These are the novels which The Christian Science Monitor considers The Best of 2008. I’ve read a handful of them, and so I would be inclined to trust the rest of their picks, too. DLKeur
By Tahmima Anam (HarperCollins, 288 pp., $24.95)
Bangladeshi author Tahmima Anam’s moving debut novel tells the story of a widowed mother’s fight to keep her son and daughter safe during Bangladesh’s war for independence. This beautiful work celebrates Anam’s love for her homeland.
Rehana Haque, a young widow, blissfully prepares for the party she will host for her son and daughter. But this is 1971 in East Pakistan, and change is in the air.
Set against the backdrop of the Bangladesh War of Independence, A Golden Age is a story of passion and revolution; of hope, faith, and unexpected heroism in the midst of chaos—and of one woman’s heartbreaking struggle to keep her family safe.
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By Tony D’Souza (Harcourt, 320 pp., $25)
“That my mother was made of unusual things should be obvious in her desire to go to India, to marry an Indian,” Francisco D’Sai observes near the beginning of this captivating family tale. An idealistic young Peace Corps worker from Detroit, Denise Klein marries Lawrence D’Sai, an industrious young man from the small but proud community of Indian Catholics known as the Konkans.
She gives birth to Francisco several years later in Chicago. Soon thereafter, Francisco’s fun-loving uncles, Les and Sam, arrive at O’Hare airport sporting Fu Manchu mustaches. An American kung fu film had been all the rage in India the year before, and knowing nothing else of America, they’d grown their mustaches to get ready for their trip.
Francisco’s father, whose greatest desire is to assimilate completely into American culture, is not happy to see them. He does not want anything from India following him into his new life in America, where he works very hard, speaks very little, and drinks too much.
Meanwhile, as Francisco grows up, his mother and his uncle Sam, both passionate raconteurs, do their best to preserve the family’s Konkan heritage. Kindred spirits and closest confidants, Denise and Sam feed Francisco’s imagination with proud visions of India and Konkan history.
But sometimes, when the real story is unspeakable, history is just a fairy tale. Filled with romance, comedy, and masterful storytelling, The Konkans leaves us surprised by what secrets the past may hold for us if only we wonder enough to look.
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The Blue Star
By Tony Earley (Little, Brown & Co, 304 pp., $23.99)
This sequel to “Jim the Boy” continues the story of Jim Glass, now a teenager, who is being lovingly raised by his widowed mother and a trio of uncles in Aliceville, N.C., on the eve of World War II. This novel is a rarity: a good story, simply told, without fuss or flourish. (Christian Science Monitor)
Seven years ago, readers everywhere fell in love with Jim Glass, the precocious ten-year-old at the heart of Tony Earley’s bestseller Jim the Boy. Now a teenager, Jim returns in another tender and wise story of young love on the eve of World War Two. Jim Glass has fallen in love, as only a teenage boy can fall in love, with his classmate Chrissie Steppe. Unfortunately, Chrissie is Bucky Bucklaw’s girlfriend, and Bucky has joined the Navy on the eve of war. Jim vows to win Chrissie’s heart in his absence, but the war makes high school less than a safe haven, and gives a young man’s emotions a grown man’s gravity. With the uncanny insight into the well-intentioned heart that made Jim the Boy a favorite novel for thousands of readers, Tony Earley has fashioned another nuanced and unforgettable portrait of America in another time–making it again even realer than our own day. This is a timeless and moving story of discovery, loss and growing up, proving why Tony Earley’s writing “radiates with a largeness of heart” (Esquire).
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By Tod Wodicka (Pantheon, 266 pp., $21.95)
Meet Burt Hecker: a 60-something, mead-drinking, tunic-wearing medieval re-enactor from upstate New York. He prefers oat gruel to French fries because potatoes were unavailable in Europe before 1200 AD; and, at war with the modern world, he enjoys hosting large-scale re-enactments at the Victorian bed and breakfast he calls home.
But Burt has some serious problems. After an incident involving the New York State police and an illegally borrowed car, Burt is forced to join a local music therapy workshop to manage his anger. He gallantly accompanies the group to Germany for a festival celebrating the music of the visionary saint Hildegard von Bingen–but he has no plan to return home. His real destination is Prague: he must find his estranged son Tristan, who, he believes, has lost his way in the Bohemian city.
As we move between past and present, the tragic details of Burt’s life are gradually revealed: the recent death of his beloved wife; the circumstances that separate him from his children; his complicated relationship with his mother-in-law. And we begin to understand, with heart-wrenching clarity, Burt’s eccentric and poignant devotion to a time other than one’s own.
