Lullaby [suggested by Elaine McCaughley]
The baby is dead. It took only a few seconds.
When Myriam, a French-Moroccan lawyer, decides to return to work after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect caretaker for their two young children. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite and devoted woman who sings to their children, cleans the family’s chic apartment in Paris’s upscale tenth arrondissement, stays late without complaint and is able to host enviable birthday parties.
The couple and nanny become more dependent on each other. But as jealousy, resentment and suspicions increase, Myriam and Paul’s idyllic tableau is shattered… [product description from Amazon]
Originally published in France as Chanson Douce. The US English translation is called The Perfect Nanny.
Author’s Wikipedia page.
Author has no website at time of writing, although it can only be a matter of time ;o)
Shortlisted for this month
The book selector for the month can choose up to three books for nomination. This month Elaine’s other selections were:
The Road to Wigan Pier
A searing account of George Orwell’s observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over time. His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity. It crystallized the ideas that would be found in Orwell’s later works and novels, and remains a powerful portrait of poverty, injustice and class divisions in Britain. [product description from Amazon]
The novel has its own Wikipedia page.
Author’s Wikipedia page
Britannica includes biographical notes for Orwell.
The Rape of Nanking
In December 1937, one of the most horrific massacres in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred. The Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking (what was then the capital of China), and within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered-a death toll exceeding that of the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. In this seminal work, Iris Chang, whose own grandparents barely escaped the massacre, resurrects this history and tells the story from three perspectives: that of the Japanese soldiers, that of the Chinese, and that of a group of Westerners who refused to abandon the city and created a safety zone, which saved almost 300,000 Chinese.
Amazingly, the story of this atrocity–one of the worst in world history–continues to be denied by the Japanese government. More than just narrating the details of an orgy of violence, The Rape of Nanking tells the shocking story of the concerted effort during the Cold War on the part of the West and even China to stifle open discussion of the massacre. Drawing on extensive interviews with survivors and documents brought to light for the first time, Iris Chang’s classic is the definitive history of this horrifying episode. [Product description from Amazon]
The book has a Wikipedia page.
Author’s Wikipedia page.
Author’s website.