Vicky Recommends for Christmas

THE FALCONER

by Dana Czapnik

“Coming of age story set in NY in the 1990s from the perspective of an incredibly bright, basketball playing teenage girl who doesn't quite fit in. Reads like Salinger's Catcher in The Rye meets Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries. Fast paced, whip-smart and deeply moving. LOVE.”

A new coming-of-age classic, an early '90s New York-set novel of love, basketball, art and feminism. Seventeen-year-old Lucy Adler, a street-smart, trash-talking baller, is often the only girl on the public courts.

Lucy's inner life is a contradiction. She's by turns quixotic and cynical, insecure and self-possessed and, despite herself, is in unrequited love with her best friend and pick-up teammate Percy, son of a prominent New York family who is trying to resist his upper crust fate. As Lucy questions accepted notions of success, bristling against her own hunger for male approval, she is drawn into the world of a pair of provocative female artists living in what remains of New York's bohemia. In her hit US debut, Dana Czapnik memorably captures the voice of a young woman in the first flush of freedom searching for an authentic way to live and love.

Suzy Recommends for Christmas

THE DUTCH HOUSE

by Ann Patchett

“The kind of book that makes you neglect your chores. A book about homes, architecture, and the messiness of family life.”

Danny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish mansion. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve - Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her wit, her brilliance. Life is coherent, played out under the watchful eyes of the house's former owners in the frames of their oil paintings.

Then one day their father brings Andrea home. Though they cannot know it, her arrival to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve's lives. The siblings are drawn back time and again to the place they can never enter, knocking in vain on the locked door of the past. For behind the mystery of their own exile is that of their mother's - an absence more powerful than any presence they have known.

Told with Ann Patchett's inimitable blend of humour, rage and heartbreak, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale and story of a paradise lost; of the powerful bonds of place and time that magnetize and repel us for our whole lives.