The beginning of this lovely print journey is the arrival of an ocean liner in Cherbourg; a young couple with an impossible amount of luggage struggle to make their way first to Mont St. Michel and eventually to a château some distance from Blois. We eventually learn these Americans have booked a stay in the château in advance but otherwise are unscheduled for a 4-month trip to Europe in the...
This book is Claire Fuller's first; she is British and I learned of her through her twitter feed (can't remember how I began following it). It will be available as a print book in the US on March 17, but I bought the kindle book last week so I could read it while traveling to Iowa. And what a great way to endure travel by air it was. It is the gripping story of an 8-year-old girl...
Reading Matters was very enthusiastic about this book and I found that I wholeheartedly agree. The narrator is an elderly woman writing in 1933 about events that occurred in 1888-90, beginning with the International Exhibition in Glasgow. In the preface of this novel Harriet Baxter tells us that she wants to write a book about Ned Gilllespie, described as her dear friend and soul mate. He...
It was Michael Dirda's review in The Washington Post that drew me to this book; he said the book quickly has you in thrall. That at the end "you find yourself emotionally sucked dry, as much stunned as exhilarated by the power of art." It's true, I was in thrall, read faster and faster as it went along, and was stunned and overwhelmed by the end. Sarah Waters is, according to...
Having read Tony's blogpost about this book, I figured I would enjoy it, but it turns out that It was mesmerizing from the outset and I could hardly put it down. It drew me along in a way that few books have. So, what is it about this book? We learn the story of an artistic couple, Owen, the writer and Gus, the painter told by Gus. Owen has published five books that are well regarded but only...
I picked up this 1975 novel because the author kept turning up on my radar screen and I saw the book had been acclaimed as a great one. It is the story of a family in the late 60s and 70s set in that stylish world of a New York City architect whose family has the perfect life in a lovely old house outside the city. It is told in an appealingly episodic way: Nedra and Viri know how to...
Remember that eerie music from sci-fi movies of the 50s? That sound was created by a theremin. Here's the studio session for the theremins for the most famous of those movies, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Us Conductors is a fictionalized account of the life of Leon Theremin, its inventor, and you can see it played by one of the characters in the book here. Theremin narrates the...
Having admired Touch by this author, I was eager to read this one. It is an action-packed tale of a lobster-fishing dynasty on a small island, founded by the much-mentioned Brumfitt Kings, who had arrived on Loosewood Island 200 years earlier. Brumfitt was an artist as well as a fisherman and a well-known one; tourists come to the island to visit the scenes he painted. The narrator is Cordelia...
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, is the religious ruminations of an elderly preacher near death writing to his young son. Lila is the story of the mother of that son, a surprise love who came into the preacher John Ames' life so late. The setting is small town Iowa, sometime after the Depression. Lila was stolen away from her parents and sure death...
The third book in Davies' Cornish Trilogy (The Rebel Angels and What's Bred in the Bones are the first two) adds new characters to the familiar Darcourt, Maria, Arthur and the late Frances. Much of this book centers on the creation of an opera based on sketches and bits of music by E.T.A. Hoffman about Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere. This echoes Frances' painting done in...