image and description from Amazon.com 

Here One Moment

by Liane Moriarty

   Flight attendant Allegra Patel loves her job, but today is her  twenty-eighth birthday and she’d rather not be placating a plane full of  passengers unhappy about a long delay. There’s the well-dressed man in  seat 4C desperate not to miss his daughter’s musical. A harried mother  frantically tries to keep her toddler and baby quiet. Honeymooners still  in their wedding finery dream of their new lives, while a chatty  emergency room nurse dreams of retirement.

Suddenly a woman  traveling alone stands. She walks down the aisle making predictions  about how and when passengers will die. Some dismiss her, they don’t  believe in psychics. Some are delighted with her prophecies! Their lives  will supposedly be long. Others are appalled.

Then: a few months later, the first prediction comes true.  

image and description from Amazon.com 

    Imagine, the letters one has sent out into  the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a  magnificent puzzle. . . . Isn’t there something wonderful in that, to  think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this  very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small  thing, to someone?”

Filled with knowledge that only comes from a life fully lived, The Correspondent is a gem of a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and  connection with people we might never meet in person. It is about the  hubris of youth and the wisdom of old age, and the mistakes and acts of  kindness that occur during a lifetime.

Sybil Van Antwerp has  throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her  place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to  write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of  the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately  wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she  thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often  yet never sends the letter.

Sybil expects her world to go on as  it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished  lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in  her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her  life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years  needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in  her heart to offer forgiveness.

Sybil Van Antwerp’s life of  letters might be “a very small thing,” but she also might be one of the  most memorable characters you will ever read.