Wildly inventive and mesmerizing, Tod Wodicka’s debut is a modern-day Arthurian quest that introduces one of the most winning oddball characters to come along in years.
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By Leif Enger (Atlantic Monthly Press, 285 pp., $24)
One of Time magazine’s top-five novels of the year and a New York Times best seller, Leif Enger’s first novel, Peace Like a River, captured readers’ hearts around the nation. His new novel is a stunning successor—a touching, nimble, and rugged story of an aging train robber on a quest to reconcile the claims of love and judgment on his life, and the failed writer who goes with him.
In 1915 Minnesota, Monte Becket—“a man fading, a disappointer of persons”—has lost his sense of purpose. His only success long behind him, Monte lives a simple life with his loving wife and whipsmart son. But when he befriends outlaw Glendon Hale, a new world of opportunity and experience presents itself.
Glendon has spent years in obscurity, but the guilt he harbors for abandoning his wife, Blue, over two decades ago, has finally lured him from hiding. As the modern age marches swiftly forward, Glendon aims to travel back into his past—heading to California to seek Blue’s forgiveness. Beguiled and inspired, Monte soon finds himself leaving behind his own family to embark for the unruly West with his fugitive guide—a journey that will test the depth of his loyalties, the inviolability of his morals, and the strength of his resolve. As they flee from the relentless Charles Siringo, an ex-Pinkerton who’s been hunting Glendon for years, Monte falls ever further from his family and the law, to be tempered by a fiery adventure from which he may never get home.
With its smooth mix of romanticism and gritty reality, So Brave, Young, and Handsome often recalls the Old West’s greatest cowboy stories. But it is also about an ordinary man’s determination as he risks everything in order to understand what it’s all worth, and follows an unlikely dream in the hope it will lead him back home.
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By Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins, 311 pp., $25.95)
Louise Erdrich’s mesmerizing new novel, her first in almost three years, centers on a compelling mystery. The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation. The descendants of Ojibwe and white intermarry, their lives intertwine; only the youngest generation, of mixed blood, remains unaware of the role the past continues to play in their lives.
Evelina Harp is a witty, ambitious young girl, part Ojibwe, part white, who is prone to falling hopelessly in love. Mooshum, Evelina’s grandfather, is a seductive storyteller, a repository of family and tribal history with an all-too-intimate knowledge of the violent past. Nobody understands the weight of historical injustice better than Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, a thoughtful mixed blood who witnesses the lives of those who appear before him, and whose own love life reflects the entire history of the territory. In distinct and winning voices, Erdrich’s narrators unravel the stories of different generations and families in this corner of North Dakota. Bound by love, torn by history, the two communities’ collective stories finally come together in a wrenching truth revealed in the novel’s final pages.
The Plague of Doves is one of the major achievements of Louise Erdrich’s considerable oeuvre, a quintessentially American story and the most complex and original of her books.
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By David Wroblewski (Ecco, 566 pp., $25.95)
Born mute, speaking only in sign, Edgar Sawtelle leads an idyllic life with his parents on their farm in remote northern Wisconsin. For generations, the Sawtelles have raised and trained a fictional breed of dog whose thoughtful companionship is epitomized by Almondine, Edgar’s lifelong friend and ally. But with the unexpected return of Claude, Edgar’s paternal uncle, turmoil consumes the Sawtelles’ once peaceful home. When Edgar’s father dies suddenly, Claude insinuates himself into the life of the farm— and into Edgar’s mother’s affections.
Grief-stricken and bewildered, Edgar tries to prove Claude played a role in his father’s death, but his plan backfires —spectacularly. Forced to flee into the vast wilderness lying beyond the farm, Edgar comes of age in the wild, fighting for his survival and that of the three yearling dogs who follow him. But his need to face his father’s murderer and his devotion to the Sawtelle dogs turn Edgar ever homeward.
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By Ethan Canin (Random House, 458 pp., $27)
From Ethan Canin, bestselling author of The Palace Thief, comes a stunning novel, set in a small town during the Nixon era and today, about America and family, politics and tragedy, and the impact of fate on a young man’s life.
