Happy Friday!  You never know which books are going to stick with you – maybe it’s something your parents read to you as a child, perhaps a book that provided comfort during a difficult time in your life, or a novel that kept you up reading until the wee hours of the morning.  For today’s author, it was a book about two men in a middle-aged crisis embarking on a fishing trip.  Welcome Nicole Harkin!

Who would expect a book about men fishing would catch my interest? But Shark Drunk did just that. Set in Sweden, the book follows two middle-aged men as they seek to ward off a middle-aged crisis by fishing for a Greenland shark from a dingy. Almost Moby Dick, updated for a modern audience, the book flew by, as I learned about Greenland shark oil and Norse myths. I won’t give away the ending, which had me on the edge of my dingy until the end of the book. I am honestly recommending this book to every person I meet these days.

Another Swedish author’s book caught my eye recently: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. The author is obsessed with death in another form, hers rather than that of a shark. She delineates how to downsize before it is too late, reminding aging seniors, or the rest of us for that matter, to destroy our extra dildos and unfinished paintings. As I read this book, I thought about my grandmother who died last year. She engaged in death cleaning without calling it that. At the end of every visit to her in recent years, I came home with more of her stuff. At the time I didn’t see it as her preparing to die but looking back it is clear. She did not want to be a burden to us. She never was to me. This book will appeal to those interested in The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

Nicole’s Latest Release

Start with a family of four children and two parents, add in a sudden catastrophic illness, a secret girlfriend, financial ruin, and divorce; shake with cancer, teenage pregnancy, a bit of humor and resiliency: that’s the recipe for my childhood. Tilting, A Memoir is a story of how one set of parents lived and died—but more than that—it is an exploration of the secrets and lies of childhood and the stories we tell ourselves which mold us into the people we become. The book recently won a gold medal in The Wishing Shelf Book awards!

https://smile.amazon.com/Tilting-Memoir-Nicole-Harkin/dp/1612968929/

Author Bio

Nicole Harkin currently resides in Washington, DC with her husband and two small children. She works as a writer and family photographer. As a Fulbright Scholar during law school, Nicole lived in Berlin, Germany where she studied German environmentalism. Her work can be found in Thought Collection and you are here: The Journal of Creative Geography. She is currently working on mystery set in Berlin. Her photography can be seen at http://www.nicoleharkin.com. Her book, Tilting, A Memoir, won a gold award in The Wishing Shelf Book Awards.

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