Category Archives: Fiction

Language Arts by Stepanie Kallos

30 Wednesday Sep 2015

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What good fortune – the discovery of a very fine author –  new to me! Recommended by another Weston librarian who remembered so fondly Kallos’ first book,  Broken for You.  I opened the covers of this book and was immersed in storytelling at its finest, unpredictable connections of characters, mastery of the words that made me pause to reread and savor, and something close to the divine fleetingly reveals itself.  Prepare to embrace a fine author for your reading pleasure.

“A riveting read…Kallos moves back and forth in time, and among characters, in a story that deftly mixes family drama, neuroscience, mystery and an exploration of the dying art of handwriting that is far more intriguing than it sounds…You’re likely to find yourself rereading it at least once to fully absorb what you may have missed the first time around.”—Bookpage

 “Language Arts was like yoga for my heart—my sentiments were stretched and strengthened, my imagination challenged and contorted, and when I finished, I felt grateful for this beautifully honest, lyrical journey. I loved this book.” — Jamie Ford, best-selling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

 “Kallos’ earlier novels, Broken for You (2004) and Sing Them Home (2009), have been widely praised, and her third deserves all of those kudos and more. This novel, masterfully plotted and written, is a wondrously beautiful story of love and loss, offering hope in the face of the harshest reality.”—Booklist, starred review

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Nora Webster by Colm Toibin

14 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by in Fiction, Historical Fiction

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Rural Ireland’s recent past is the setting for this novel about a 40-year-old mother of four, Nora Webster, who struggles to adjust emotionally after a fatal illness takes the life of her husband of 20 years.  Burdened by straitened finances, distracted by grief and by turns worried about or detached from her children, she is weighed down by the dullness of her days without her husband.  Nora’s circumstances are not entirely hopeless though as she is capable, independent-minded and supported by well-meaning family and acquaintances.  Her pessimism about the future begins to recede as she permits herself to take pleasure in small moments of happiness. A chance encounter with a local voice teacher leads to a new focus on music as a means to recovery as she crafts a new life on her own.

“Fascinating… Revelatory… More thoughtful than Emma Bovary and less self-destructive, in the end far and away a better parent than the doomed Anna Karenina for all the latter’s dramatic posturing, Nora Webster is easily as memorable as either—and far more believable. To say more would spoil a masterful— and unforgettable—novel.” (Betsy Burton NPR)

“The Ireland of four decades ago is beautifully evoked… Completely absorbing [and] remarkably heart-affecting.” (Booklist (starred review))

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The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

02 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by in Fiction, mystery

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In this thriller by bestselling Japanese novelist Higashino, a distressed single mother has a tough time freeing herself and her daughter from her abusive ex-husband.  Her requests to the police for protection from this deadbeat go unheeded and she attempts to escape him by relocating.  Settling into her new apartment she and her daughter introduce themselves to their next-door neighbor, a lonely math teacher for whom this meeting proves to be tragically fateful.

Veteran police detective matches wits with a brilliant rookie criminal. This character-driven mystery by the prolific Higashino has much to recommend, including a droll Columbo-like sleuth and a great surprise ending. (Kirkus Reviews (starred review))

Winner of Japan’s prestigious Naoki Prize and a bestseller there with more than two million copies sold, this literary psychological thriller is a subtle and shifting murder mystery. It will make readers redefine devotion and trust in an otherwise complete stranger. (Library Journal (starred review))

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Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf

21 Friday Aug 2015

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The author, once again, in this his last novel, returns to the fictional small town of Holt, Colorado, the setting for all of his fiction (Plainsong, Eventide, and Benediction).  

Haruf, who passed away in November 2014, has written a bittersweet but buoyant novel about a widow and a widower who find each other and in the process find an antidote to loneliness.

Despite the author’s spare style, Haruf packs as much action, character development and emotion in 179 pages as many authors do in books twice or three times as long.

The review in Library Journal states that “this novel resonates beyond the pages … don’t miss this exceptional work from a literary voice now stilled.”

“A fine and poignant novel that demonstrates that our desire to love and to be loved does not dissolve with age. . . . The story speeds along, almost as if it’s a page-turning mystery.” —Joseph Peschel, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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The Daylight Marriage by Heidi Pitlor

07 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by in Fiction, mystery

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In this mystery set in the Boston area, the author explores the dysfunctional marriage of tall beautiful Hannah and her distracted climate scientist husband, Lovell.

When Hannah doesn’t return home one day, the family unit starts to crumble. Their children find solace elsewhere – Janine, the teenage daughter with the couple next door and Ethan with his He-Man toys. Lovell immerses himself in his work and courts the media in his effort to find his missing wife.

The many references to local spots, South Boston, Carson Beach, MIT, Martha’s Vineyard, will keep the reader turning pages in this psychological thriller which is similar to Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.