In the early 1970s, Corey Sifter, the son of working-class parents, becomes a yard boy on the grand estate of the powerful Metarey family. Soon, through the family’s generosity, he is a student at a private boarding school and an aide to the great New York senator Henry Bonwiller, who is running for president of the United States. Before long, Corey finds himself involved with one of the Metarey daughters as well, and he begins to leave behind the world of his upbringing. As the Bonwiller campaign gains momentum, Corey finds himself caught up in a complex web of events in which loyalty, politics, sex, and gratitude conflict with morality, love, and the truth.
America America is a beautiful novel about America as it was and is, a remarkable exploration of how vanity, greatness, and tragedy combine to change history and fate.
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By Joseph O’Neill (Pantheon, 256 pp., $23.95)
In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans–a banker originally from the Netherlands–finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part operator, introduces Hans to an “other” New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality. Hans is alternately seduced and instructed by Chuck’s particular brand of naivete and chutzpah–by his ability to a hold fast to a sense of American and human possibility in which Hans has come to lose faith.
Netherland gives us both a flawlessly drawn picture of a little-known New York and a story of much larger, and brilliantly achieved ambition: the grand strangeness and fading promise of 21st century America from an outsider’s vantage point, and the complicated relationship between the American dream and the particular dreamers. Most immediately, though, it is the story of one man–of a marriage foundering and recuperating in its mystery and ordinariness, of the shallows and depths of male friendship, of mourning and memory. Joseph O’Neill’s prose, in its conscientiousness and beauty, involves us utterly in the struggle for meaning that governs any single life.
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By Rachel Kushner (Scribner, 336 pp., $25)
Rachel Kushner has written an astonishingly wise, ambitious, and riveting novel set in the American community in Cuba during the years leading up to Castro’s revolution — a place that was a paradise for a time and for a few. The first novel to tell the story of the Americans who were driven out in 1958, this is a masterful debut.
Young Everly Lederer and K. C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom — three hundred thousand acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that surround their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a child’s dreamworld, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the indulgences and betrayals of the grown-ups around them — the mordant drinking and illicit loves, the race hierarchies and violence.
In Havana, a thousand kilometers and a world away from the American colony, a cabaret dancer meets a French agitator named Christian de La Mazière, whose seductive demeanor can’t mask his shameful past. Together they become enmeshed in the brewing political underground. When Fidel and Raúl Castro lead a revolt from the mountains above the cane plantation, torching the sugar and kidnapping a boat full of “yanqui” revelers, K.C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony humming. Though their parents remain blissfully untouched by the forces of history, the children hear the whispers of what is to come.
At the time, urgent news was conveyed by telex. Kushner’s first novel is a tour de force, haunting and compelling, with the urgency of a telex from a forgotten time and place.
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By Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Dial Press, 274 pp., $22)
“The Jane Austen Book Club” meets “84 Charing Cross Road” in this charmer about the activities of a small group of Britain’s Channel Islanders and how they lived during five years of Nazi occupation. (The Christian Science Monitor)
“I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.” January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb….
As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends—and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society—born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island—boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers all.
Juliet begins a remarkable correspondence with the society’s members, learning about their island, their taste in books, and the impact the recent German occupation has had on their lives. Captivated by their stories, she sets sail for Guernsey, and what she finds will change her forever.
Written with warmth and humor as a series of letters, this novel is a celebration of the written word in all its guises, and of finding connection in the most surprising ways.
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The Likeness
By Tana French (Viking, 480 pp., $25.95)
Six months after the events of In the Woods, Detective Cassie Maddox is still trying to recover. She’s transferred out of the murder squad and started a relationship with Detective Sam O’Neill, but she’s too badly shaken to make a commitment to him or to her career. Then Sam calls her to the scene of his new case: a young woman found stabbed to death in a small town outside Dublin. The dead girl’s ID says her name is Lexie Madison – the identity Cassie used years ago as an undercover detective – and she looks exactly like Cassie.
With no leads, no suspects, and no clue to Lexie’s real identity, Cassie’s old undercover boss, Frank Mackey, spots the opportunity of a lifetime. They can say that the stab wound wasn’t fatal and send Cassie undercover in her place to find out information that the police never would and to tempt the killer out of hiding. At first Cassie thinks the idea is crazy, but she is seduced by the prospect of working on a murder investigation again and by the idea of assuming the victim’s identity as a graduate student with a cozy group of friends.
As she is drawn into Lexie’s world, Cassie realizes that the girl’s secrets run deeper than anyone imagined. Her friends are becoming suspicious, Sam has discovered a generations-old feud involving the old house the students lived in, and Frank is starting to suspect that Cassie’s growing emotional involvement could put the whole investigation at risk. Another gripping psychological thriller featuring the headstrong protagonist we’ve come to love, from an author who has proven that she can deliver.
