THE WIDOWER'S TALE BY JULIA GLASS

Seventy year old Percy Darling is settling happily into retirement.  He is reading novels, watching old movies and swimming naked in his pond.  His routines are disrupted when he is persuaded to let a locally beloved pre-school take over his barn.  As Percy sees his rural refuge overrun by children, parents and teachers, he must re-examine the solitary life that he has made for himself in the three decades since the sudden untimely death of his wife.  

This is a captivating tale about a man who can no longer remain aloof from his community, his two grown daughters or to his great shock, the precarious joy of falling in love.

I don't know which character I enjoyed the most, Percy, Trudy, Clover, Robert, Turo or Ira and Anthony.

It was a wonderful book!!!! 

ASTRAY BY EMMA DONOGHUE

The historical short stories in Emma Donoghue's new collection wander across centuries and continents, but they actually don't stray far from this Irish-born writer's preoccupation with captivity, sexual predation, prostitution, and the grip of parenting.  

All fourteen stories concern some sort of wanderer;  a wife fleeing the Irish famine to join her suffering husband in Toronto; a black slave and his white "Missus" bolting from the nasty, "Marse" in Civil War Texas; prospectors who strike an unexpected vein of mutual comfort in the snowbound Yukon goldfields; Chicago counterfeiters who hatch a harebrained plot to ransom Lincoln's exhumed body for a jailed colleagues release; and a lesbian couple losing each other to dementia after nearly six decades of living and making sculpture in Toronto.

Donoghue's endnotes supply information that takes us beyond the scope of her stories. They enhance the stories and satisfy our curiosity about what really happened.

Excellent read!!!!!