Sunday Forrester is autistic. She lives in a small town in the English Lake District. It is the 1980s when little Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize
Sunday Forrester is autistic. She lives in a small town in the English Lake District. It is the 1980s when little is known, and even less is understood about individuals on the spectrum. The author, Viktoria Llyod-Bartow, who is autistic, tells the story of the gradual unraveling of Sunday's relationship with her adolescent daughter, Dolly, from Sunday's point of view.
Sunday and Dolly live in a modest house Sunday inherited from her parents and works in a plant nursery owned by her former in-laws.
The summer after Dolly sat for her G-levels, Vita and Rollo, a wealthy, charming, and superficial couple, moved in next door for the summer. In her 50s and ten years, Rollo's senior, Vita, laments that they never had children. She "befriends" Sunday and Dolly, inviting them to weekly Friday night dinners and whooing Dolly with shopping trips, sleepovers, and the promise of a well-paid job in London. She plays Sunday, capitalizing on her inability to read people and Dolly's adolescent angst.
We learn of these events through Sunday's narrative. She is a devoted, loving mother and a good friend to her coworker who experiences the world differently. It is painful to witness the cruelty she encounters.
I loved how Llyod-Bartow created Sunday's narrative voice. Many authors ( Nita Prose's Molly the Maid comes to mind) create autistic characters who seem childlike and immature. Lloyd Bartow portrays Sunday as a responsible, caring adult who struggles to understand the world. Highly recommend...more
Winner 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize for Best Canadian Fiction Shorlisted 2023 Booker Prize
Study for Obedience is a novel many people love or hate. It'sWinner 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize for Best Canadian Fiction Shorlisted 2023 Booker Prize
Study for Obedience is a novel many people love or hate. It's a difficult book to rate. I neither loved nor hated it. I admired what Sarah Bernstein was trying to accomplish and enjoyed her often beautiful prose. (She is a poet, first and foremost). However, I did not enjoy reading it. I found the story claustrophobic and painful, which is the point, and her skill at creating this ambiance was one of the reasons I admired the text.
The novel is about the experience of the outsider. The narrator is an unnamed Jewish woman who goes to a rural village in an unnamed Eastern European country to care for her brother, whose wife and children left him. Her family was originally from this country, but something unnamed happened, forcing them to leave. She doesn't speak the language and can't communicate with the villagers, who blame her for animal-related illnesses, Avian flu, and mad cow disease that coincide with her arrival in the village. She senses their fear whenever she visits the town.
The narrator's response is to demonstrate her "obedience" by taking on demeaning tasks, such as cleaning the filthiest barns, to show that she is harmless and means well. However, the narrator's strategy of self-abnegation dates back to her earliest years as she explains how she learned service and self-denial as a child who catered to the whims of her family. Her penchant for self-sacrifice and attempting to please others can be attributed to how women were socialized during her youth. Yet she also feels that co-workers viewed her as an outsider at the jobs she held before returning to her family's country of origin.
As the narrative continues, the source of the narrator's discomfort becomes increasingly unclear. Why are the villagers afraid of her? Are they anti-Semitic? (They seem to accept her brother.) Is she viewed as some type of witch? Or is she an unreliable narrator? The ending is open-ended, and Bernstein leaves the reader with food for thought. I could reread the book and find different levels of meaning each time....more
Tan Twan Eng examines the racism, patriarchy, and homophobia that underly British " colonial civility" in the Penang co4.5
Longlisted Booker Prize 2023
Tan Twan Eng examines the racism, patriarchy, and homophobia that underly British " colonial civility" in the Penang colony in his clever work of historical fiction, The House of Doors. The novel fictionalizes W. Somerset Maughm's stay on the Malay peninsula in 1921 and invents a counter-narrator, Lesley Hamlyn, the wife of his old friend, Robert, in whose home he and his secretary, Gerald, are guests.
The chapters rotate between the voices of Maughm and Lesley as she tells him of the tumultuous events of 1910: her work for the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat Sen, her affair with one of Sen's compatriots, and the story of the infamous murder trial of her friend, Ethel Proudlock, which remained shrouded in mystery. Maugham used the Proudlock case as the basis of a novella, The Letter, which he later turned into a play.