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The Black Tower
By Louis Bayard (William Morrow, 368 pp., $24.95)
Vidocq. The name strikes terror in the Parisian underworld of 1818. As founder and chief of a newly created plainclothes police force, Vidocq has used his mastery of disguise and surveillance to capture some of France’s most notorious and elusive criminals. Now he is hot on the trail of a tantalizing mystery—the fate of the young dauphin Louis-Charles, son of Marie-Antoinette and King Louis XVI.
Hector Carpentier, a medical student, lives with his widowed mother in her once-genteel home, now a boardinghouse, in Paris’s Latin Quarter, helping the family make ends meet in the politically perilous days of the restoration. Three blocks away, a man has been murdered, and Hector’s name has been found on a scrap of paper in the dead man’s pocket: a case for the unparalleled deductive skills of Eugène François Vidocq, the most feared man in the Paris police. At first suspicious of Hector’s role in the murder, Vidocq gradually draws him into an exhilarating—and dangerous—search that leads them to the true story of what happened to the son of the murdered royal family.
Officially, the Dauphin died a brutal death in Paris’s dreaded Temple—a menacing black tower from which there could have been no escape—but speculation has long persisted that the ten-year-old heir may have been smuggled out of his prison cell. When Hector and Vidocq stumble across a man with no memory of who he is, they begin to wonder if he is the Dauphin himself, come back from the dead. Their suspicions deepen with the discovery of a diary that reveals Hector’s own shocking link to the boy in the tower—and leaves him bound and determined to see justice done, no matter the cost.
In The Black Tower, Bayard deftly interweaves political intrigue, epic treachery, cover-ups, and conspiracies into a gripping portrait of family redemption—and brings to life an indelible portrait of the mighty and profane Eugène François Vidocq, history’s first great detective.
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City of Refuge
By Tom Piazza (HarperCollins, 403 pp., $24.95)
In the heat of late summer, two New Orleans families—one black and one white—confront a storm that will change the course of their lives.
SJ Williams, a carpenter and widower, lives and works in the Lower Ninth Ward, the community where he was born and raised. His sister, Lucy, is a soulful mess, and SJ has been trying to keep her son, Wesley, out of trouble. Across town, Craig Donaldson, a Midwestern transplant and the editor of the city’s alternative paper, faces deepening cracks in his own family. New Orleans’ music and culture have been Craig’s passion, but his wife, Alice, has never felt comfortable in the city. The arrival of their two children has inflamed their arguments about the wisdom of raising a family there.
When the news comes of a gathering hurricane—named Katrina—the two families make their own very different plans to weather the storm. The Donaldsons join the long evacuation convoy north, across Lake Pontchartrain and out of the city. SJ boards up his windows and brings Lucy to his house, where they wait it out together, while Wesley stays with a friend in another part of town.
But the long night of wind and rain is only the beginning—and when the levees give way and the flood waters come, the fate of each family changes forever. The Williamses are scattered—first to the Convention Center and the sweltering Superdome, and then far beyond city and state lines, where they struggle to reconnect with one another. The Donaldsons, stranded and anxious themselves, find shelter first in Mississippi, then in Chicago, as Craig faces an impossible choice between the city he loves and the family he had hoped to raise there.
Ranging from the lush neighborhoods of New Orleans to Texas, Missouri, Chicago, and beyond, City of Refuge is a modern masterpiece—a panoramic novel of family and community, trial and resilience, told with passion, wisdom, and a deep understanding of American life in our time.
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When Will There Be Good News?
By Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown & Co., 400 pp., $24.99)
When Will There Be Good News? is the brilliant new novel from the acclaimed author of Case Histories and One Good Turn, once again featuring private investigator Jackson Brodie.
Thirty years ago, six-year-old Joanna witnessed the brutal murders of her mother, brother and sister, before escaping into a field, and running for her life. Now, the man convicted of the crime is being released from prison, meaning Dr. Joanna Hunter has one more reason to dwell on the pain of that day, especially with her own infant son to protect.
Sixteen-year-old Reggie, recently orphaned and wise beyond her years, works as a nanny for Joanna Hunter, but has no idea of the woman’s horrific past. All Reggie knows is that Dr. Hunter cares more about her baby than life itself, and that the two of them make up just the sort of family Reggie wished she had: that unbreakable bond, that safe port in the storm. When Dr. Hunter goes missing, Reggie seems to be the only person who is worried, despite the decidedly shifty business interests of Joanna’s husband, Neil, and the unknown whereabouts of the newly freed murderer, Andrew Decker.
