Larry Greico, Librarian. Brazilian author Paulo Coelho has achieved international fame for his works of fiction. The library has just added Adultery, first published in Brazil in 2012, with the English translation published in 2014.

The story is about a woman, Linda, who has everything: a loving husband, two wonderful children, and a career as a well-respected and accomplished journalist. She is on the top of the world, where there are few surprises, but also where routine spells comfort. One day, she interviews a famous writer who awakens something in her she forgot she had—the urge for something new.

“I haven’t the slightest interest in being happy,” the writer says. “I prefer to live life passionately, which is dangerous because you never know what might happen next.” Linda is shaken by this newfound urge, and in reflection, she realizes she is not really happy at all. She is “terrified of taking risks, dulled by routine…her ten-year marriage lacks passion.”

Depressed, she seeks answers in yoga, self-improvement books, and weekend getaways, but nothing works. She happens to run into an ex-boyfriend, and that “sparks a fire that gives her life the meaning it has been lacking.” Her affair becomes an addiction, which then threatens to take over the rest of her life. She has to make a choice, or risk losing everything.

In exquisite prose, Jessie Burton gives us an enchanting first novel, The Miniaturist, a historical piece about a young woman in Amsterdam in 1686. Just eighteen-years-old, Nella Oortman begins her new life as the wife of “illustrious merchant trader” Johannes Brandt. She feels like a stranger in her new home. With Johannes often locked in his study or at his warehouse office, Nella is left alone with his rather unpleasant sister, Marin.

Then Johannes gives Nella an extraordinary wedding gift: “a cabinet-sized replica of their home.” Nella hires a miniaturist to make furnishings for the rooms in the “doll-house.” The tiny furnishings are meant to mirror their real-life counterparts, sometimes “in eerie and unexpected ways.”

Observer: “A fabulously gripping read that will appeal to fans of Girl With a Pearl Earring and The Goldfinch, but Burton is a genuinely new voice with her visceral take on sex, race, and class.”

New York Times bestselling author Louise Penny has just published her tenth “Chief Inspector Gamache Novel.” As The Long Way Home begins, Armand Gamache, former Chief Inspector of Homicide with the Surete du Quebec, has retired to the village of Three Pines, where he believes he has “found a peace he’d only imagined possible.”

As he frequents a park bench, reading a small book, The Balm in Gilead, he is joined by neighbor Clara Morrow who persuades him to help her find her estranged artist husband, Peter, who has failed to come home as promised on the first anniversary of their separation. Gamache enlists the aid of his former second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and Myrna Landers, and they “journey deeper and deeper into Quebec…and into the soul of Peter Morrow.”

The New York Times Book Review: “Penny writes with grace and intelligence about complex people struggling with complex emotions. But her great gift is her uncanny ability to describe what might seem indescribable.”

Join us for the Friends of the Library Fall Book and Bake Sale on Friday and Saturday, October 10 and 11, during library hours, to find literary bargains galore, and an assortment of tasty treats for the palate. When you support the Friends by participating in fund-raisers like this, you assure that the library’s programs continue. The Friends generously fund the Summer Reading Program for Kids, the artist-in-residence program, spring and fall film series, and a host of other events and services each year. In fact, they are the reason the Gilpin Library is one of the leading small and rural libraries in the country when it comes to programming. You can help.