The House of Doors is a finely crafted period piece that captures the ambiance of the times. Novelist Cristina Hernandez described it as " historical fiction at its best- a novel that doesn't feel as if it was written about a time but rather as though it was written directly from that time." I couldn't agree more. Highly recommend.
I finished Paul Murray's The Bee Sting a week ago and have been mulling over what to say. I liked the novel and found itShortlisted 2023 Booker Prize
I finished Paul Murray's The Bee Sting a week ago and have been mulling over what to say. I liked the novel and found it very engrossing. It is a family saga reminiscent of Franzen, set in a small Irish town about two hours outside Dublin in 2008 during the financial crisis. The book examines the crash's impact on the once affluent Barnes family, Dickie, Imelda, and their two children, Cass, 17, and PJ, 12, after the family auto dealership goes bust.
Murray tells the story from each character's perspective, providing engaging tragicomic backstories for the parents Dickie and Imelda. Like their flawed but likable parents, Cass and PJ's lives are upended by the family's falling status, and they respond with characteristic adolescent and preadolescent angst.
The author has a lively writing style and a gift for character development. While the book is long (650 pages), it was a pleasure to read. However, the implausible ending didn't work for me, detracting from my overall estimation of the book. While I would still recommend it, I would be disappointed if it won the Booker Prize....more
Jonathan Escoffey illuminates the Jamaican-American experience in his moving debut novel If I Survive You. ThrougShortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
Jonathan Escoffey illuminates the Jamaican-American experience in his moving debut novel If I Survive You. Through eight interconnected stories, he examines race, identity, sibling rivalry, father-son-conflict issues, and the perils of not fitting into neat little boxes.
Trelawney is the younger son of Topper and Sanya, Jamaican immigrants living in Miami. Unlike his older brother Delano, Trelawney was born in the US. Topper and Sanya had the light brown skin of many from the Jamaican middle class. In Multiethnic Miami, Trelawney was constantly asked, "What are you?" a question that would continuously haunt him. He was mistaken for Dominican in school until the Dominican kids learned he could not speak Spanish. The Blacks would not accept him because of his brown skin and prior association with the Dominicans. The Cubans saw him as too dark. He was too American in Jamaica, and in Miami, he was too Jamaican. Then, at his university in the Midwest, he entered a world with little nuance, where people were seen as either black or white, and others no longer saw him as Jamaican.
Due to constant shifts in his sense of identity and belonging, Trelawney experiences confusion, pain, and rage-- sentiments that extend to his fraught relations with his father and brother. Escoffery interweaves these sentiments throughout the novel with humor, grace, and a keen sense of irony.
While his female characters are well-drawn, they play a minimal role in the novel. A secondary focus in these stories is on male relationships and identity. Topper, a Miami contractor, has difficulty relating to the bookish, literary Trelawney. Their ongoing animosity and Topper's blatant favoritism of Delano fuel much of the internal conflict within the stories as Trelawny reduced to homelessness and living in his van, tries to figure out his place in his family and the larger world.
I liked If I Survive You. Escoffey's use of interconnected stories worked for the most part, although some of the stories were better developed than others. It is a strong debut....more
" History is a silent record of people who didn't know when to leave."
Prophet Song kept me up reading late into the night. Winner Booker Prize 2023
" History is a silent record of people who didn't know when to leave."
Prophet Song kept me up reading late into the night. It is an emotionally draining novel with Orwellian themes and scenes that propel the reader forward with the intensity of a Hitchcock film.
In a dystopian future, Ireland's far-right National Alliance Party (NAP) comes to power. To maintain order, they create a secret police with supplemental powers that strip citizens of their fundamental rights. The story centers on the impact of the new order on a middle-class Dublin family, the Stacks; Eilish, a microbiologist; Larry, an official in the Teacher's Union of Ireland, their four children; and Eilish's aging father, who is struggling with dementia.
