Skip to main content

Three Novels

By





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 apocalyptic at the end in an almost Orwellian vein.

This book by the author of Little Bee (see below) was coincidentally released on the day of the London underground terrorist attacks in 2005. The movie with Michelle Williams and Ewan MacGregor was only partially faithful to this almost postmodernist novel and really watered it down a bit. Published in German as Lieber Obama, which I think is a better title.

Question of Attraction / David Nicholls
Drunken romps and half-hearted attempts at being academic never really distract Brian from his one true ambition-- appearing on the UK television quiz show University Challenge. (Click here for a website that pays homage to this British cultural totem.)

This is a very funny novel with a great character-driven plot that will especially appeal to Anglophiles. It's an enjoyable journey down memory lane to the mid-80s with upturned collars and Dexy’s Midnight Runners. By the author of One Day (see below). Published in the UK as Starter for Ten.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

So Much for That / Lionel Shriver

By
This novel comes from the 2005 Orange Prize winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin , a disturbing book in which a parent with ambivalent feelings towards motherhood deals with the aftermath of a Columbine-style school killing perpetrated by her son. Lionel Shriver has said that she prefers to create characters that are hard to love, and So Much for That certainly contains some flinty characters, who although they may be hard to love, are nevertheless very believable. The topic this time is healthcare in America. Shep is all ready to launch into an exotic early retirement on the island of Pemba off the eastern coast of Africa, but when his wife reveals a diagnosis of mesothelioma, he must hold on to his job to maintain family health coverage to see her through her devastating illness. His work colleague and friend, Jackson, experiences a medical dilemma completely of his own doing, which proves to be his un doing. Jackson's daughter suffers from an unusual genetic disorde...
1 comment
Read more
By
This Book Is Overdue! : How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All / Marilyn Johnson Click here to check availability in AFPLS This book is an interesting collection of essays that offer glimpses into the brave new world of librarianship. It’s sort of the antithesis of Nicholson Baker’s grumpy dissing of librarians in his 2001 book Doublefold . If you thought that librarians are still the be-bunned shushing ladies in wool skirts with reading glasses dangling around their necks on slender gold chains, then this book certainly is overdue for you. The author shows how librarians are morphing and adapting to the new information landscape, meeting new challenges with fewer resources and a public that wants instant gratification in clicks-and-mortar libraries. Meet librarians who offer triage reference services in streets filled with protesters and others who assume alternate identities and inhabit virtual libraries in the cyber universe called Second Life. Learn about how the venerable N...
1 comment
Read more

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating / Elisabeth Tova Bailey

By
The snail is a lowly creature, and probably one that most of us have never truly contemplated. The snail was probably a creature to which the author hadn't given much thought before a debilitating disease kept her confined to bed, practically immobile, for months and months. One day a friend put a woodland snail in a pot of violets on her nightstand. After being transported from the woods, the snail had emerged from its shell into the alien territory of my room, with no clue as to where it was or how it had arrived; the lack of vegetation and the desertlike surroundings must have seemed strange. The snail and I were both living in altered landscapes not of our choosing; I figured we shared a sense of loss and displacement. p 20 The companionship of this tiny creature is what sees her through the darkest days of her imprisonment by her horrible disease. The snail, thriving in its slow-mo existence and life of undemanding simplicity, provides interest and comfort to the author. ...
1 comment
Read more