War and Turpentine / Stefan Hertmans

I'm not sure how I stumbled across this title, but it is a real gem. Written by Flemish-Belgian writer Stefan Hertmans, the book-- part memoir, part scrapbook, part historical fiction, is cobbled together from the notebooks and reminiscences of the author's grandfather. His hard-knock upbringing in Ghent rivals anything that Dickens described in the poor districts of London. The central part of the book consists of his grandfather's harrowing accounts as a soldier describing the brutality of World War I. The scenes exceed even the shock-value of some of the montages in the recent movie 1917. The book ends with his marriage to the sister of his beloved, after the former succumbed to the flu of 1918.

This is a history of 20th century Europe, but at the same time it serves as a nuanced and multilayered glimpse into an intimate and personal family history.

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The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

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.

Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Transient Desires / Donna Leon

Book 30 of the Guido Brunetti mystery series. I haven’t read them all, but enough to enjoy a visit back with a familiar character in a setting I love. Two female American college students are left wounded and unconscious outside the hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. Brunetti soon discovers who left them there, but the question remains why? The plot involves a nephew indebted to his criminal and abusive uncle, and illegal human trafficking. The book ends rather abruptly, and you may get the sense that after twenty-nine installments of the series, the author might just be phoning it in. Nevertheless, this book represented a nice little trip back to a Venice where real people live and work, and this to me is never a waste of time. I downloaded this to my iPad.

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