The nightmare begins when secret police attack a peaceful teacher's rally for higher wages. Larry and other union officials are arrested and disappear. Legal due process starts to erode, and the NAP replaces people in jobs nationwide with party hacks, causing Eilish to lose her job. Lynch chronicles Eilish's struggles to keep her children and aging father safe as the nation descends into a violent civil war, and they become refugees.
At first, I found Lynch's writing style difficult to follow. There are no paragraphs, and he doesn't use conventional indicators for dialogue. Scenes proceed without interruption until a gap appears, indicating a new section's start. However, once I grew accustomed to his style, I found his writing had almost a cinematic flow that drew me deeper and deeper into the nightmare.
Prophet Song is a powerful novel as it crystalizes the trauma that so many people worldwide are experiencing. In an interview, Lynch stated that two competing sentiments motivated him to write this novel. First, he is troubled by the lack of empathy for refugees, which he feels is prevalent in the West. Lynch also wanted to explore how much agency individuals possess in times of societal collapse. He succeeds on both fronts. Prophet Song is a mesmerizing, provocative read. I highly recommend it....more
Shortlisted for Booker Prize 2023 Longlisted National Book Award 2023 Longlisted for Booker Prize 2023
"I think eugenics was a perfect example of how ev Shortlisted for Booker Prize 2023 Longlisted National Book Award 2023 Longlisted for Booker Prize 2023
"I think eugenics was a perfect example of how every idiom and discipline of human thought is equally vulnerable to perversion and degradation, which is to say, utterly. " Paul Harding, Booker Interview 2023
Pulitzer prize winner Paul Harding loosely based his latest novel, This Other Eden, upon an ugly but little-known incident of racism in US history- the 1912 state eviction and institutionalization of the residents of Malaga Island, a mixed-race community off the coast of Maine. The community had a long history.
Malaga Island (renamed Apple Island in the novel) was first settled in 1792 by formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife Patience. The island soon became a refuge for other mixed-race families. Poor yet resilient, the inhabitants staved off a hurricane of Biblical proportions in 1815 and built a community that endured for six generations until 1912 ( the year of the first international Eugenics conference in London.)
The novel begins with the arrival of Matthew Diamond, a well-intentioned but somewhat bigoted teacher-turned-preacher who opens a summer school for the island's children that brings the island to the state's attention. Diamond is amazed and impressed by the range of their abilities, and he becomes a reluctant advocate for his students and their families. Neither residents' resistance nor Diamond's protests can stop state officials armed with the pseudoscience of eugenics.
Harding was a student of Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne Robinson (Gilead), and her influence is evident in the stark lyricism of his prose, the numerous biblical references, and the realistic portraits of the characters. However, as Harding stated in his Booker interview, the characters are the creation of his imagination. As I read, I wondered how well his novel meshed with the islander's reality and found a wealth of resources: https://downeast.com/history/malaga-i.... that enhanced my understanding.
I highly recommend This Other Eden, but if you want to understand what happened, combine it with a Google search on Malaga Island....more
"A nation-state is a group of people who have agreed jointly to remember and forget the same things." ErnWinner of the International Booker Prize 2023
"A nation-state is a group of people who have agreed jointly to remember and forget the same things." Ernest Renan
Time Shelter is a wry, compassionate, yet cynical examination of the blurring of history and memory. It begins with a clever and humane undertaking. The novel's anonymous narrator is asked by Gaustine, a geriatric psychiatrist, to assist him with creating Time Shelters, clinics with floors that replicate past eras of the 20th century to help Alzheimer's and dementia patients retrieve their earlier memories. The clinics are so successful that some expand to houses and villages and begin attracting individuals without medical memory problems who wish to escape the harsh reality of the present for a nostalgic past.
Gospodinov then takes the premise further and envisions a Europe where the majority prefer to live in the past and must choose via referendum which decade they would like to inhabit. The narrator returns to his native Bulgaria to observe the competing factions. While there are intellectual and green parties, who would like to work to improve the present, most people embrace either the socialist era or a nationalist past that replicates the time of Bulgaria's great glory. Period reenactments become a form of "campaigning." After an in-depth portrait of Bulgaria, Gospodiniv surveys the eras debated in various European countries.