Across town, Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe is looking for a missing person of her own, murderer David Needler, whose family lives in terror that he will return to finish the job he started. So it’s not surprising that she listens to Reggie’s outrageous thoughts on Dr. Hunter’s disappearance with only mild attention. But when ex-police officer and Private Investigator, Jackson Brodie arrives on the scene, with connections to Reggie and Joanna Hunter of his own, the details begin to snap into place. And, as Louise knows, once Jackson is involved there’s no telling how many criminal threads he will be able to pull together — or how many could potentially end up wrapped around his own neck.
In an extraordinary virtuoso display, Kate Atkinson has produced one of the most engrossing, masterful, and piercingly insightful novels of this or any year. It is also as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, as Atkinson weaves in and out of the lives of her eccentric, grief-plagued, and often all-too-human cast. Yet out of the excesses of her characters and extreme events that shake their worlds comes a relatively simple message, about being good, loyal, and true. When Will There Be Good News? shows us what it means to survive the past and the present, and to have the strength to just keep on keeping on.
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Home
By Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 325 pp., $25)
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson returns to small-town Iowa and the story of the prodigal son she first wrote about in “Gilead.” This time, however, she examines Jack Boughton from the viewpoint of his own household. (Christian Science Monitor)
Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames inGilead, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend.
Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years—comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.
Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake.
Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.
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The Given Day
By Dennis Lehane (William Morrow, 720 pp., $27.95)
Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane’s long-awaited eighth novel unflinchingly captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the crossroads between past and future. Filled with a cast of unforgettable characters more richly drawn than any Lehane has ever created, The Given Day tells the story of two families—one black, one white—swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power. Beat cop Danny Coughlin, the son of one of the city’s most beloved and powerful police captains, joins a burgeoning union movement and the hunt for violent radicals. Luther Laurence, on the run after a deadly confrontation with a crime boss in Tulsa, works for the Coughlin family and tries desperately to find his way home to his pregnant wife.
Here, too, are some of the most influential figures of the era—Babe Ruth; Eugene O’Neill; leftist activist Jack Reed; NAACP founder W. E. B. DuBois; Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson’s ruthless Red-chasing attorney general; cunning Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge; and an ambitious young Department of Justice lawyer named John Hoover.
Coursing through some of the pivotal events of the time—including the Spanish Influenza pandemic—and culminating in the Boston Police Strike of 1919, The Given Day explores the crippling violence and irrepressible exuberance of a country at war with, and in the thrall of, itself. As Danny, Luther, and those around them struggle to define themselves in increasingly turbulent times, they gradually find family in one another and, together, ride a rising storm of hardship, deprivation, and hope that will change all their lives.
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A Most Wanted Man
By John Le Carré (Scribner, 322 pp., $28)
New spies with new loyalties, old spies with old ones; terror as the new mantra; decent people wanting to do good but caught in the moral maze; all the sound, rational reasons for doing the inhuman thing; the recognition that we cannot safely love or pity and remain good “patriots” — this is the fabric of John le Carré’s fiercely compelling and current novel A Most Wanted Man.
A half-starved young Russian man in a long black overcoat is smuggled into Hamburg at dead of night. He has an improbable amount of cash secreted in a purse around his neck. He is a devout Muslim. Or is he? He says his name is Issa.
Annabel, an idealistic young German civil rights lawyer, determines to save Issa from deportation. Soon her client’s survival becomes more important to her than her own career — or safety. In pursuit of Issa’s mysterious past, she confronts the incongruous Tommy Brue, the sixty-year-old scion of Brue Frères, a failing British bank based in Hamburg.
Annabel, Issa and Brue form an unlikely alliance — and a triangle of impossible loves is born. Meanwhile, scenting a sure kill in the “War on Terror,” the rival spies of Germany, England and America converge upon the innocents.
Thrilling, compassionate, peopled with characters the reader never wants to let go, A Most Wanted Man is a work of deep humanity and uncommon relevance to our times.
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By Ian Rankin (Little, Brown & Co., 432 pp., $24.99)
It’s late autumn in Edinburgh and late autumn in the career of Detective Inspector John Rebus. As he tries to tie up some loose ends before retirement, a murder case intrudes. A dissident Russian poet has been found dead in what looks like a mugging gone wrong. By apparent coincidence a high-level delegation of Russian businessmen is in town, keen to bring business to Scotland. The politicians and bankers who run Edinburgh are determined that the case should be closed quickly and clinically.
