Mailbox Monday 12.19.11

Hosted this month by Let Them Read Books.

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week (checked out library books don’t count, eBooks & audio books do). Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists.

It's the summer of 1927, and young Daphne du Maurier has traveled to Thornleigh Manor to attend the wedding of her good friend, Ellen, who is set to marry her beau, Teddy. Having met in the midst of the chaos and calamity of wartime, the lovers were brutally separated years before by family objections, but have since reunited. But when Teddy is found murdered just after the wedding, and Ellen is accused of the crime, Daphne and the dashing Major Browning must uncover the truth before all is lost.

Won.

When Daphne Duvallon left New Orleans in the middle of her own wedding and ran away to New York, she vowed never to return to the land of her ancestors. Now she has come back to the South, to Natchez, Mississippi, a city as mysterious and compelling as the ghostly voices that haunt Daphne's dreams. A hasty visit to play the harp at her brother's wedding becomes an unexpected rendezvous with destiny when she meets Simon Hopkins, a nationally renowned nature photographer with dark secrets of his own. For the first time in years Daphne knows what she wants--until shadows from another life that cannot forget or forgive threaten to silence the music in her life and destroy her only real chance for happiness.

From NetGalley. Release date: March 1st.

Put on trial by her slaveholder husband and convicted of madness by a Virginia judge, Iris Dunleavy is sent to Sanibel Asylum to be restored to a good wife. But Iris knows her husband is the true criminal; she is no lunatic, only guilty of violating Southern notions of property.

A pompous superintendent heads this asylum populated by wonderful characters, including his self-diagnosing twelve-year-old son, a woman who swallows anything in sight, and Ambrose Weller, a Confederate soldier whose memories terrorize him into wild fits that can only be calmed by the color blue, but whose gentleness and dark eyes beckon to Iris.

The institution calls itself modern, but Iris is skeptical of its methods, particularly the dreaded water treatment. In this isolated place, she finds love with Ambrose. But can she take him with her if she escapes? Will there be anything for them to make a life from, back home?

Blue Asylum is the rich, absorbing story of a spirited woman, a wounded soldier, their impossible love, and the call of freedom.

From NetGalley. Release date: April 10th.