The Last Anniversary, is an early novel by one of my favorite writers, Liane Moriarty. Moriarty always weaves a good tale full of interesting characters and keeps the reader in a bit of suspense waiting to find out what happens. Set on tiny Scribbly Gum Island, just off the coast of Sydney, Sophie inherits a house and becomes part of a family mystery about parents who left their newborn baby and disappeared without a trace. As Sophie’s biological clock is…
Quiet Until the Thaw by Alexandra Fuller is a novel about life on the Lakota reservation for two Native American cousins who choose very different paths. Fuller captures the wisdom and humor, as well as great sadness and injustice experienced by the Lakota on the reservation. Fuller is one of my favorite writers and I still much prefer her non-fiction, but this is an engaging debut novel worth checking out.
The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso is a novel set in South Africa in a neighborhood where two older women, one black, one white, live next door to each other. They have both recently lost their husbands and circumstances bring them together even though they have always hated each other. Omotoso’s writing is so subtle you hardly realize you are unearthing the deep pains that reside in a country so long fractured by apartheid. Powerful, funny, incisive and honest….
Radio Girls by Sarah–Jane Stratford is historical fiction about some of the first women in radio, specifically Hilda Matheson of the BBC. 1920’s London, after WW1 when there were beginning to be fascist rumblings from Germany, Matheson was not only a director of the Talks programs at the BBC, but also a spy. The BBC was one of the few places women could work, and Stratford does a wonderful job of exploring the early days of radio, and what life was…
Faithful by Alice Hoffman is a novel about a 17 year old girl who gets in a car crash that leaves her best friend almost dead and in a coma. Shelby, the one who walks away, is devestated and can’t forgive herself.Hoffman is one of my favorite writers; in this book, we travel with Shelby through her breakdown, grief, self destruction and eventual path back towards life, love and happiness. Beautifully written, a worthwhile read.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery is a beautiful book about a very intelligent 12 year old girl and a 54 year old concierge in an apartment building in France that no one notices, because she seems unremarkable, although in truth, she is also quite brilliant. The chapters switch between these two characters as they observe life in the building around them, until a new tenant one day brings them all together. Beautifully written, full of observations about…
The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness by Kyung-Sook Shin is a semi-autobiographical novel about a Korean girl who grows up poor in the countryside and is sent to Seoul when she is 16 to live in a single room with her older brother and cousin and work long hours in a factory. Eventually she continues school and becomes a writer. However, the four years spent working at the factory and living in that single room were so traumatic for her, she…
The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker is a novel about two female animators who meet in art school in NYC and set up a studio together to make adult animated films based on their lives. It is partly about their process, and what it means to be an artist, but mostly about their friendship and their raumatic childhoods, one in Florida, the other in Kentucky. Their decade long relationship is the strongest thing in both of their lives, but it…
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante is a novel about the lifelong friendship between two girls growing up in a rough neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples in the 50’s where poverty and violence is the norm. Ferrante captures the feeling of the neighborhood, the struggles both girls face trying to educate themselves and rise above their circumstances. They each do so in different ways, yet remain bound to each other nonetheless. Beautifully written, Ferrante is a great storyteller and…
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett is a novel about two families whose lives are thrown together when a father of four kisses a woman, not his wife, at a christening party and suddenly two families are split up. The six step-siblings form an unexpected bond during Summers spent running free together away from their parents. There is a tragedy and a mystery at the core of the story which is revealed slowly, in parts, as the reader gets to know each…