Time Shelter is a philosophical novel with reflections and insights on time, aging, and much political allegory. It is often a wise and funny book. However, the pacing is slow, and there is little character development except for the anonymous narrator. I meandered through it, marking passages I liked and rereading them. As the novel progresses, it becomes more surreal, and sometimes, it isn't easy to follow. However, overall, I liked the book and admired the author's inventiveness. I recommend it....more
Tom Kettle is 66 years old. He retired from the Dublin Detective Squad nine months ago and enjoys living in the Long-listed for the 2023 Booker Awards
Tom Kettle is 66 years old. He retired from the Dublin Detective Squad nine months ago and enjoys living in the country doing nothing. He has earned it. However, the inevitable knock on the door brings two young detectives who want his help with an old cold case dealing with the death of a priest.
Kettle lacks sympathy for the clergy. He and his deceased wife, June, were orphans raised by church officials, Tom by monks, and June in a convent laundry. From a young age, Tom was sexually abused by a monk and June by a visiting priest. Both were traumatized by years of abuse and when they met as young adults forged a bond rooted in compassion for each other's trauma. They were determined to find happiness, have children, and provide them with a happy family life.
" two babies in their bed and June in their own...Tom would be thinking of the early rise in the morning to get out to the bus, the long trek into town, head nodding from broken sleep, and the passing of his character as father and husband into his character as policeman and colleague, a curious transition that in the evening would be reversed in the eternal see-saw of life, of everyone's life."
While the initial knock on the door often signals a quest to solve a cold case, Old God's Time is not a mystery novel. The case serves as a trigger that causes Tom to try to come to terms with his life and the painful losses of his wife and two children.
n a sense, Tom is an unreliable narrator. He is not dishonest, but he has blocked many sad and painful memories that unfold as the novel progresses. Barry is a beautiful writer. His prose is taunt and subtle, and while written in the third person from Tom's perspective, Barry manages to capture Tom's interior thoughts in a rhythmic stream of consciousness.
Old God's Time is a sad story and was often painful to read. However, I loved the book. It is my first book by Sebastian Barry, and I am excited to read more. Highly recommend....more
3.5 Have you ever picked up a novel that initially gripped you but found the conclusion so disappointing that it altered your view of the book? Unfortu3.5 Have you ever picked up a novel that initially gripped you but found the conclusion so disappointing that it altered your view of the book? Unfortunately, that was my experience with Ian McEwan's Amsterdam.
The novel focuses on the unbridled ambitions and questionable ethics of two friends from the British elite, Vernon, a newspaper editor, and Clive, a classical music composer. McEwan, a master of satire and nuanced characterization, deftly chronicles their rise and decline and then fizzles out. However, I still recommend this book, especially if you are a McEwan fan....more
"Less than 1 percent of lynchers were ever convicted of a crime. Only a fraction of those ever served a sente3.5 Short Listed for the 2022 Booker Prize
"Less than 1 percent of lynchers were ever convicted of a crime. Only a fraction of those ever served a sentence."
"You should know I consider police shootings to be lynchings."
The Trees, Percival Everett's satirical revenge fantasy, seethes with rage and justifiably so. It focuses on the history of lynching in the US. Everitt spoofs on formulaic TV cop and FBI shows and leads the reader through an investigation of an expanding array of white corpses, all linked to the perpetrators of lynchings beginning in Money, Mississippi, with the killers of Emmett Till.
Everitt's writing is vivid, quick-paced, and moves between humor, pathos, and anger. I listened to the book on audio and found hearing the long list of the victims' names and locations across the country especially chilling. For a more detailed account, see the excellent review below.
I am new to the world of Booker Prize longlists and predictions. I started reading the lists during Covid out of boLonglisted for the 2022 Booker Prize
I am new to the world of Booker Prize longlists and predictions. I started reading the lists during Covid out of boredom and found an array of authors I might not have encountered on my own. So I continued this year and am perplexed about the criteria they use to select the list. Thus far, I have read Nightcrawling, Oh William, Small Things Like These, The Colony, and half of Booth. All good books, and yet the only book that stands out to me thus far is The Colony.
