Friday Finds

Share your Friday Finds at Should be Reading. Friday Finds are the great books you heard about, read about or discovered and added to your TBR list this past week?

Sunflowers by Sheramy Bundrick

A novel of Vincent Van Gogh, Sheramy Bundrick’s Sunflowers is an arresting and beautiful tale of a young French prostitute’s passionate, doomed relationship with a troubled artist. Vividly evoking a bygone time and place, Bundrick brings her characters to breathtaking life as she seamlessly blends historical fact with riveting speculation. A story that will captivate readers of Susan Vreeland and Karen Essex, and admirers of Tracy Chevalier’s New York Times bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring, Sheramy Bundrick’s exceptional debut, Sunflowers, will linger long in the mind like a breathtaking landscape or an exquisite portrait done in oils.

"I'd heard about him but had never seen him, the foreigner with the funny name who wandered the countryside painting pictures."

From a talented new author comes a poignant and haunting novel of creation and desire, passion and madness, art and love.

A young prostitute seeking temporary refuge from the brothel, Rachel awakens in a beautiful garden in Arles to discover she is being sketched by a red-haired man in a yellow straw hat. This is no ordinary artist but the eccentric painter Vincent van Gogh—and their meeting marks the beginning of a remarkable relationship. He arrives at their first assignation at No. 1, Rue du Bout d'Arles, with a bouquet of wildflowers and a request to paint her—and before long, a deep, intense attachment grows between Rachel and the gifted, tormented soul.
But the sanctuary Rachel seeks from her own troubled past cannot be found here, for demons war within Vincent's heart and mind. And one shocking act will expose the harsh, inescapable truth about the artist she has grown to love more than life.

I have always liked Vincent Van Gogh's art work very much. I read a wonderful review of this book in Literatehousewife.com. I'm very excited about this book and can't wait to read it!

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Unfinished Desires by Gail Godwin

Set in a small town in the mountains of North Carolina, Unfinished Desires is a complex and deeply affecting story of friendship, loyalty, redemption, and memory.
The ninth grade class of Mount St. Gabriels, an all girls Catholic School, is strong willed (some might say "notorious"). Leading the pack is the unforgettable Tildy Stratton, the undisputed queen bee of the class, who quickly befriends Chloe Starnes, a day student recently taken in by her uncle following her young mother's mysterious death. The passionate friendship fills a void for each girl, and the headstrong Tildy soon has Chloe and the whole class enacting her vision for a play based on the colorful founding story of the school.
What happens the night of the play will profoundly affect the course of many of the lives involved, including that of the girls' teacher, a young nun, as well as the school's matriarch, Mother Suzanne Ravenel. Fifty years later, she will still relive that night in 1951, trying to reconcile past and present, and reaching back even further to her own senior year at Mt. St. Gabriel's, where the roots of a tragedy are buried.

Gail Godwin is an author my mother used to read. She gave me my first book by this author to read, A Mother and Two Daughters. I really enjoyed this book and over the years I have read several other books By Gail Godwin so I was very happy to see that she had a new one this year.