Autumn is ambling into town from somewhere north. The trees have picked up on it already - the days are shorter now and leaves are setting about their annual shutdown. Lawn chairs are put away for the season, and we find ourselves more content to sit indoors on upholstery situated near a fireplace - or at least a nice incandescent bulb. What can be more appealing on a long fall evening than an impressive pile of books, a cup of tea and the scent of - yes - store bought flowers that seem to carry you back to a sweet summer day. For a while, you can forget the world. In this issue I am shining the spotlight on relatively unsung but marvelous - authors and their subjects, - hoping to share with you the joy of discovery that accompanied my own first encounters with them. Outstanding wordsmiths all, they are able to pull us into their worlds, often putting into words for the first time our own shared personal experiences and their remembrances. Or, when we need escape most, providing a fictional world, a world that has just enough truth woven into it that the story often stays with us longer than the so-called "best sellers" do. In three superbly written books, Canadian author Beth Powning has managed to immerse us in her luminescent prose each time. As a young married woman, she writes in her first book Home: Chronicle of a North Country Life:

It was early spring in New England,
when we were finally ready to make our move.
We withdrew day by day, cutting threads,
disengaging. As the truck rolls backward,
the headlights isolated my parents as they
stood together, waving, with brave smiles.
My tears made this last image, which I wanted
to be of the utmost clarity, blur and waver.

Most of us have had that moment, but she captures it for us so well, bring us back to that time, that place. Her new home was to be a rural old New Brunswick farm. Home, with its marriage of Powning's extraordinary nature photography and her meticulous and flowing observations of her wild and only slightly unwilling land over all the seasons, draws us into the natural world and leaves us with many lasting moments and beautiful images. She is an artist in every sense of the word. The photography is breathtaking.

The Hatbox Letters marks Powning's debut as a novelist, and this latest book is a "don't miss." Living alone in rural Canada, 52-year-old Kate Harding, recently widowed and suffering the emotional pain of the loss of husband and best friend, begins to immerse herself in the house, sorting through family papers going back to the 1800s, all stored in old hatboxes. (I have corresponded with the author, finding that the mysteries and tragedy unveiled in the hatboxes are the true story of her own ancestors, making the book even more spell-binding). As a new tragedy unfolds in Kate's own life, we see her gradually beginning to connect the strands of her unraveled life.

Prepare for a slow moving beginning followed by a book that is oh! so difficult to put down. A great book! Shadow Child: An Apprenticeship in Love and Loss, Powning's moving memoir of the loss of a stillborn first child will have special meaning for anyone who has experienced the loss of a child.

And now - a poet, a poet whom we can identify with - a poet who celebrates the "mystery of the ordinary". . . Linda Pastan. I still have a poem from her early days, so meaningful at the time, about childbirth:

She's crowning, someone says,
but there is no one royal here,
just me, quite barefoot,
greeting my barefoot child.

Thirty years later, I find her still touching the corners of my heart with her truths, as she gathers the best of ten previous books in Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998. Pastan is past 70 now, and her poetry has worked through the puzzles of childhood, marriage and motherhood. Now in her latest poems, we see the beginnings of her looking at final losses. The poignant poem within "Notes to my Mother" - is bound to touch most of us:

Though I learned to love
the woman you became
after the stroke,
I never quite forgave her
for hiding my real mother - you,
Somewhere
in the drifted snows beyond
that unscalable widow's peak.

There is more - much more - and if you are like me, you will read it more than once and then find yourself copying out poems to read again and again.

Moving on. We all have that need at times to escape - to cozy up on the sofa for the evening with a novel or mystery that, will stand out from the rest. Object of Virtue stands up to the test, and more. This tale of a previously unknown Faberge figurine, up for auction at a prestigious New York auction house, and a last minute search to establish its heritage and authenticate it, allows its author, Nicholas B.A. Nicholson a specialist in Russian art works at Christies, to bring us backstage into the world of the art auction world. Nicholson’s insider knowledge, combined with his extensive background in Russian history and the Russian community in New York, not only holds our interest with the intricacies of his tale, but we find that he has opened a world few of us would have known. Don't miss reading the interview with Nicholson at book’s end!

Another Canadian author - Michelle Wan - again with an unusual life of travel - this time to the Dordogne region of France where she and her husband, a tropical horticulturist, explore annually in their quest to photograph and chart wild orchids. Her depth of knowledge, both of orchids and the Dordogne, has led her to write a literary mystery of a woman's search for her long missing sister in this ruggedly beautiful area of France - and into the exotic world of orchid hunting, looking for the Deadly Slipper of the title. A rare Lady's Slipper orchid, it was in the last photograph in a roll of film found after her sister's disappearance. You will find the plot filled with surprising twists and turns, and your knowledge of orchids will improve one-hundred-fold.

Being Mrs. Alcott spans the life of Grace Alcott, a woman for whom much has been beyond her control or not her choice. It is reminds me of that time long past when wifely images were set by the mothers' generation. A long-married patrician, saddled with an' overbearing husband, ungrateful sons, and now cancer, she begins to come to terms with what she has done. "I've accomplished almost nothing in life," Mrs. Alcott finally admits. Author Nancy Geary, writing this book around the question of accident-or-fate versus choice or free will, lets us watch Grace Alcott come to terms with what she has allowed to happen, what she has left to do, and what she still has time to change. Even in this era where the bar of feminist consciousness has been raised, many "Mrs. Alcotts" still exist. For some reason, it is then I think of Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken."

A bit of non-fiction - with the "rush" that comes from some armchair reading about those whose creed of living life to the fullest takes us right to the edge. You should not miss reading the most incredible story ever in mountaineering, Touching the Void, by Joe Simpson. But if time is a factor, our library now has the DVD, which holds true to the tale and keeps you on the edge of your seat. The incredible British made film of the same name tells the true tale of mountain climber Joe Simpson's escape from death in the Peruvian Andes after a climbing accident in 1985 a story of survival that ranks alongside that of Shackle ton's in the Antarctic. The movie keeps rigid adherence to the facts of the best adventure book of our lifetime. I promise you that it will stay in your head long after you see it. Be one of the first to see it at home!

To balance that, let's go to a woman explorer, so famous in her time - socialite Ruth Harkness. If we are old enough, we still may remember little Su-Lin, the infant giant panda - never before seen in the West - who was captured i n China and brought back to go on display at the  Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. When Harkness' husband died while trying to bring back the first panda, "with a whiskey sour in one hand and a Chesterfield cigarette in the other" Ruth arrived to complete her mission. She found herself up against bandits, ruthless competitors, and such rugged wilderness and hard times, that we find ourselves looking back often at the period photographs in the book that document quest for the panda, saying "this woman had the GUTS to do that?" Author Vicki Croke's access to her correspondence during that time enabled her to make this woman and her adventures in wildest - China absolutely come alive. You will find The Lady and The Panda a very exciting tale.

Stories are essential to our very nature as human beings. Within our library you will find a multitude of new literary delights – large print, books on tape, best sellers – or perhaps most delectably of all, plan to go off on a leisurely ramble in search of old favorites deserving a new look. New or old, we invite you to go out with an armload for your fall pleasures.
                                     – Joan Larsen
 

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