It’s all systems go at the Family Library!

Of course, we are all looking forward to the days when we can be reunited as one family in the Family Library but, until then, we are continuing to offer a programme of online activities that you can share with us, including Storybox, Toddle Tots Stickyfingers.

Talking of which, we hope to be able to safely open our doors to the public again soon and have begun preparing measures such as social distancing in the building.

Our Mobile Library is hoping to get out and about this week with deliveries of books, audiobooks and DVDs for those in need.

Staff from our outreach services remain in touch with the most vulnerable members of the community who may be living alone and self-isolating, offering a chat and information where needed. Those online are also able to download free audiobooks until July.

This is the second of our monthly series of local book reviews: a summary of ’The Flood’, a book written by one of the members of our team, assistant librarian Rachel Bennett, or ’Rakie ’, as she is better known, provided by fellow local author Elizabeth Brooks.

The Flood by Rachel Bennett is published by Harper Collins Publishers, priced £7.99 (ebook £2.99). Released November 2019.

Rachel Bennett’s crime thriller, The Flood, feels eerily in tune with the reality we’re living through now.

Daniela returns to her home village after seven years’ absence and finds it transformed by a devastating flood.

As the waters rise and the village is cut off, everything that once felt normal and familiar seems to acquire an apocalyptic edge.

Daniela’s visit is meant to be fleeting - she wants to collect a hidden package from her childhood home - but her plans for a quick exit are thwarted by the discovery of her younger sister’s body.

The novel begins in 2003, when Daniela and her three sisters are children, and moves seamlessly back and forth between ’then’ and ’now’.

It’s a story about family feuding, sibling rivalries and dangerous secrets, with plenty of twists and turns along the way.

All the characters are sensitively drawn, and the plot is brilliantly constructed, but the star of the show is the menacing setting, with its submerged fields, dark rainclouds and dripping woods.

A perfect lockdown read: pacey, involving and resonant.

Rachel’s latest novel, ’Little Girls Tell Tales’, set on the Isle of Man, will be published by HarperCollins tomorrow (Friday, May 29), with an online launch event hosted on via Zoom.

by The Family Library Team

www.familylibrary.im