Stacking the Shelves

Stacking the Shelves

Stacking The Shelves is all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves, may it be physical or virtual. This means you can include books you buy in a physical store or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts and of course ebooks! It’s hosted by Tynga’s Reviews and Reading Reality!

(Link to add on Goodreads through the book title.)

I was very excited to discover under my Christmas tree a subscription box from The Strand! The Book Hookup is a quarterly subscription box that includes an anticipated signed, first edition title along with an additional paperback and literary goodies from people and places The Strand loves. My family was a little confused when I opened the box because it didn’t include books they thought they had ordered, but I was happy because one of the books (Days Without End) was even on my TBR shelf. Hopefully I don’t have to send it back! 😉

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

Thomas McNulty, aged barely seventeen and having fled the Great Famine in Ireland, signs up for the U.S. Army in the 1850s. With his brother in arms, John Cole, Thomas goes on to fight in the Indian Wars—against the Sioux and the Yurok—and, ultimately, the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, the men find these days to be vivid and alive, despite the horrors they see and are complicit in.

Moving from the plains of Wyoming to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry’s latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. An intensely poignant story of two men and the makeshift family they create with a young Sioux girl, Winona, Days Without End is a fresh and haunting portrait of the most fateful years in American history and is a novel never to be forgotten.

On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl

A lonely newlywed and her wayward brother-in-law follow divergent and dangerous paths through the postwar American West. 

Muriel is newly married and restless, transplanted from her rural Kansas hometown to life in a dusty bungalow in San Diego. The air is rich with the tang of salt and citrus, but the limits of her new life seem to be closing in: She misses her freethinking mother, dead before Muriel’s nineteenth birthday, and her sly, itinerant brother-in-law, Julius, who made the world feel bigger than she had imagined. And so she begins slipping off to the Del Mar racetrack, to bet and eavesdrop, learning the language of horses and risk. Meanwhile, Julius is testing his fate in Las Vegas, working at a local casino where tourists watch atomic tests from the roof, and falling in love with Henry, a young card cheat. When Henry is eventually discovered and run out of town, Julius takes off to search for him in the plazas and dives of Tijuana, trading one city of dangerous illusions for another.

On Swift Horses is a debut of astonishing power: a story of love and luck, of two people trying to find their place in a country that is coming apart even as it promised them everythin
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Have you read either of these books? Are they on your TBR? Do you have a subscription box to The Book Hookup?? Let me know in the comments!

Happy Wandering!

2 thoughts on “Stacking the Shelves”

  1. I am not familiar with either of these books, but they both sound very good. I will watch for your reviews.

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