28 Monday Dec 2015
Posted in Biography, Fiction, Historical Fiction
I recommend Geraldine Brooks titles to anyone who loves historical fiction. She has done it once again! I was swept away into Second Iron Age Israel, most violent of times. This vivid, imaginative account takes one through the tribal battlefields and into the heart of David’s family of 8 wives and 9 children. Inspired by the lost book of Nathan.
23 Monday Nov 2015
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction
If you are willing to be transported to the jungle-fringed tea plantations of the Cameron Highlands to discover the only Japanese garden in Malaysia, this most gifted writer will unveil another time, a place, two characters who wrestle with unspeakable brutal pasts, and seek the healing solace in the art of gardening. I guarantee this story and this garden will linger in your mind long after you’ve read the last page.
16 Monday Nov 2015
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction
In 1919, Rachel Rabinowitz and her brother were placed in the Hebrew Orphans Home in New York City after a series of tragic family events. The orphanage is noted for its efficient care of over 1000 orphans and its modern medical facilities which include an X-ray machine. Dr. Mildred Solomon, a young radiologist eager to show her knowledge, carries out medical research using several of the orphans as research subjects.
Thirty-five years later in 1954, Rachel is now a nurse in the hospice wing of the Old Hebrews Home where she recognizes her new patient as Dr. Mildred Solomon. Rachel must now choose between forgiveness or revenge.
A fascinating but disturbing work of historical fiction by a new author who bears watching.
“Kim van Alkemade has moxie. In her provocative novel, family is saturated with betrayal, care is interrupted by ambition and desire, and the past is intimately explored, invoking the abandoned child in all of us. Orphan # 8 brims with complicated passions and pitch-perfect historical details. A riveting, memorable debut.” (Catherine Zobal Dent, author of Unfinished Stories of Girls)
“This book is utterly unputdownable. At once atmospheric, disturbing and absolutely engrossing, it poses a host of moral questions; I fully anticipate that it will become popular with book clubs.” (Historical Novels Review)
14 Monday Sep 2015
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction
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))
07 Tuesday Jul 2015
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction
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.
29 Monday Jun 2015
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction
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.
01 Monday Jun 2015
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction, Travel
McCann, 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
04 Monday May 2015
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction
Tags
1930's, anthropologists, love triangles, man-woman relationships, married people, New Guinea, primitive tribes
I can’t wait to post this book on the blog and share it with everyone who is looking for a gripping page turner! My only complaint is that it ended too soon…only 261 pages.
Masterful…Euphoria begins so deep in the action that the reader is captured on Page 1… a thrilling and beautifully composed novel…A great novelist is like an anthropologist, examining what humans do by habit and custom. King excels in creating vignettes from Nell’s fieldwork as well as from the bitter conversation of the three love-torn collaborators, making the familiar strange and the strange acceptable. This is a riveting and provocative novel, absolutely first-rate.”—Seattle Times
“Atmospheric and sensual, with startling images throughout, Euphoria is an intellectually stimulating tour de force.”—NPR.com
“Set between the First and Second World Wars, the story is loosely based on events in the life of Margaret Mead. There are fascinating looks into other cultures and how they are studied, and the sacrifices and dangers that go along with it. This is a powerful story, at once gritty, sensuous, and captivating.”—Booklist
“Atmospheric…A small gem, disturbing and haunting.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Winner of the 2014 Kirkus Prize
Winner of the 2014 New England Book Award for Fiction
14 Tuesday Apr 2015
Posted in Historical Fiction
Tags
architecture students, brothers, Budapest (Hungary), Jews, love stories, Paris (France), persecution, World War II
Historical fiction at its best. Three brothers you won’t forget. A love story so deep that even the one you have known seems somehow less. I was ready to book a trip to Budapest after reading only half the book only to realize that this mesmerizing Budapest, alas, is never to be again. The Hungarian Jewish WWII experience was so different than those of other countries. Be thunderstruck!
“To bring an entire lost world—its sights, its smells, its heartaches, raptures and terrors—to vivid life between the covers of a novel is an accomplishment; to invest that world, and everyone who inhabits it, with a soul, as Julie Orringer does in The Invisible Bridge, takes something more like genius.” —Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
“The word ‘epic’ seems inadequate to describe Julie Orringer’s phenomenal first novel, The Invisible Bridge. You don’t so much read it as live it. . . . Profoundly moving. . . . This is one that cries for you to linger over it, page by enthralling page.” —Financial Times
“Orringer avoids pathos and has a gift for re-creating distant times and places: a Paris suffused with the scent of paprikas and the sounds of American jazz, the camraderies and cruelties of the work camps. The ticking clock of history keeps it urgent and moving forward, and the result is, against all odds, a Holocaust page-turner.” —New York magazine
25 Wednesday Mar 2015
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction
Heat and Dust was recently mentioned in a Boston Globe interview with Ha Jin, author of Waiting, which won the National Book Award in 1999 and his most recent novel, A Map of Betrayal. Jin who teaches a course at Brandeis entitled “The Literature of the Migrant” describes Heat and Dust as “an exquisite novel, technically perfect.” That was a challenge! In less than two hundred pages, Jhabvala has created a penetrating and compassionate love story set in India in the 1920’s that leaves the reader wondering about the outcome.
“A superb book. A complex story line, handled with dazzling assurance … moving and profound. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has not only written a love story, she has also exposed the soul and nerve ends of a fascinating and compelling country. This is a book of cool, controlled brilliance. It is a jewel to be treasured” — The Times
“A writer of genius … a writer of world class — a master storyteller’ — Sunday Times
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