September 2015–Newsletter |

This month’s book:

By: Jessie Burton

Her family’s financial decline has necessitated eighteen year old Nella Oortman’s marriage to wealthy merchant Johannes Brandt, a much older man and a virtual stranger. Arriving at his opulent Amsterdam home, she feels isolated. She has no friends in the unfamiliar city and feels unwelcome in her new home. Johannes is kind but distant; his sister Marin, who manages the house, is cold and mysterious. The servants regard her with disdain. Although Johannes seems to have little interest in Nella, he gives her a special wedding present–a miniature duplicate of the grand house. She hires a mysterious miniaturist to create a few things for the facsimile home. What she receives are tiny, perfect copies of real items in the house and Nella begins to suspect that the secretive artist is intimately familiar with the household and perhaps the secrets of its residents.