I liked Audrey Magee's writing, the pacing, style, structure, and nuanced characterization. She deals with serious issues: colonialism, language and identity, art, and appropriation. And yet, she does this with subtlety without using the language of polemics.
The story takes place in 1979, at the height of the Troubles, on an island off the west coast of Ireland, three miles long and a half mile wide, with a population of 92. It centers on an intergenerational family that has rented out rooms for the summer to two men, J.P. Masson, a linguist from France, and Llyod, an English artist. Masson is working on his dissertation documenting change in the disappearing Irish- Gaelic language. Llyod sees himself as a modern-day Gaughin capturing island life, as Gaughin did in Tahiti. They instantly hate each other when they first meet.
The book revolves around the men's pretensions and interactions with each other and the islanders. Stylistically, the author intersperses short nonfiction reports of murder and violence that overwhelm the region between chapters providing a timely context to the interactions on the island.
I feel that The Colony is an innovative novel that tackles essential questions. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Ireland or literary fiction.
3.5 Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize Longlisted for Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
"In 2016 in the Bay area, a case broke where a young girl wa3.5 Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize Longlisted for Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
"In 2016 in the Bay area, a case broke where a young girl was sexually exploited by many Bay area officers… I was wondering about this girl and this particular iteration of police violence that I think a lot of us don't talk about. " Leila Mottley to Trevor Noah on the Dailey show
Nightcrawling, Leila Mottley's much-lauded debut novel, has earned her the reputation of "wonder kid." Written when Mottley graduated high school at 17, Nightcrawling has been a New York Times bestseller, selected by Ophrah Winfrey's Book Club, and longlisted for prestigious literary prizes. After finishing the novel, I found myself intrigued by three stories: the author's tale, the novel itself, and the 2016 case that inspired the book.
The Author: Who is Leila Mottley?
Leila Mottley was born in 2002 and, at 20, is considered a rising star on the literary scene. She grew up in Oakland and is the youngest of three children of a biracial couple Ann Bauer, the Director of a local pre-school, and Norris Mottley, a fundraising consultant, and playwright. Leila learned her love of writing from her father and began writing poetry at an early age.
Her interest in the writing led Leila to enroll at Oakland School for the Arts, a 6-12 charter school emphasizing arts education. Here Leila's poetic talents were recognized by her teachers, who encouraged her to apply to the competition for the poet laureate of the city of Oakland, a title she won in 2018. As a result, Leila began to give poetry readings and participate in poetry slams throughout the city.
When Leila was fourteen, in 2016, the story of the teenage sex worker exploited by the local police broke in the news. The story moved her, and she followed it with great interest. Then, in her senior year, Leila began to write a novel about a young black woman who became trapped in this situation. When Leila entered Smith College in the fall of 2019, she showed the story to her creative writing instructor, Ruth Ozeki. She recognized the book's potential and referred Leila to her literary agent. After a bidding war, the novel was picked up by Knopf publishing.
The Novel: Nightcrawling
Nightcrawling is the story of Kiara Johnson, a 17-year-old African- American Oakland teenager whose options have run out. Both of her parents are out of the picture. Her father, a former Black Panther, died of prostrate cancer upon release from prison. Her mother is in a halfway house for drowning her infant daughter. Oakland is gentrifying, and the rent on the apartment Kiara shares with her older brother has just been doubled.
To make matters worse, her brother has decided to pursue a career as a rap star and refuses to work. In addition, Kiara cares for and provides a semblance of stability for her next-door neighbor Trevor, the 9-year-old son of an unreliable drug addict. As Kiara is a high school dropout, she has difficulty finding work and decides to turn a few tricks to make rent and food for the month. Unfortunately, Kiara is caught by two unscrupulous cops who threaten her with arrest unless she provides sex at police parties. She complies, and the abuse is brutal. Then, one of the officers involved commits suicide and names her in a tell-all suicide note. Internal affairs get involved, and Kiara's life spirals further out of control as she becomes the key witness in a massive police scandal.
