The Bookshelf

In a small New Hampshire community two sisters, Henrietta and Jane, grow up under the shadow of a folk tale about the ruins of a house near their own. The house, more than a century earlier, was the home of a family of five who, legend has it, were transformed into coyotes.

About a dozen years ago, New Hampshire author David Elliott was in Germany on a book tour with his wife when she suggested they hop over the border into France. Before he went, he thought, “I have a lamp that looks like the Eiffel Tower – that’s good enough for me.” But after just spending 20 minutes in Paris, he says he fell in love with the city and France. Elliott’s new book takes on a topic Francophiles may enjoy. It's called Voices: The Final Hours of Joan of Arc , and it's written in

Marian Engström always had a few nagging suspicions about her boyfriend Tate. Before he died suddenly, she wondered about that faraway empty look in Tate's eyes, and was puzzled by a profound lack of empathy he sometimes displayed. And then there was the time he said he found the body of a young woman who had been murdered. Did he really just find that young woman? Or was he somehow responsible for her death? Diane Les Becquets' new novel, The Last Woman in the Forest , is the story of Marian's

Fionn Shea is an actor, activist, musician, and writer from New Hampshire. He is also transgender. In the new book, “transVersing,” which is also a play, Fionn Shea contributes his thoughts on what it means to have made the transition from woman to man, and to navigate a world that Shea says “rejects my manhood [and] forces my womanhood.” Scroll down to read a transcript of the interview as well as Fionn Shea's top five reading recommendations. Fionn Shea's Top Five Reading Recommendations: 1.

Last weekend, the Oscar for “Best Documentary” went to a film called Free Solo , which captures the rope-free climb of Alex Honnold up the awe-inspiring face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Nobody had ever done a free solo climb of "El Cap" and it had previously been considered impossible. Free solo climbers use no ropes or equipment, so a single slip-up could mean a fatal fall to earth. New Hampshire author and climber Mark Synnott has climbed with Honnold before. On the day of Honnold

One night, Evie Carter returns home to find her husband has been shot and killed in his home office. Her response? Destroy his laptop. She's arrested for his murder. Sergeant Detective D.D. Warren is on the case. Warren remembers that Evie Carter was also cleared more than a decade earlier for accidentally shooting her father. Does lightening really strike the same location twice? And what does confidential informant Flora Dane know about Evie Carter's husband? New Hampshire author Lisa Gardner

Poet Becky Dennison Sakellariou of Peterborough is no stranger to writing about Greece where she spent four decades. In her last collection, she wrote about feeling the pull of that country while living here in New Hampshire. In her new collection, she writes of a different Greece -- one that recently has been grappling with an influx of migrants. The book is called Undressing the Earth and she spoke about it with NHPR's Peter Biello. Read Becky Dennison Sakellariou's Top Five Reading

In the new novel by Sue Halpern , a young woman named Sunny gets busted for stealing a dictionary and a judge sentences her to work as a volunteer at a library in the small town of Riverton, New Hampshire. This “Riverton” is not the actual “Riverton,” New Hampshire but a fictional one that has fallen on hard times. Summer Hours at the Robber’s Library is Sue Halpern’s seventh book. She spoke with NHPR's Peter Biello. Sue Halpern's Top Five Reading Recommendations: Halpern writes as a preface to

Social media allows us to create another self. We have our in-person, corporeal lives, and then there are our digital lives: the people we are (or seem to be) on the screen. Where is this technology going? Will we someday be able to upload ourselves to a digital space and exist only there? And if so, for how long? And what happens to our minds? To free will? To our ability to love? Nottingham resident and science fiction writer Jim Kelly is no stranger to these questions, having explored them in

In Kirsti Sandy's new collection of essays, She Lived, and Other Girls Died , there are stories of family and work....of Sandy's search for her own place, and of the people she met along the way. She spoke with NHPR's Peter Biello about the book, which won Bauhan Publishing's 2017 Monadnock Essay Collection Prize, in her office at Keene State College. Kirsti Sandy's Top Five Reading Recommendations 1. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser. "This book, based on the 1906 murder of Grace Brown in