~ Mailbox Monday ~

Welcome to Mailbox Monday, a weekly meme, hosted by Alyce of At Home With Books for the month of January, originally created and hosted by Marcia of A girl and her books. Below are the titles I received for review, purchased, or otherwise obtained over the course of the past week. Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists! I didn’t receive any review books this week but I did receive two books I’m really looking forward to reading!

Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deidre Madden (sent by a friend after she learned I am participating in Orange January)
It is the height of summer, and celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house in Dublin to a friend while she is away performing in New York. Alone among all of Molly's possessions, struggling to finish her latest play, she looks back on the many years and many phases of her friendship with Molly and their college friend Andrew, and comes to wonder whether they really knew each other at all. She revisits the intense closeness of their early days, the transformations they each made in the name of success and security, the lies they told each other, and betrayals they never acknowledged. Set over a single midsummer's day, Molly Fox's Birthday is a mischievous, insightful novel about a turning point--a moment when past and future suddenly appear in a new light.

Solar by Ian McEwan (sent by the same great friend)
Michael Beard is in his late fifties; bald, overweight, unprepossessing – a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. An inveterate philanderer, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. When Beard’s professional and personal worlds are entwined in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself, a chance for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and very possibly save the world from environmental disaster.


Solar is an engrossing and satirical novel which focuses on climate change. It is a stylish new work by one of the world’s greatest living writers about one man’s ambitions and self-deceptions.