One of my favorite books of 2013 was Christopher Tilghman’s The Right-Hand Shore. Published some years after Mason’s Retreat, it was a prequel to Mason’s Retreat. A main character of these two books is the Retreat, the decaying plantation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland that was originally a land grant to the first Mason, a Catholic who fled England in the 1650s. We encounter...
This rich and complex novel has a deceptively simple mechanism to unfold the plot and explore ideas. A writer named Ruth lives with her husband Oliver on an island on the west coast of Canada. She finds a diary, letters, and a watch that had washed ashore, apparently from Japan. The diary was written by a 16-year-old girl named Nao who had returned to Japan with her parents after growing up in...
The title 419 is the number of the statute in the Nigerian legal code that refers to obtaining money through fraud. We've all seen email from those who are undeterred by that statute. The book opens on the aftermath of the suicide of a retired school teacher in Calgary facing the loss of all his money and the house where he and his wife lived. His wife and two grown children learn what...
This was recommended by Corinne; I learned later the author teaches at UVa and the book was reviewed by the NYT. He has written books that explore life on an estate called Mason’s Retreat in eastern Maryland that is older than the country. The distant past is never far away and “the Emigrant” is mentioned more than once. The key events of this story begin with the horror of the...
This novella is a gem of a book with beautiful, insightful writing and a unique premise for the story. Ed Carnes is a tenor saxophone player and composer who has drunk himself into bad health in Sweden at the age of 59. The National Endowment for the Arts offers him a sweet deal as part of the American Music Recovery Program: if he comes back to the States and agrees to be recorded 24...
This short novel is best described through its characters: Joe, the philandering famous poet, was sent off to England as a child so that he escaped the holocaust; his wife Isabel, so eager to escape her family that she goes off to war zones as a correspondent; Nina, their 14 year-old daughter; Mitchell and Laura, friends about to lose their business, who are along for the family vacation in...
When the book begins Ifemelu is preparing to return to Nigeria after living in the US for 13 years, where she will be known as an Americanah, a Nigerian who returns after living in the US. She grew up in modest circumstances, but had sufficient connections to make her way to the US. After living through terrible money troubles, she becomes successful and is able to send money home and eventually...
Recently I learned that Mariflo's sister dated David Huddle in high school and this revelation, along with the fact that I loved another book of his, Nothing Can Make Me Do This, moved me to read this one. Each chapter is in the voice of a different character, or about a different time in the character's life. So we begin with the teenage Marcy who has an affair with the husband of...
I really loved Fernanda Eberstad's non-fiction book Little Money Street about her connection with gypsies in Perpignon, a city in southwest France that is very close to Spain. I especially liked the message that you can form a connection with people wildly different from you, whose approach to life is in some ways unappealing, even unpleasant to you. Rat is the nickname Vanessa calls her...
I've thought of reading Arthur Phillips' Prague several times, but just hadn't gotten to it. I came across Jennifer's recommendation to read The Egyptologist recently, so I picked that up at the library. What an unusual book it is, told in letters and a journal by two unreliable sources. It didn't help that I read a section near the end at 4:00 am when I couldn't sleep...