“Pitlor brings forth the emotions that surge beneath the surface with the precision and power of a conductor . . . This powerful analysis of how dreams become nightmares will make readers want to hold their loved ones close.” —Booklist, starred review

 “Likely to linger in the reader’s mind . . . a perfect microscope with which to examine the inexhaustible fascinations of marriage, and as Pitlor flashes between the day of Hannah’s disappearance and Lovell’s uneasy consideration of their past resentments, she finds a nice voice — thoughtful, lyrical, unforced.” —New York Times Book Review

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The Children Act: a novel by Ian McEwan

13 Monday Jul 2015

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Right from page one, this male author has a rare sensitivity to his women characters.  A female English judge is faced with some difficult cases and portrayed with much compassion.

“Irrefutably creative … With his trademark style, which is a tranquil mix of exacting word choice and easily flowing sentences, McEwan once again observes with depth and wisdom the universal truth in the uncommon situation.”
—Booklist, starred review

“A short, concise, strong novel in which a judge’s ruling decides the fate of a teenage boy in ways she never intended or imagined … it’s a book that begins with the briskness of a legal brief written by a brilliant mind, and concludes with a gracefulness found in the work of few other writers.”
—Meg Wolitzer, NPR

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The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

07 Tuesday Jul 2015

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The Turner House is a thoughtful, character-driven novel centered on the beloved home of an African American family. Francis and Viola Turner leave their sharecropping roots in Arkansas with their baby son Cha-Cha to find opportunity in Detroit during the city’s industrial heyday. Through sacrifice and hard work, together they raise a large family at 6257 Yarrow Street, a place that embodies their pride and hope for a brighter future. When matriarch Viola falls sick in 2008, the Turner family, thirteen-strong, must reckon with changing realities over which they have little control.

“A lively, thoroughly engaging family saga with a cast of fully realized characters…[Flournoy] handles time and place with a veteran’s ease…She puts her own distinctive stamp on this absorbing narrative.”–Publisher’s Weekly, starred and boxed review
“Nobody can take you from joyful to infuriated as fast as your brother or sister. Similarly, the ups and downs of the 13 siblings that populate The Turner House, the first novel by Angela Flournoy, whip from laugh-out-loud to heart-crushing. Still, she proves even bonds that have stretched a mile long have the ability to snap back.”—Essence
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A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

29 Monday Jun 2015

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9780316176538_p0_v3_s114x166 Kate Atkinson’s new book A God in Ruins is a companion piece to her 2013 novel Life After Life. Both books follow the Todd family in England before, during, and after World War II, focusing in particular on siblings Ursula and Teddy. In each story, Atkinson plays with the idea of time, and writes beautifully and powerfully about war. Both books are compelling in different ways; I recommend reading Life After Life first.

“Atkinson isn’t just telling a story: she’s deconstructing, taking apart the notion of how we believe stories are told. Using narrative tricks that range from the subtlest sleight of hand to direct address, she makes us feel the power of storytelling not as an intellectual conceit, but as a punch in the gut.”―Publishers Weekly
“A sprawling, unapologetically ambitious saga that tells the story of postwar Britain through the microcosm of a single family, and you remember what a big, old-school novel can do.”―Tom Perotta, New York Times Book Review

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You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz

22 Monday Jun 2015

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Set in Manhattan with some side trips to the Boston area, the first third of this book is slow-paced and the characters are vague.  However, the reader will soon discover that as the details are filled in, all is not perfect in the life of the main character, Grace Sachs, a family therapist, who thinks she has a perfect marriage. Suddenly there is a murder, a mystery and a missing husband! You will read this book in a “New York minute”!

“This excellent literary mystery [unfolds] with authentic detail in a rarified contemporary Manhattan. . . intriguing and beautiful.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Korelitz does not disappoint as she chronicles the emotional unraveling of her heroine in this gripping saga…A cut above your average who-is-this-stranger-in-my-marriage-bed novel, “You Should Have Known” transforms itself at certain moments from a highly effective thriller into a nuanced novel of family, heritage, identity, and nurture.”—The Boston Globe
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Transatlantic by Colum McCann

01 Monday Jun 2015

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9780812981926_p0_v2_s114x166McCann, the author of Let the Great World Spin, has created a remarkable novel of multiple generations of fictional female characters, and has interwoven their lives with those of real historical figures in both Ireland and the United States. With the characters Lily Duggan, an Irish maid, her granddaughter, Hannah Carson, Arthur Brown, the aviator, Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist, and George Mitchell, former U.S. senator who mediated the ceasefire in Northern Ireland, the author spans continents and leaps centuries and links the New World with the Old.

Read this book once for the story line and then read it again to fully understand and follow the threads of family and history.

“One of the greatest pleasures of TransAtlantic is how provisional it makes history feel, how intimate, and intensely real. . . . Here is the uncanny thing McCann finds again and again about the miraculous: that it is inseparable from the everyday.”—The Boston Globe

 “What distinguishes TransAtlantic from [Colum] McCann’s earlier work isn’t the stunning language or the psychological acuity or the humor and imagination on display—all of that has been there before. It’s the sheer ambition, the audacity to imagine within the same novel the experience of Frederick Douglass in 1845 . . . then the first nonstop trans-Atlantic flight in 1919 . . . then to leap into the near-present and embody the former senator George Mitchell, . . . knitting through and around them the stories of four generations of women.”—The New York Times Magazine

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