Maya is in love with both her boyfriend and her boss. Sadie’s lover calls her as he drives to meet his wife at marriage counseling. Gwen pines for her roommate, a man who will hold her hand but then tells her that her palm is sweaty. And Sasha agrees to have a drink with her married lover’s wife and then immediately regrets it. These are the women of Single, Carefree, Mellow. The Avid Reader Show is sponsored by Wellington Square Bookshop in Chester County, PA. Please visit our website at www.we...
Feb 23, 2015•1 hr
Minneapolis Star Tribune: “Unbecoming inverts everything we expect from a heist story: The pacing is deliberate, the characters are recognizably human, and even small acts of deception leave victims in their wake…By introducing complex themes and one of the most compelling characters in recent fiction, Scherm has elevated the heist novel beyond entertainment. Like a painting that becomes more intriguing the longer you study it, Unbecoming is a genuine work of art.” The Avid Reader show is sponso...
Feb 21, 2015•43 min
A debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people's lives. Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She’s even started to feel like she knows them. “Jess and Jason,” she calls them. Their life—as she sees it—is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost. The Avi...
Feb 10, 2015•18 min
Moving from the hot and dry present of a quiet Canadian farm to a dusty, burnt past of hunger, war, and passion, from trying to remember to trying to forget, Etta and Otto and Russell and James is an astounding literary debut about friendship and love, hope and honor, and the romance of last—great—adventures. The Avid Reader is sponsored by Wellington Square Bookshop in Chester county, PA. Please visit our website at www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com.
Feb 04, 2015•49 min
***This book has also been published as Where the Moon Isn't.*** Winner of the 2013 Costa First Novel Award "A stunning novel. Ambitious and exquisitely realized . . . clearly the work of a major new talent." —S. J. Watson, New York Times bestselling author of Before I Go to Sleep While on vacation with their parents, Matthew Homes and his older brother sneak out in the middle of the night. Only Matthew comes home safely. Ten years later, Matthew tells us, he has found a way to bring his brother...
Feb 04, 2015•50 min
Orphan Train is a gripping story of friendship and second chances from Christina Baker Kline, author of Bird in Hand and The Way Life Should Be. Penobscot Indian Molly Ayer is close to “aging out” out of the foster care system. A community service position helping an elderly woman clean out her home is the only thing keeping Molly out of juvie and worse...
Jan 28, 2015•54 min
A lively microbiography of Chaucer that tells the story of the tumultuous year that led to the creation of The Canterbury Tales In 1386, Geoffrey Chaucer endured his worst year, but began his best poem. The father of English literature did not enjoy in his lifetime the literary celebrity that he has today—far from it. The middle-aged Chaucer was living in London, working as a mid-level bureaucrat and sometime poet, until a personal and professional crisis set him down the road leading to The Can...
Dec 15, 2014•43 min
Sam discusses his staffs picks for the Best Books of 2014 with store manager, Donna. The Avid Reader Show is sponsored by Wellington Square Bookshop in Chester County, PA. The show airs every Monday at 4PM on WCHE AM 1520. Please visit our store at www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com
Dec 15, 2014•39 min
About Stanley Warren.. My first area of creative expression has been poetry. I have written some 1500 poems, of which several dozen have been published here and there, but many more recited at readings. In my late twenties I became the lyricist for a progressive electronic combo called Silver Apples, writing the words to seven of the nine songs on their first album, music that is played and listened to today. The Avid Reader Show is sponsored by Wellington Square Bookshop in Chester County, PA. ...
Nov 25, 2014•42 min
Hailed as “The Great Israeli Novel” (Time Out Tel Aviv) and winner of the prestigious Bernstein Prize, The Hilltop is a monumental and daring work about life in a West Bank settlement from one of Israel’s most acclaimed young novelists. The Avid Reader Show airs each Monday at 4PM EST on WCHE AM 1520. Please visit our website at www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com
Nov 25, 2014•36 min
Fiction. "Who is Nell Zink? She claims to be an expatriate living in northeast Germany. Maybe she is; maybe she isn't. I don't know. I do know that this first novel arrives with a voice that is fully formed: mature, hilarious, terrifyingly intelligent, and wicked. The novel is about a bird-loving American couple that moves to Europe and becomes, basically, eco-terrorists. This is strange, and interesting, but in between is some writing about marriage, love, fidelity, Europe, and saving the earth...
