Never Let Me Go is a haunting novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day. We meet Kathy, Tommy and Ruth, all growing up at Hailsham,a secluded boarding school in the English countryside, and from the beginning it’s obvious that something is not quite right. The story unfolds as Kathy looks back at her life at and we are given subtle hints as to what was really going on. Part coming of age story, part science fiction,…
Prayers and Lies, the debut novel by Sherri Wood Emmons, is set in rural Appalachia, in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia. The novel is narrated by Bethany, a young girl who lives with her 3 sisters and parents in Indianapolis, and visits the Coal River where her Mother grew up, every summer to spend time with her cousins there. Her cousin Raena May becomes like a sister to her, and the book traces their lives as they grow together, and…
The Art of Hearing Heartbeats is a beautiful new novel by Jan-Philipp Sendker. After coming across an old love letter from her father to an unknown woman, Julia, a New York lawyer, sets off for Burma in search of her father, four years after his disappearance. There she meets a man named U Ba who claims to know her father and the story of the first twenty years of his life growing up in a remote village in Burma. The…
The Master Quilter by JenniferChiaverini is part of the Elm Creek Quilts Series. I have enjoyed some of these in the past, particularly The Aloha Quilt. This one, however, is not one of my favorites. All the regular quilters are here, but this time they are all keeping secrets from one another and the sense of a strong group of women, coming together with a love of handwork and supporting each other through all aspects of their lives is a little…
The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn by Janis Hallowell is a story of ordinary people longing for the divine and finding it in the form of a 14 year old girl at a local cafe. It shows how faith can make even the impossible seem true, and that devotees come in all forms, from loving to violent. The novel tells of the universal search for God, for miracles, for something extraordinary in even the most ordinary of places. The story is told…
I had read some of Susan Vreeland’s other historical fiction, Girl in Hyacynth Blue, The Passion of Artemesia, and really enjoyed it, so I picked up a copy of The Forest Lover, Vreeland’s historical fiction based on the life of Canadian painter Emily Carr. I will admit that I hadn’t heard of Carr before, much to my loss. She is Canada’s most celebrated female painter, although she was hardly recognized in her lifetime. Living and painting in Vancouver at the…
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…