The Cat’s Table, the new novel by Michael Ondaatje, is the semi-autobiographical novel of an 11 year old boy’s journey from Colombo to England aboard the ship Oronsay. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, took a similar voyage alone as a boy, later became a writer and now lives in Canada. All these things are true of the Michael in the novel. However, all the wonderful characters who the boy meets at the cat’s table (the table farthest from the captain’s) are…
Grayson, by Lynne Cox is the true story of Cox’s encounter with a baby gray whale off the coast of Southern California when she was 17 years old. Cox is a world famous American long-distance open-water swimmer, she was the first person to swim the Straits of Magellan in Chile, and the first to swim around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, just to name a couple of her many, many accomplishments. Grayson is the wonderful story of Cox’s…
Helen Simonson’s debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, is an unlikely love story between a retired British Major and a Pakistani shopkeeper in the small village of Edgecombe St. Mary in the English countryside. The Major’s quiet life of tea, golf, and literature is disturbed when he finds himself longing for the company of Mrs. Ali, the shopkeeper who he knows very little about, but can’t stop thinking of. As their friendship develops, gossip spreads, and their new relationship is…
The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid, Travels Through My Childhood by Bill Bryson, is a memoir of a very ordinary boy growing up in Des Moines in the 50’s. Nothing drastic ever happens here, yet all the little details are captured in a laugh out loud journey back in time, when life was simple. No one’s parents seemed to worry about things like drinking too much, smoking too much, kids running through DDT or nuclear fallout from test sights. Bryson makes us…
How It All Began by Penelope Lively is a novel of chance meetings and experiences that create more chance meetings and experiences that alter the courses of many lives like a domino effect. This is all based on chaos theory, or more specifically, the butterfly effect. The idea that the flapping of a single butterfly’s wing in the Amazon produces a tiny change in the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done,…
I really enjoyed Janice Lee’s debut novel The Piano Teacher until the end. It tells the story of Claire, a young piano teacher from England who has just moved to Hong Kong with her husband in 1953. The Other part of the story is told from voices of expats living there ten years earlier, through the war years. One in particular, Will Truesdale, ties the story together. In 1942 he is in love with a beautiful Eurasian socialite, Trudy Liang….
I’ve read several of Jeanette Winterson’s novels, and was excited when her new memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, came out. I don’t usually buy books in harcover, but I did this time, and I wasn’t disappointed. Winterson’s memior is brilliant. She was born in Manchester, England in 1959 and adopted at 6 weeks old. She never new who her birth mother was, and always believed she was dead. Her adopted mother was a depressed, religious fanatic…
The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom is a powerful and disturbing novel. Set in the South at the end of the 18th century, a seven year old Irish girl, Lavinia is orphaned during the sea crossing to America. She is taken in by the Captain and given to his slaves in the kitchen house to raise her and serve their family. Boundaries get confused as she grows into the white woman she becomes and can no longer live with the black…
Cecelia Ahern writes lighthearted, feel-good novels full of just a little bit of magic. If You Could See Me Now is no different. Ahern lives in Ireland, and this novel, as her previous novels, is set in the charming Irish countryside. P.S. I Love You (one of her earlier novels) was made into a movie starring Hilary Swank, and If You Could See Me Now is soon to be a movie as well. It tells the story of six year old Luke…
The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O’Hagan, certainly has a catchy title, which seems to be what drew so many people to this rather tiresome book. It is narrated by Marilyn Monroe’s highly intelligent, and well read little dog Maf. A gift to her from Frank Sinatra, Maf went everywhere with Marilyn in the last two years of her life. The book is more a commentary of the times, than a biography of …