WILMINGTON, NC (WECT) - The weather this summer has been extremely hot, pretty uncomfortable for some of our beach visitors to sit at the ocean to do some summer reading. However, the summer has also produced new books to choose from, including one from a writer with a strong connection to the Wilmington.
Whatever your taste, there is no shortage of new summer books on the shelves right now.
Laura Hillenbrand has one of the most popular summer books, Unbroken, the story of a young man who competed in the Olympics in Munich and later wound up as a German Prisoner of War in World War II. Other popular books have been a couple of best sellers on the New York Times list, Folly Beach and The Butterfly's Daughter.
When tourists come to the area, books that spotlight our rich history are popular, from pirates to ghosts. And many of the authors have a local connection. Ellyn Bache is a name many people are familiar with.
Bache has written several books, mainly for women. She didn't begin writing seriously until the first two of her children were born. She began as a freelance newspaper journalist. And finally after nearly six years of rejection slips, her short stories began to be pushed in magazines and then in book form.
"Ellyn has an unusual knack of cutting to the heart of human emotion" said Brooks Preik, owner of Two Sisters Bookery. "And all of her books really leave you with learning something about how people deal with love, adversity, trouble and happiness," Preik told WECT's Bob Townsend.
Her first novel, Safe Passage, is about a family waiting to hear the fate of a son at the site of a terrorist bombing, and was later made into a film starring Susan Sarandon.
Since then, she has continued to write novels, and her latest book, just released is The Art of Saying Goodbye.
"There are so many people who find themselves dealing with the death of a friend or a loved one, and really not knowing what to say or do, so I wrote the book to help people know how to say goodbye," explained Bache. "It is not from personal experience, but an idea I thought would make a good subject."
Bache used to live and write in Wilmington but she moved to Greenville, South Carolina, to be closer to family. That happened after the sudden death of her husband, Terry, who was the wrestling coach at Wilmington's Hoggard High School.
These days she stays busy, being a grandmother to her nearly a dozen grandchildren, and at the same time, planning where her next literary trip will take her.
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