About a boy - by Nick Hornby
Will Lightman is a Peter Pan for the 1990s. At 36, the terminally hip North Londoner is unmarried, hyper-concerned with his coolness quotient, and blithely living off his father's novelty-song royalties. Will sees himself as entirely lacking in hidden depths--and he's proud of it! The only trouble is, his friends are succumbing to responsibilities and children, and he's increasingly left out in the cold. How can someone brilliantly equipped for meaningless relationships ensure that he'll continue to meet beautiful Julie Christie-like women and ensure that they'll throw him over before things get too profound? A brief encounter with a single mother sets Will off on his new career, that of "serial nice guy." As far as he's concerned--and remember, concern isn't his strong suit--he's the perfect catch for the young mother on the go. After an interlude of sexual bliss, she'll realize that her child isn't ready for a man in their life and Will can ride off into the Highgate sunset, where more damsels apparently await. The only catch is that the best way to meet these women is at single-parent get-togethers. In one of Nick Hornby's many hilarious (and embarrassing) scenes, Will falls into some serious misrepresentation at SPAT ("Single Parents--Alone Together"), passing himself off as a bereft single dad: "There was, he thought, an emotional truth here somewhere, and he could see now that his role-playing had a previously unsuspected artistic element to it. He was acting, yes, but in the noblest, most profound sense of the word."
What interferes with Will's career arc, of course, is reality--in the shape of a 12-year-old boy who is in many ways his polar opposite. For Marcus, cool isn't even a possibility, let alone an issue. For starters, he's a victim at his new school. Things at home are pretty awful, too, since his musical therapist mother seems increasingly in need of therapy herself. All Marcus can do is cobble together information with a mixture of incomprehension, innocence, self-blame, and unfettered clear sight. As fans of Fever Pitch and High Fidelity already know, Hornby's insight into laddishness magically combines the serious and the hilarious. About a Boy continues his singular examination of masculine wish-fulfillment and fear. This time, though, the author lets women and children onto the playing field, forcing his feckless hero to leap over an entirely new--and entirely welcome--set of emotional hurdles.
From 
BBC reporter Delaney's fictionalized history of his native country, an Irish bestseller, is a sprawling, riveting read, a book of stories melding into a novel wrapped up in an Irish history text. In 1951, when Ronan O'Mara is nine, he meets the aging itinerant Storyteller, who emerges out a "silver veil" of Irish mist, hoping to trade a yarn for a hot meal. Welcomed inside, the Storyteller lights his pipe and begins, telling of the architect of Newgrange, who built "a marvelous, immortal structure... before Stonehenge in England, before the pyramids of Egypt," and the dentally challenged King Conor of Ulster, who tried, and failed, to outsmart his wife. The stories utterly captivate the young Ronan ("This is the best thing that ever, ever happened"), and they'll draw readers in, too, with their warriors and kings, drinkers and devils, all rendered cleanly and without undue sentimentality. When Ronan's mother banishes the Storyteller for telling a blasphemous tale, Ronan vows to find him. He also becomes fascinated by Irish myth and legend, and, as the years pass, he discovers his own gift for storytelling. Eventually, he sets off, traversing Ireland on foot to find his mentor. Past and present weave together as Delaney entwines the lives of the Storyteller and Ronan in this rich and satisfying book. 
For those of you who love literature and food, this is the most wonderful book to recommend. It is called 
The Messianic Legacy by Baigent-Leigh-Lincoln (1989)
Discovery of the Grail by Andrew Sinclair (1998)
(2006)
One of the most important developments of the last 50 years in religious studies has been the emergence of suppressed and forgotten texts and lore. A flood of new archeological knowledge and newly discovered ancient texts sheds unexpected light on the traditions of Christian worship. Into this flood, Gardner, who holds the office of the Jacobite Historiographer Royal of the Royal House of Stewart, would like to inject yet another revelation: the bloodline of Jesus Christ. According to Gardner, Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and she was pregnant with his child when he was crucified at Qumran, not Golgotha as it is usually thought. Mary delivered a male child before she and her son were spirited out of Palestine to France, where she died. This child became the scion of an amazing genealogy that terminates,surprise, in the House of Stuart. Furthermore, that house did not expire but flourishes to this day. This book is an amazing patchwork of scholarly trappings and dizzy tomfoolery stitched together with myth and fable until it fabricates the amazing argument that indeed the Crown of England properly belongs to the Line of David through Jesus Christ himself.