But the further they dig, the more Rebus and his colleague DS Siobhan Clarke become convinced that they are dealing with something more than a random attack - especially after a particularly nasty second killing. Meantime, a brutal and premeditated assault on local gangster ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty sees Rebus in the frame. Has the Inspector taken a step too far in tying up those loose ends? Only a few days shy of the end to his long, inglorious career, will Rebus even make it that far?
Reviews
‘A fitting end to one of the most beguiling characters in the history of crime fiction… it leaves them gasping for more.’ Marcel Berlins, The Times
‘Like the best of its predecessors, it weaves a complex plot against an intimately realised background’ The Herald
‘Has all the ingredients that have made Rebus the standard bearer for Tartan Noir’ Scotland on Sunday
‘This may be Rebus’s swansong but every page crackles with energy.’ Evening Standard
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By David Rhodes (Milkweed, 429 pp., $24)
When David Rhodes’ first three novels were published in the mid-seventies, he was acclaimed as “one of the best eyes in recent fiction” (John Gardner), and compared favorably to Sherwood Anderson. In 1976, a motorcycle accident left him paralyzed from the waist down, and unpublished for the subsequent three decades.
With Driftless, Rhodes returns to the midwestern landscape he knows so well, offering a fascinating and entirely unsentimental portrait of a town apparently left behind by the march of time. Home to a few hundred people yet absent from state maps, Words, Wisconsin, comes richly to life by way of an extraordinary cast of characters. Among them, a middle-aged couple guards the family farm from the mendacious schemes of their milk co-operative; a lifelong paraplegic suddenly regains the use of her legs, only to find herself crippled by fury at her sister and caretaker; a woman of conflicting impulses and pastor of the local Friends church stumbles upon an enlightenment she never expected; a cantankerous retiree discovers a cougar living in his haymow, haunting him like a childhood memory; and a former drifter forever alters the ties that bind a community together.
At once intimate and funny, wise and generous, Driftless is an unforgettable story of contemporary life in rural America.
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The Elegance of the Hedgehog
By Muriel Barbery (Europa, 325 pp., $15)
A young girl and a concierge find an unlikely kinship in this novel about the wealthy residents of a Parisian apartment building. Originally published in France last year, this book was a phenomenon in France, winning the 2007 French Booksellers Prize. (The Christian Science Monitor)
“Renée Michel is the dumpy, nondescript, 54-year-old concierge of a small and exclusive Paris apartment building….
“Paloma Josse also lives in the building. Acutely intelligent, introspective and philosophical, this 12-year-old views the world as absurd and records her observations about it in her journal…
“These two characters provide the double narrative of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and you will — this is going to sound corny — fall in love with both….
“Tender and satirical in its overall tone, yet most absorbing because of its reflections on the nature of beauty and art, the meaning of life and death…. The intelligent Muriel Barbery has served readers well by giving us the gently satirical, exceptionally winning and inevitably bittersweet Elegance of the Hedgehog.”
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By Amitav Ghosh (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 515 pp., $26)
Bestselling author Amitav Ghosh delights with an absorbing tale, rich in detail, of the motley international crew assembled aboard a 19th-century British trading ship. (Christian Science Monitor)
At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean; its purpose, to fight China’s vicious nineteenth-century Opium Wars. As for the crew, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts.
In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a freespirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races, and generations.
The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, the exotic backstreets of Canton. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, that makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive—a masterpiece from one of the world’s finest novelists.
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A Mercy
By Toni Morrison (Knopf, 176 pp., $23.95)
A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize–winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier.
In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root.
Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, “with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady.” Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who’s spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens’ mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness.
A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
Acts of mercy may have unforeseen consequences.
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Serena
By Ron Rash (Ecco Press, 384 pp., $24.95)
The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton travel from Boston to the North Carolina mountains where they plan to create a timber empire. Although George has already lived in the camp long enough to father an illegitimate child, Serena is new to the mountains—but she soon shows herself to be the equal of any man, overseeing crews, hunting rattle-snakes, even saving her husband’s life in the wilderness. Together this lord and lady of the woodlands ruthlessly kill or vanquish all who fall out of favor. Yet when Serena learns that she will never bear a child, she sets out to murder the son George fathered without her. Mother and child begin a struggle for their lives, and when Serena suspects George is protecting his illegitimate family, the Pembertons’ intense, passionate marriage starts to unravel as the story moves toward its shocking reckoning.