When Nightcrawling was longlisted for the Booker, I decided to read it or rather listen to it on audible. I was interested in finding out what had inspired a group of critics to select the work of a 17- year- old for such a prestigious award. I finished the book two days ago, and I think that what makes the book work or what made it work for me was the authenticity of the protagonist's voice. What Leila Mottley understands is what it is like to be an adolescent. This book could have easily become a work of sordid sensationalism, but it doesn't. Sad, abusive scenes are followed by segments demonstrating friendship and resilience. There are happy and tender moments with the nine-year-old Trevor and with her best friend.
I didn't feel that Nightcrawling was a great work of literary fiction. It doesn't compare to a book like Shuggie Bain, which won the Booker two years ago. However, it is quite an accomplishment for a 17-year-old, and I look forward to reading her future work.
The Case that Inspired the Novel or Truth is Stranger than Fiction (Forgive the Cliché)
When I finished the novel, I googled the 2016 Oakland police scandal. I found the story of Celeste Guap ((pseudonym). Celeste's family is originally from Nicaragua. Her mother worked as a police dispatcher for the Oakland Police, earning over $100,000. Celeste's mother was involved with a police officer who was like a father to Celeste. Unfortunately, he was killed in the line of duty when she was 12. After his death, she began to occasionally exchange sex for money. In a newspaper interview, Celeste said that she did it because it was "all around her." She made connections via social media and slept with three police officers as a minor.
Celeste believes that none of what happened to her would have occurred if her mother's boyfriend had been alive. She claims he would never have allowed it. However, she was coerced into providing sex to multiple partners at police parties. Unbeknown to her mother, several of the officers involved were her " friends."
When one of the officers committed suicide and named her in his confession. Like her fictional counterpart, Celeste became the center of a police scandal. A few officers lost their jobs, and others just received reprimands. Celeste sued the Department and received a million dollars in compensation with no liability. She is now 23, lives with her two-year-old son, and works as a Sex Workers' Rights Activist. On her Facebook page, Celeste was asked about the book Nightcrawling. She said, "It's pure fiction."
Shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Award
Argentinian author Claudia Pinera pushes the boundaries of crime writing in her finely crafted noveShortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Award
Argentinian author Claudia Pinera pushes the boundaries of crime writing in her finely crafted novel Elena Knows. The story centers on the death of Elena's 43-year-old, devoutly religious daughter. Rita, who the police found hanging in the local church belfry. They ruled her death a suicide. However, Elena, 63, who suffers from advanced stages of Parkinson' Disease, does not believe her daughter killed herself. Due to the limitations of her illness, she decides to seek the assistance of a woman, Isabel, whom her daughter helped twenty years ago.
The book, which takes place over one day, chronicles the arduous journey of Elena, who cannot move without the assistance of medications she takes throughout the day. As Elena traverses Buenos Aires, she remembers. Her flashbacks, coupled with her meeting with Isabel, provide the key to what happened to Rita.
On the surface, Elena Knows appears to be a mystery. However, it investigates more than Rita's death. It examines the impact of a chronic brutal illness on the mother-daughter relationship when the daughter becomes the caregiver. It also looks at how religious dogma influences life choices.
The book is short yet moves slowly and painfully like Elena and captures the trauma of having one's life governed by a disease progressively worsening. The writing is taut and captures the ambiance of sorrow and suffering. It is an excellent book, though sad, and I found it difficult to read at times because of the harsh reality it so vividly portrayed. Nevertheless, I felt Elena Knows deserved its Booker nomination.