(1994) Clark's books are always megahits, and her fans love the nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat suspense that is her trademark. So it's a little surprising that this collection of six interrelated stories featuring Willy and Alvirah Meehan lacks Clark's usual energy and pizzazz. The Meehans, who first appeared in Clark's Weep No More, My Lady, have struck it rich in the lottery. No longer do they slave away at housecleaning (Alvirah) and plumbing (Willy). Their days are spent pursuing the hedonistic pleasures of the idle rich, although, to their credit, Alvirah and Willy haven't lost touch with their roots. Alvirah seems to have a "talent" for murder, both for being in the general vicinity when one occurs and for uncloaking the villain before anyone else. For readers who enjoy the nouveau riche approach to crime solving (a la Jonathan and Jennifer Hart or Nick and Nora Charles), these stories may prove mildly entertaining, but because they're so short, there's little opportunity for any real development of motive, plot, or character. And while the Meehans are basically nice, easy-to-like folks, the stories about their escapades are flat, facile, and distinctly lacking in suspense.
(2001) Emily Graham knows what it's like to have enemies. The pretty New York attorney--a millionaire due to a lucky stock market break--has been sued by her greedy ex-husband and stalked by a man who thinks she helped his mother's murderer escape punishment. But when she buys her great-great-grandmother's childhood home in the sleepy resort town of Spring Lake, Emily thinks her new life will be saner, even though five other young women, including Emily's ancestor Madeline Shapley, have disappeared from Spring Lake under creepy circumstances over the past century.
(1996) Imagine Nick and Nora Charles with a taste for politics and none for gin, and you'd be pretty close to Mary Higgins Clark's Henry Parker Britland IV and his attractive young wife, Sandra O'Brien Britland, known as Sunday. Henry, possessor of an enormous inherited fortune and known as one of America's sexiest men, has just finished his second term as president of the United States and is happily retired at 44, puttering around his New Jersey country estate. Sunday, who bootstrapped her way up from a modest working-class background, is a junior congresswoman with a reputation for smarts. The two met, romantically enough, on the eve of Henry's leaving office, fell madly in love, and were married six weeks later. In this collection of four pleasantly readable stories, the sleuthing duo catch the murderer of a statesman's flashy amour, endure Sunday's kidnapping and mastermind her rescue, solve the 34-year-old mystery of the disappearance of a foreign prime minister from the Britland family yacht, and reunite a ransomed boy with his parents at Christmas. Of the four, "They All Ran After the President's Wife" may be the best plotted, and has a particularly amusing McGuffin in the character of a caviar-loving terrorist. While the suspense is on the mild side throughout, the romance is lighthearted but sincere, and the occasional flashes of wit are dryly appealing. It's a bonbon, to be enjoyed for its brief sweetness.
(2005) Clark's clever use of a bit of New Jersey real estate code fits perfectly into her usual formula for minting bestsellers in a novel about past deadly secrets coming to haunt the present. At One Old Mill Lane, in Mendham, N.J., 10-year-old Liza Barton wakes to find her stepfather, Ted Cartwright, attacking her mother, Audrey. Liza grabs a gun in defense, but in the ensuing melee Audrey is killed and Ted is wounded. Dubbed "Little Lizzie Borden," Liza is taken away and almost convicted of murdering her mother and attempting to kill the lying, scheming Ted. Twenty-four years later, Liza, now known as Celia Foster Nolan, has just been presented with a surprise birthday present from her new husband, Alex: the house at One Old Mill Lane. Alex doesn't know Celia is really Liza, and he doesn't know the house's grim past—but thanks to a real estate code obligating agents to notify prospective buyers if a house could be considered "stigmatized property," he's about to find out about the latter at least. As Celia fights to keep her dark secret hidden, their real estate agent turns up dead. More folks are killed and Celia comes under suspicion. But in typical Clark style, most of the characters look a little guilty. Some readers will get annoyed by Celia's tendency to do things that reinforce the cops' suspicions, but Clark's steadfast fans will suspend all necessary disbelief and play along.