Rash’s masterful balance of violence and beauty yields a riveting novel that, at its core, tells of love both honored and betrayed.
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By Julia Glass (Pantheon, 304 pp., $24.95)
From the author of the best-selling Three Junescomes an intimate new work of fiction: a tale of two sisters, together and apart, told in their alternating voices over twenty-five years.
Louisa Jardine is the older one, the conscientious student, precise and careful: the one who years for a good marriage, an artistic career, a family. Clem, the archetypal youngest, is the rebel: uncontainable, iconoclastic, committed to her work but not to the men who fall for her daring nature. Louisa resents that the charismatic Clem has always been the favorite; yet as Clem puts it, “On the other side of the fence–mine–every expectation you fulfill . . . puts you one stop closer to that Grand Canyon rim from which you could one day rule the world–or plummet in very grand style.”
In this vivid, heartrending story of what we can and cannot do for those we love, the sisters grow closer as they move farther apart. Louis settles in New York while Clem, a wildlife biologist, moves restlessly about until she lands in the Rocky Mountains. Their complex bond, Louisa observes, is “like a double helix, two souls coiling around a common axis, joined yet never touching.”
Alive with all the sensual detail and riveting characterization that mark Glass’s previous work,I See You Everywhere is a piercingly candid story of life and death, companionship and sorrow, and the nature of sisterhood itself.
Nancy Fulda proprietress of AnthologyBuilder.com thinks you might be. Executed as a straight forward website on the surface, AnthologyBuilder is in reality, an innovative concept that takes advantage of state of the art of print on demand technology, Web 2.0 user interfaces, and a huge pool of author talent. Seemingly, Nancy has found a way to keep popular reprints available, paper consumption to a minimum and get authors paid for their work.
The Deepening, in conjunction with roving reporter Bosley Gravel, was graciously granted a few minutes of Nancy’s time to get the details of this fascinating project.
BG: What can you tell us about the genesis of AnthologyBuilder and its goals, mission statement?
NF: AnthologyBuilder started as wishful thinking and a whimsical blog post *. I was frustrated because my friends were publishing in so many different magazines that I’d go broke trying to subscribe to them all, and joked that I wanted a build-your-own-anthology web site that let me pick and choose my own stories.
There was an overwhelmingly positive response to that post. Several people even contacted me and proposed business partnerships to get the site up and running. Most of the proposals fell through in the end, but by then I’d fallen in love with the project and decided to make it happen on my own.
The site opened for its first round of beta testing last December and currently hosts 674 stories and 313 cover images. I’m amazed at how supportive the creative community has been of the concept. At this point, we can’t afford to pay our artists and authors the kind of compensation they truly deserve, and yet they’ve chosen to entrust us with these fantastic stories and images anyway. For me, it’s a reaffirmation that we’ve got a truly innovative project here; something people are willing to go out on a limb for because they like the idea of it and believe it will work.
One of the driving concepts behind AnthologyBuilder is the idea of the customer as an editor. In the past, fiction readers have been at the mercy of the market; they could only buy the stories that happened to be in print at the time, and assembling a collection of their favorite stories often required the purchase of over a dozen anthologies and magazines.
I hope that AnthologyBuilder will change all that. As our library grows, I expect AnthologyBuilder to become a place where customers can come to assemble the anthology they’ve always wanted to buy but have never been able to find on the shelves at their local bookstore. A cat-lover could create an anthology of kitty mysteries, for example, and a retired doctor could assemble a collection of futuristic medical thrillers.
BG: Approximately how many hours a day goes into AnthologyBuilder?
NF: Heh. It depends on the day. In the beginning, I spent about three months working on the project full time, and it still sucks entire weeks out of my life on occasion. The rest of the time, I’d say I spend about 2-3 hours per day updating the web site, processing submissions, and doing quality checks on customer orders.
BG: What about staffing?
NF: Mostly, AnthologyBuilder is all me. I’ve got my husband handling negotiations with our printing companies, and I’ll be pulling in some extra editorial help in the not-too-distant future. But for now, the company is far too young to support a full-time staff.
BG: Have any big names (prize winning, etc) contributed to AnthologyBuilder?
NF: The list is actually quite long. We’ve got stories by best-selling author Eric Flint; Campbell Award winner and SFWA Secretary Mary Robinette Kowal; Campbell Award winner Jay Lake; British Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and Pushcart award nominee Eugie Foster; and about a dozen winners of the Writers of the Future contest. We also have cover art by Hugo-award-winning artist Frank Wu.
