Peachy Reads

This is a totally character-driven plot set in one of London’s most colorful neighborhoods, Portobello Road in Notting Hill. Different levels of obsession define the various characters who populate this short novel—a man with a seemingly harmless addictive personality, a reformed criminal who writes relationship advice for a newsletter in his fringe church, his nephew who is obsessed with impressing his girlfriend, and a psychologically fragile man whose near-death experience brought an imagined companion back with him from the other side. The neighborhood and the characters provide all the interest in this novel. Great for armchair travelers. You’ll think you’re on Portobello Road. Click here for some pics of Portobello Road .

I recently finished three novels by authors whose other titles I've enjoyed recently. The Fifth Woman / Henning Mankell Another installment in the Swedish police detective Kurt Wallander series. Another psycho killer. Who could imagine they’d be so thick on the ground in bucolic southern Sweden? The strength of this series is not just the original crime storylines but the humanity of Kurt himself. Check out the BBC-produced TV series with Kenneth Branagh in the title role. Incendiary / Chris Cleave This novel takes the form of an extended letter to Osama bin Laden by a bereaved Eastend woman. She’s writing to him to share her pain in having lost both her husband and her four-year-old boy in an Al Quaeda orchestrated terrorist attack at a football match. Her letter reveals the story of how events unfolded. She is not blameless in the way she leads her life, but her honest narrative and sense of humor and irony put an interesting twist on the story. Things get a little apocal

This novel would make a great book club choice since it is absolutely overflowing with issues-- a clash of values and expectations between the West and the Developing World (formerly known as the First and Third Worlds). Little Bee, an illegal asylum seeker in England makes her way to a British couple whose paths tragically crossed with hers while they were on holiday on a beach in strife-torn Nigeria. Without giving anything away, her arrival on their doorstep in Kingston-on-Thames sets certain events in motion that have calamitous results and cause more than one moral dilemma. I enjoyed the originality of Little Bee , however, it was almost a bit too telescopically written for my liking-- it seemed more like a screenplay for a movie, the scenes being so short, almost isolated, and so packed full of meaning. There were just SO many moments pregnant with significance, like pictures of iconic scenes in a ten-day-ten-country European vacation slide show jumping from slide to slide-- it