Thanks to GR Friends Meike and Daniel Schindler for inspiring me to read this novel. ...more
Long Listed for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2022
The Fortune Men is a finely crafted work of Short-Listed for the Booker Prize 2021
Long Listed for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2022
The Fortune Men is a finely crafted work of historical fiction that examines the life of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali migrant to the UK who in 1952, was executed for a murder he did not commit. Nadifa Mohamed deftly depicts the interplay between Mattan’s inner world and his life in Tiger Bay a vibrant multiethnic seaport community in Cardiff where sailors from all over the world dock and sometimes settle. Mattan left his home in Somalia at age 14, travelled to South Africa where he took a job on a ship and began a life as an adventurer, gambler and sometime petty thief. He married Laura Williams, a white working-class Welsh woman from Cardiff and they had three sons.
In alternating chapters, Mohamed provides the back story of Mattan and the family of the murder victim, Violet Volacki. a Jewish shopkeeper, who suffered from a spinal disorder. Violet lived with her sister Diana, a resistance fighter and war widow and her niece Grace in an apartment next to the shop. On the night of the killing, a tall black man rang the shop doorbell. Violet opened the shop for him and was robbed and killed. The police arrested and charged Mattan even though Diana and Grace both testified that he was not the man they saw in front of the shop that evening. Despite a weak case based upon circumstantial evidence Mattan was convicted and hung. He was the last man to be hung in the UK.
Nadifa Mohamed painted an in-depth sympathetic portrait of Mattan who was neither a saint nor a murderer. She did extensive research and included excerpts from the trial. She did and excellent job capturing the time, place and the rampant racism which initially limited his life chances and ultimately led to his wrongful conviction. In 1998, the Criminal Cases Review Commission overturned the conviction. The Fortune Men is a troubling and thought-provoking book. I recommend it.
If John Wilkes Booth were alive today, he would have undoubtedly participated in the January 6th Insurrection and p3.5 Longlisted for Booker Prize 2022
If John Wilkes Booth were alive today, he would have undoubtedly participated in the January 6th Insurrection and perhaps heralded the call to hang Mike Pence. Most likely, Booth, a member of the Know-Nothings, would have been an active member of the Proud Boys or another alt-right militia. The eerie sense of past as the prologue underlying Karen Joy Fowler's novel adds a level of dread.
Booth is more than a historical novel about John Wilkes Booth. It is the story of his family and the time and place which produced him. The ninth of ten children of Mary Ann and Junius Booth, a famous Shakespearean actor, John, is the political outlier of this Bohemian clan. Fowler tells the family saga from the perspectives of three of John's siblings and intersperses historical segments about Abraham Lincoln to provide additional context. It is an engaging, thought-provoking read....more
"He found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another."
Orders of Roman Catholic Nuns in Ireland ran theSpoiler Alert
"He found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another."
Orders of Roman Catholic Nuns in Ireland ran the Magdelene Laundries from the 18th century until 1996 to house "fallen women," prostitutes, unwed mothers. The Nuns forced these women to engage in unpaid manual labor, washing, ironing, and packing laundry as "penance for their sins." From 1922-1996, 10,000 girls passed through the laundries where abuse was commonplace(https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/wo...).
In Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan provides the reader with entre into this world. Her writing, like the story itself, is subtle and low keyed. It centers on Bill Furlong, a local coal and timber merchant in New Ross, a small town in County Wexford. Furlong is married and has five daughters. His mother, an unmarried domestic worker, avoided the laundry when her employer took in mother and son when at 16, she gave birth to him.
The novella occurs at Christmas time, a busy delivery season for Furlong. When he delivers to the local convent, he finds a young girl, dirty and cold, locked in the shed. She has recently given birth, is lactating, and asks Furlong desperately about her baby. He brings her to the Mother Superior, who feigns ignorance and provides him with a hefty tip. After that, he leaves and must decide what to do.
Keegan juxtaposes scenes of an idyllic Irish village at Christmas time with the harsh realities of the residents of the laundries, a reality that most village residents are aware of but don't want to confront. It is against this backdrop that Furlong deals with his moral dilemma.
I highly recommend this short work. I want to thank GR friends Candi and JimZ for bringing this book to my attention!...more
"But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean. This may be the only thing in th3.5 Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize
"But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean. This may be the only thing in this world I know to be true."
Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout's 63-year-old, writer protagonist, has just lost her second husband. However, she has remained friendly with her first husband, William Gerhardt, the father of her two daughters.
In the novel Oh William, Lucy meditates on marriage and familial ties and questions whether it is possible to really know anyone, even oneself. Written as a literary memoir, Oh William deftly moves between Lucy's marriage to William and her friendship with him after her second husband's death.
The story revolves around surprising revelations about William's mother, who passed many years ago. Lucy agrees to accompany him on an investigation into her mother-in-law's past. This journey plays a prominent role in the novel and triggers much of Lucy's self-reflection.
Elizabeth Strout is an excellent writer. Her finely developed characters are all too human. She uses two writing formats: a literary memoir (My Name is Lucy Barton, Oh William) or a series of interconnected stories ( Olive Kitteridge). I prefer the latter format as it allows me to see the characters from multiple vantage points rather than through the lens of a single narrator. That said, Oh William is a fine novel, well worth reading. It just isn't my favorite novels by Elizabeth Strout....more
Shortlisted Man Booker 2021 Longlisted National Book Award 2021
He wanted drama and showdown and righteous calls for justice from concerned citizens. InShortlisted Man Booker 2021 Longlisted National Book Award 2021
He wanted drama and showdown and righteous calls for justice from concerned citizens. Instead, he got America (p.125).
Bewilderment takes place in the not too distant future and centers on the relationship between recently widowed astrobiologist Theo Byrne and Robin, his nine-year-old son. Robin's mother, Aly, an animal rights lawyer, died in a car accident when Robin was seven. Currently, Robin is having anger issues at school, and within the last few months, he has received three different diagnoses, autism, ADHD, and OCD. Given the range of diagnoses, Theo is hesitant to put his son on psychoactive drugs.
A few years earlier, Theo and Aly had contributed brainwaves to an experimental database. So Theo decides to allow Robin to try a new non-chemical experimental brain treatment, Decoded Neurofeedback, aka Dec Nef, which will channel his mother's brain waves to help him stay calm and enhance his emotional intelligence. The novel traces Robin's development while undergoing this new treatment, his growing awareness of environmental decay, and his youthful attempts to draw attention to the earth's demise. It also chronicles the pressures father and son face once the media gets hold of the story.
If I could have voted for this year's Booker winner, I would have chosen Bewilderment. I liked the winner, The Promise, and from the perspective of technique, it is a more finely crafted novel. However, Bewilderment was the book from the shortlist that grabbed me and gnawed at me. Maybe it was because the dystopian pessimism reflected my feelings, or perhaps it was the father-son relationship and the father's struggle to deal with his son's growing awareness of the planet's demise that moved me. Nevertheless, I found it a powerful read.
The Man who saw Everything is my first dip into Deborah Levy's writing. The novel is a character study of Saul Adler, an aLonglisted 2019 Booker Prize
The Man who saw Everything is my first dip into Deborah Levy's writing. The novel is a character study of Saul Adler, an androgynous and self-absorbed historian of Eastern European history. Adler's father, a Puritanical Communist, and his brother bullied him during his youth in England as both sensed but could not fathom his differences. Adler was considered a person of incredible beauty and was sought after by many, yet he had difficulty forming lasting relationships.
The book's first half begins in 1988 when Saul is 28. It chronicles the end of his relationship with Jennifer, a 25-year-old British photographer who used him as the subject of her photo art. Then it follows him to the failing German Democratic Republic, where he researches a youth group that resisted the Nazis and becomes lovers with Walter, his appointed guide (and Stasi informer), and Luna, Walter's sister.
The book's second half begins thirty years later, just after Brexit. Saul has been in an auto accident and developed sepsis which fragmented his memory. The story takes place in his hospital room and moves back and forth in time, filling in the last thirty years while examining the impact of time and history on Saul and the critical people in his life.
I loved Deborah Levy's writing. Her prose is sleek, finely crafted, and layered with nuance. She drew me into the story, and I found the book difficult to put down. However, due to its many dimensions, The Man who saw Everything is a novel that one should read slowly, savor, and revisit.
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