story of a grandfather sitting at the bedside of his gravely injured granddaughter, closely followed by Five Tuesdays in Winter, Hotel Seattle, and Mansard. The only story I disliked was The Man at the Door.

1. Creature ⭐⭐⭐⭐
2. Five Tuesdays in Winter ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5
3. When in the Dordogne ⭐⭐⭐⭐
4. North Sea ⭐⭐⭐.5
5. Timeline ⭐⭐⭐⭐
6. Hotel Seattle ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5
7. Waiting for Charlie ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
8. Mansard ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5
9. South ⭐⭐⭐⭐
10. The Man at the Door ⭐⭐

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#FiveTuesdaysinWinter #NetGalley

I: @lilybooks @groveatlantic

T: @lilykingbooks @GroveAtlantic

#contemporaryfiction #crime #domesticdrama #familydrama #historicalfiction #romance #shortstories #sliceoflife

THE AUTHOR: Lily King grew up in Massachusetts and received her B.A. in English Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. After grad school she took a job as a high school English teacher in Valencia, Spain and began writing her first novel. Eight years, ten more moves all over the US, and many bookstore, restaurant and teaching jobs later, that novel was published.

In 1995 she met a guy named Tyler at her friend Bernardine’s house in Belmont, Mass. They married in 1998. They have two daughters and two dogs and live in Portland, Maine.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Grove Atlantic via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

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