Skip to main content
By
One Day / David Nicholls

Dexter and Emma, (known to each other as “Dex” and “Em”), nearly experience a romantic entanglement on the day of graduation from university in Edinburgh in 1988. Nearly, because it doesn’t quite happen.

The remarkable premise of this book is that it follows their relationship for only one day during the next twenty years as their life paths drift apart and then reconnect, all the while holding on to that initial infatuation that seemed to make them soulmates. Every chapter meets up with Dex and Em on July 15th, charting the sometimes surprising, and often humorous courses of their lives. Dex is a bit narcissistic and self-destructive; Emma a little lacking in confidence and drive. But they seem to bring out the best in each other and depend on each other’s support to get through life’s tough patches. This book out-Nick-Hornbys Nick Hornby. It’s authentic, it’s funny, it’s frequently dramatic, but never boring. I smell a movie coming.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

By
If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...
2 comments
Read more
By
Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010
2 comments
Read more

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

By
A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.
Post a Comment
Read more