(1993) Henry Chester is an artist in the late 19th century, specializing in sentimental paintings of young girls. At the same time fascinated and repelled by female sensuality, he has spent much of his career searching for the Perfect Woman - one who embodies his conflicting ideals of innocence, passivity and sexual availability. In Effie, a life model only nine years old, he finally believes he has found her. As soon as she is old enough, Henry marries Effie, having moulded and educated her to suit his purposes, but the infatuated young woman soon realizes that the man she has married is not the loving father-figure she imagined him to be. Repressed and infantilized by her husband, increasingly dependent on the laudanum he gives her for her "nerves" and desperate for affection, Effie becomes involved with the cheerily amoral Mose Harper, and enters an illicit affair with him which leads her into a dangerous underworld of prostitution, revenge, deceit and murder. Who is Fanny Miller, the brass-tongued madame? Why does she seem so familiar? Who is Marta, her dark daughter, lost years ago and yet still somehow present in the shadows of her silken rooms? And when does friendship end and possession begin? 
(2002) The story is set on the tiny island of Le Devin, off the Brittany coast. The ageing population consists of two communities; the wealthy La Houssinière, which covers the most habitable part of the island and which is favoured by tourists, and Les Salants, an impoverished, anachronistic fishing village with little to recommend it to outsiders. Rivalry has existed between the two communities for years. The main point of contention between them is La Houssinière's complete control over the island's only beach and the source of its prosperity. Into this arena comes Mado, a spirited and independent young woman who left the island with her mother ten years ago, returning now to Les Salants to care for her ailing father. Dogged by prejudice, she manages nevertheless to make a life in the community she has always loved, but finds it threatened, both by serious tidal erosion as well as by the influential Claude Brismand, a local entrepreneur and owner of the island's only hotel, whose plans to buy up land in Les Salants upon which to build holiday homes is becoming increasingly more aggressive. When Mado realizes that a new sea wall, built by Brismand at La Houssinière to protect the beach, is directly responsible for the damage to Les Salants, she attempts to redress the balance. With the help of Flynn, an itinerant beachcomber and one-time engineer, she and the rest of the villagers of Les Salants formulate an ambitious and secret engineering project to attack the beach and to take it for themselves...
(2003) It is set in France, at the beginning of the 17th century, a time of political and social upheaval following the murder of the king, Henri IV. It is the story of Juliette, a onetime acrobat and rope-dancer, now retired and living under an assumed identity as a nun (of all things), with her daughter, Fleur, in a tiny island convent off the Brittany coast. Juliette - or Soeur Auguste, as she is now known - has had a troubled and eventful life. Raised by gypsies, persecuted by the Church, separated from her adopted family, driven to begging and prostitution to make ends meet, she manages to find a kind of stability as a performer in a dance troupe led by Guy LeMerle, known as The Blackbird; an actor, playwright and petty criminal with whom the young Juliette becomes infatuated. After some years on the road and some popular success, the troupe is scattered, following a disastrous brush with the law. Juliette, now pregnant and thoroughly disillusioned with the itinerant life, finds refuge in the abbey of Sainte Marie-de-la-mer, under the protection of the kindly Abbess. However, the death of the Abbess, a few months after the murder of the king in Paris, plunges the convent into disarray. The old regime is at an end; a new Abbess has been appointed (for political reasons), a young woman of noble birth who intends to introduce reform on a grand scale. Juliette's dismay is compounded when the new Abbess reveals herself to be a child of only eleven years of age, raised in Paris and quite unable to appreciate the needs and feelings of a group of country nuns. Worse still, she has brought her confessor with her, and Juliette recognizes him at once. Now masquerading as a priest, Guy LeMerle, Juliette's old associate, clearly intends mischief. Unable to unmask him without betraying herself and putting her daughter in jeopardy, Juliette is drawn unwillingly into his plans. But as LeMerle leads the nuns gradually into confusion, hysteria and finally, chaos, Juliette realizes that he has more than simple extortion in mind. And as the story builds up to a confrontation from which only one of them can escape with their life, Juliette is cruelly torn between her loyalty to her convent friends, her instinct as a mother and her enduring love for a man who has betrayed her once before, and who will not hesitate to do so again…
