This Jennifer-recommended book was a Booker Prize finalist for this year. I recall reading somewhere that this was the first post-Brexit novel and while it speaks to trying to come to terms with that world, there's more. First we hear Daniel's voice as he finds himself washed up onto a beach and concludes he must be dead. "Thank you for having me, death. Please excuse me, must get...
I was so happy when I heard recently that Viet Thanh Nguyen won a MacArthur award. I was impressed by his tour de force of a book The Sympathizer and have been looking forward to reading this one. It did not disappoint. Each short story dropped you into a world that you do not know and his skill often left me breathless. With these short stories you have to pay attention to each sentence...
I fell in love with this short book from the outset and read it slowly because I didn't want it to end. The book is set in Canada, rather vaguely in the 1980s. It's intense because the characters love whatever it is they love so intensely. And it doesn't matter that the things they love are not, for me, particularly lovable. Lets start with Réjean: Réjean had never owned...
Francis Spufford is a British writer of non-fiction; this is his first foray into fiction. It is set in 1746 in New York and is written in the style of novels of the time. While I assume concessions were made to make it more readable for the modern reader, still, I needed to look up many words (and was grateful that the kindle makes that so easy). Speaking of words that I needed to look up, this...
JaquiWine's review of this book prompted me to put it on my list and what a pleasure it has been to read. It is a celebration of the end of World War II and coming to terms with a changed world for the upper class in England. Through the course of a hot summer day Laura surveys the diminished life she and her husband Stephen have now that those who cleaned their house, fed them, took care of...
I have loved this beautiful town of Charlottesville since 1982 despite its flaws. It's hard to know how it happened that so many hate-filled people came to our town for a well-funded, carefully planned event. I assume they were drawn here by the lure of a fight; did they come here hoping to kill, "own" the town, an angry urge to destroy something, anything? How is it that racism is...
Having loved his 2014 book The Betrayers, I was happy to find David Bezmozgis had an earlier novel. This one tells the stories of two generations of a Jewish family from Latvia. The moment at hand is their time in 1978 as they and others have been allowed to leave the Soviet bloc and have made it as far as Rome on their way to a permanent location. Though we hear the story and thoughts of several...
Having admired her first book Free Food for Millionaires, I was happy to see Min Jin Lee has another out. This one is set almost entirely in Japan, covering a time period of 1910 to 1989 and tells a multi-generational story of a Korean family. It begins with the parents of Sunja in Korea; when her beloved father died young, she and her mother survived by renting to and feeding even poorer workers...
It turns out that I was unable to reach 100 pages in this book of short stories by the author of my favorite book this year (Lincoln in the Bardo). It is just too dark. Tony wrote this about Tenth of December in 2013, For at least three of the stories in George Saunders’ new collection, I read a few pages of the story only to discover I had not a clue about what the story was about...
The author is married to Anita Raja, the woman identified as writing under the pen name of Elena Ferrante (I've read and written about her Neopolitan Quartet). One of her first books, The Days of Abandonment is, according to the NYT review of this book, the story of a woman with two children whose husband leaves her for a younger woman. Ties widens that story to include the...