By its Cover: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery / Donna Leon

US cover

It’s been awhile since I’ve visited the campi, canals, and calli of Venice with Commissario Guido Brunetti. For a long while I was more partial to Aurelio Zen and even read some books by Andrea Camilleri, but I really enjoyed my reunion with Donna Leon in this slim novel. The writing is really good, the story was engaging, and the cultural insights are astute. I felt like I was following alongside Brunetti, drinking in the atmosphere of Venice, and seeing it through the eyes of a native. Granted, Leon is not a native Veneziana, but after thirty years she's as Venetian as any American could hope to be.

UK cover, which I think is so much better

Brunetti is called in to investigate the vandalism and theft of some priceless books at a Venetian Library. The plot thickens when one of the library’s readers turns up murdered. Was it the mysterious American scholar with credentials from a university in Kansas, or someone else?

Comments

And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation. Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

Here we are / Graham Swift

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