The narrator of this book by odd circumstances lands in Cairo at the time of the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference. Agnes is an unassuming 40ish woman from Cleveland who finds herself alone in the world, with some money, as a result of the influenza epidemic of 1918. After a makeover by a kindly and stylish woman named Mildred in a downtown department store, our Agnes is dressed for...
A book about the transformative nature of books is, of course, irresistible. At an unspecified time in an unknown place, that is to say, "once upon a time," a man began to teach a group of children by reading Great Expectations by Dickens to them a chapter a day. The island where this story occurs is at war; the whites left the island when the mine was no longer...
Audiobook. The setting is a small, wasting town in upstate New York, where people find themselves out of work and sometimes sick from the chemicals that once were a part of their employment. This one focuses on two generations of the Lynch family. First, Big Lou Lynch, so good-hearted and unable to see how things are, that I was as exasperated as his waspish wife, Tessa...
I knew I would love the book written by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of March. This is the fictionalized story of an actual artifact, the Sarajevo Haggadah (Jewish religious text that instructs on the Passover Seder), that was unusual in that it is illustrated, was created in medieval Spain, and has survived. It is known that it was saved from destruction twice in recent years; in 1940 a...
An opaquely told story of the mob figures and other rare characters in Havana in the 50s, Dancing to Almendra often left me confused. The main narrator is an ambitious young journalist who is told that the escape and killing of a hippopotamus is a message sent too late to a mob figure who had recently been killed in the U.S. Interesting idea, but mystifying. A few of the...
Mark Hadden wrote the very appealing and funny Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, told from the point of view of a boy with autism. This time he has made a 60ish man going a little crazy laugh-out-loud funny. George, who keeps losing his grip on reality, in the merriment by his family: his wife is having an affair with a former colleague of George’s, his daughter is marrying...
The main storyline of The Tenderness of Wolves involves the murder of a trapper and shady character in the wilds of Canada in 1867 and the efforts of others to find the murderer. The effort largely seemed to involve tracking through the miserable cold and snow — beginning with the setting off immediately after the murder of a very young man who was the lover of the murder victim...
This first novel written by woman born in India who grew up in Cardiff and now lives in London is about an immigrant family living in Wales. The intensity with which the father, an academic, focuses on making his daughter a math genius makes the helicopter parents we know appear neglectful. Every moment of her life is scheduled and almost all of her schedule involves studying...
This recommendation by Mary Susan was published in 1995. It is the story of a 30ish book conservator who goes to Florence to help with the recovery after the flood in 1966. She is an enormously appealing character — how does he do that? — that the reader is pleased to be around. The background of the art, books and buildings in jeopardy enriches the story. It...
Other worldly is the term that comes to mind to describe Ondaatje’s characters in Divisadero. The first family we encounter consists of the father, his daughter Anna whose mother died in childbirth, another baby girl (Claire) taken home from the hospital along with his daughter because her mother also died in childbirth, and a boy, Coop, taken in because his parents were...