Oct 30, 2014•54 min
Inspired by and structured around the chamber piece of the same title by the French composer Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time is a mesmerizing story of four lives irrevocably linked in a single act of betrayal. The novel takes us on an unforgettable journey beginning during the 1930s Bonus Army riots, when World War I veteran Arthur Sinclair is falsely accused of conspiracy and then disappears. His absence will haunt his son, Douglas, as well as Alden and Sutton Kelly, the children ...
Oct 30, 2014•27 min
In his highly anticipated sequel to The Elements, Theodore Gray demonstrates how the elements of the periodic table combine to form the molecules that make up our world. The Avid Reader show airs Mondays at 5PM EST on WCHE AM 1520. The show is sponsored by Wellington Square Bookshop in Chester County, PA. Please visit our website at www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com
Oct 30, 2014•31 min
Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her million-copy bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics to her eager students in Iran. In this exhilarating followup, Nafisi has written the book her fans have been waiting for: an impassioned, beguiling, and utterly original tribute to the vital importance of fiction in a democratic society. What Reading Lolita in ...
Oct 30, 2014•44 min
Mandy Aftel is widely acclaimed as a trailblazer in natural perfumery. Over two decades of sourcing the finest aromatic ingredients from all over the world and creating artisanal fragrances, she has been an evangelist for the transformative power of scent. In Fragrant, through five major players in the epic of aroma, she explores the profound connection between our sense of smell and the appetites that move us, give us pleasure, make us fully alive. The Avid Reader Show is sponsored by Wellingto...
Oct 17, 2014•35 min
Digital information is a powerful tool that spreads unbelievably rapidly, infects all corners of society, and is all but impossible to control—even when that information is actually a lie. In Virtual Unreality, Charles Seife uses the skepticism, wit, and sharp facility for analysis that captivated readers in Proofiness and Zero to take us deep into the Internet information jungle and cut a path through the trickery, faker y, and cyber skulduggery that the online world enables. The Avid Reader sh...
Oct 07, 2014•46 min
“ Haunting and riveting ... In several moving passages, Mandel's characters look back with similar longing toward the receding pre-plague world, remembering all the things they'd once taken for granted — from the Internet to eating an orange ... It's not just the residents of Mandel's post-collapse world who need to forge stronger connections and live for more than mere survival. So do we all. " - Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The Avid Reader Show is sponsored by Wellington Square Boo...
Sep 27, 2014•44 min
“Maria Venegas is a transfixing writer. Her voice is tough, vulnerable, humorous, insightful and always rousingly alive. American readers have rarely encountered a depiction of Mexican lives so true, unsentimental, and moving as in this emotionally complex story of an Americanized young woman and her outlaw father who lives by the hard violent codes of Mexico profundo.” —Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name The Avid Reader Show is sponsored by Wellington Square Bookshop. It airs every Monda...
Sep 15, 2014•50 min
“Is there such a thing as a Rescue Book? Well, there is now. This is a miracle of a book. It’s even a spiritual handbook. And it is for readers young and old and all of the in-between. Cooney is such a wise genius of a writer, and her sentences keep surprising you, but are never the point in themselves. I read with a kind of mental breathlessness. If Cooney needs someone to convince her to write a sequel, I volunteer.” —Gail Godwin AUGUST 2014 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT The Avid Reader Show is sp...
Sep 15, 2014•41 min
The New York Times bestseller by the author of Cloud Atlas | Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize “With The Bone Clocks, [David] Mitchell rises to meet and match the legacy of Cloud Atlas.”—Los Angeles Times Following a terrible fight with her mother over her boyfriend, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her family and her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as “the radio people,” Holly is a lightning rod for psyc...
Sep 15, 2014•41 min
Arturo and Alma Rivera have lived their whole lives in Mexico. One day, their beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter, Maribel, sustains a terrible injury, one that casts doubt on whether she’ll ever be the same. And so, leaving all they have behind, the Riveras come to America with a single dream: that in this country of great opportunity and resources, Maribel can get better. The Avid Reader Show airs Mondays at 5PM EST on WCHE 1520AM. The Show is sponsored by Wellington Square Bookshop in Chester...