Other names visitors to the site might recognize include Dave Freer, Cat Rambo, Tobias Buckell, Jim C. Hines, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Irene Radford, James Maxey, and Lawrence Schimel.
Oh yes, and our selection of public domain stories includes one written by President Abraham Lincoln.
BG: AnthologyBuilder appears to running custom software. Was it commissioned?
We tried to commission a web developer, but couldn’t find anyone willing to take on the project, so I ended up doing it myself. That was kind of fun, actually. It involved learning PHP, figuring out how to run a web server, interfacing with an online API, and juggling several random tasks that I never would have guessed come hand in hand with running a company.
BG: What is your hosting situation?
NF: We run off of a Linux server and use a fairly standard web hosting package with (theoretically) unlimited bandwidth.
BG: Currently there is no sponsored advertising on the site. Could you tell us a bit about your philosophy on third-party ads?
NF: I make a point of keeping advertising to a minimum on the site. I want visitors to feel comfortable and have fun putting together anthologies. They can’t do that with random advertisements flashing at them from five different directions. When I do run ads on the site, I make sure they’re low-key and relevant to the site’s content.
BG: What sort of things might be in AnthologyBuilder’s future?
NF: The first item of business is to finish the last few bug checks, move out of beta testing, and make our first big marketing push. We’ve been running very low-key so far, making sales primarily by word-of-mouth through the blogosphere, and I’m curious to see what kind of traffic the site might generate once we start actively looking for customers.
After that, the next planned expansion is the introduction of an Open Market where authors can upload their own stories and set their own prices–sort of like the e-Bay of the written word. This would be a secondary site, running separately from the more carefully moderated main site, and would be a bit of an experiment.
BG: Any plans to expand to podcast style stories?
No. Our site is centered around the concept of printed books. Podcasting doesn’t really fit into the scheme.
BG: Will AnthologyBuilder ever offer a paperless version?
NF: I doubt it. For one thing, the contract with our authors clearly specifies reprint rights and limits electronic display to a short preview only. Moving to a paperless version would require getting each author’s approval of the change.
Secondly, I don’t feel it would add much to the site. There are already plenty of places where you can get electronic stories. The whole point of AnthologyBuilder is that you can hold the stories in your hand and stash them on your bookshelf.
BG: Any plans to expand to the world of ‘first rights’?
Only in the sense that authors could choose to put unpublished stories in the Open Market. I’d advise authors against doing that, though. Sell the story somewhere else first. You can always put it on AnthologyBuilder later.
BG: How about on staff copy editors?
NF: Yup. That’s a definite possibility.
BG: Have there been any legal problems?
Well, I have nightmares about all the ways someone could potentially abuse the site, but so far no one has tried.
BG: Tell us about the physical characteristics of the actual book:
NF: The books we print are 6 x 9 inch Trade Paperbacks. That means they’re about the size of a hardcover novel, but with a glossy paper binding. They look about like this, except with a title and cover art of your own choice.
One of the coolest things about AnthologyBuilder, in my opinion, is that you can choose your own cover art for each book, and we’ve got a truly astounding selection. From Carolyn Yoachim’s photographic genius to the fantastical renditions of Dean Spencer and Jonathan Rollins, there’s something here for everyone.
So far, our customers seem very pleased with the books and the quality of the stories. I intend to keep it that way.
BG: What are your favorite anthologies?
NF: Looking over my bookshelf, I’d say three of my favorites are Tales of Knights and Roses, When My Job’s Done, and the Villa Diodati Sampler.
BG: How many books printed this far?
NF: Sorry, that one’s confidential 
Clearly, with dozens of pre-edited anthologies, and hundreds of top notch stories to chose from when you build your own, there is something for everyone at AnthologyBuilder.com. Go build your own personalized anthology today! And don’t forget your gift cards for all your friends and family.
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Nancy Fulda’s fiction has appeared in venues including Jim Baen’s Universe, Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, and Norilana Books’ Warrior, Wisewoman anthology. She is a Phobos Award recipient, a two-time WOTF Finalist, and an assistant editor at Jim Baen’s Universe.
Nancy keeps a blog at http://nancyfulda.livejournal.com. She lives in Germany with her husband, their two children, and no cats.
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Bosley Gravel lives in a constant state of breaking the fourth wall, he is currently working on slipstream detective novella featuring evil incarnate. He writes in various genres and interested in all things fictitious.