Aug 17, 2014•40 min
From the National Book Foundation.. James McBride’s novel takes a pivotal, troubled sequence in American history—John Brown’s abolitionist campaign—and retells it in a voice as comic and original as any we have heard since Mark Twain. The narrator is one Henry Shackleford, aka Onion, an escaped teenaged slave who accompanies Brown while disguised as a girl. Fondly portraying Brown as a well-meaning but unhinged zealot, The Good Lord Bird is daringly irreverent, but also wise, funny, and affectin...
Aug 17, 2014•25 min
KIRKUS REVIEW On a journey from Ohio to Hollywood to Long Island to London in the 1940s, a couple of plucky half sisters continually reinvent themselves with the help of an unconventional assortment of friends and relatives. The Avid Reader Show airs Mondays at 5PM EST on WCHE 1520AM. The Show is sponsored by Wellington Square Bookshop in Chester County, PA. Please visit our website at www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com
Aug 17, 2014•44 min
Physicist Dave Goldberg speeds across space, time and everything in between showing that our elegant universe—from the Higgs boson to antimatter to the most massive group of galaxies—is shaped by hidden symmetries that have driven all our recent discoveries about the universe and all the ones to come. The Avid Reader Show airs every Monday at 5PM EST on WCHE AM 1520. The show is sponsored by Wellington Square Bookshop in Chester County, PA. Please visit our website at www.wellingtonsquarebooks.c...
Aug 03, 2014•58 min
Me Before You Louisa Clark is an ordinary girl living an exceedingly ordinary life—steady boyfriend, close family—who has barely been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for ex–Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair bound after an accident. Will has always lived a huge life—big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel—and now he’s pretty sure he cannot live the way he is. One Plus One One single mom. One chaotic family. One quirky stranger....
Jul 27, 2014
Streetlamps, neon signs – an ever-present glow that has changed the natural world and adversely affected our health; Paul Bogard illuminates the problems caused by a lack of darkness. We live awash in artificial light. But night’s natural darkness has always been invaluable for our spiritual health and the health of the natural world, and every living creature suffers from its loss. Paul Bogard investigates what we mean when we talk about darkness. He travels between the intensely lit cities – f...
Jul 19, 2014•56 min
"A great story--how modernism brought down the regime of censorship--told as a great story. Kevin Birmingham's imaginative scholarship brings Joyce and his world to life. There is a fresh detail on nearly every page."--Louis Menand, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club The Avid Reader is sponsored by Wellington Square Bookshop in Chester County, PA. The show airs at 5PM EST on WCHE 1520 AM. Please visit our website at www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com
Jun 26, 2014•59 min
Dysfunctional government: It’s become a cliché, and most of us are resigned to the fact that nothing is ever going to change. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge show us, that is a seriously limited view of things. In fact, there have been three great revolutions in government in the history of the modern world. The West has led these revolutions, but now we are in the midst of a fourth revolution, and it is Western government that is in danger of being left behind. The Avid Reader Show i...
Jun 26, 2014•41 min
Not since Donna Tartt’s The Secret History has a novel this intoxicating captured the headiness and dark temptations of university life. The old Etruscan city of Grifonia swarms with year-abroad students—thousands of them from all over. Ostensibly, they’ve come to study. But really they are here to reinvent themselves, to shuck their identities and buck constraints far from the watchful eyes of parents and others who know them too well. There’s a reason Henry James’s young ladies went to Europe ...
Jun 22, 2014•56 min
Laline Paull’s ambitious and bold first novel, “The Bees,” follows Flora 717, a sanitation worker doomed by her birth to the lowest caste of her community. She is large and ugly and — oh, yes — a bee. What could feel gimmicky or cute never does; Flora 717 is a brave and spirited soul, and it is a pleasure to follow her through the hive and the air. The brief prologue and epilogue are the only sections of the book with humans, aside from a single scene halfway through in which a man harvesting ho...
Jun 19, 2014•56 min
