FullReviews Index - page 3
Queen of Broken Hearts
Clare is a widow whose husband died in what may have been a hunting accident. Her step-daughter, Haley, is married with two children when her marriage goes asunder. Two men love Clare. Rye Ballenger is a sophisticated Southerner and cousin to her late husband. Lex Yarbrough has just moved down from Maine and been divorced by his harridan of a wife who then wants him back so Clare cannot have him. Clare's best friend Dory is married to Son who thinks he "owns" the town by birthright...
Traveler
In Traveler, his beautifully written follow up to The Memory of Running, Ron McLarty has created a character who returns home to an awakened sense of responsibility after a note arrives telling him of the death of his first love...
Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakthrough
Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakthrough is feel-good chick-lit at the top of its game. Isabel Sharpe's latest novel is a story about three women on the verge of self-discovery. It begins when Vivian Harcourt moves into the sleepy town of Kettle, Wisconsin, the home of her late grandmother. Known to the world as the glamorous Lorelai Taylor and having recently been acquitted of her boyfriend's murder, Vivian moves back to Kettle to escape the media.
The Book of Dave
When cabdriver Dave Rudman's wife deserts him for another man, taking their only child with her, Dave pens a gripping text—part memoir, part deranged philosophical treatise, and part handbook of "the Knowledge" learned by all London cab drivers. Five hundred years later, the Book of Dave is discovered by the inhabitants on the island of Ham, where it becomes a sacred text of biblical proportion, and its author is revered as a mighty prophet.
Once in a Promised Land
Once in a Promised Land is the story of a couple, Jassim and Salwa, who left the deserts of their native Jordan for those of Arizona, each chasing their own dreams of opportunity and freedom. Although the two live far from Ground Zero, they cannot escape the nationwide fallout from 9/11. Jassim, a hydrologist, believes passionately in his mission to keep the water tables from dropping and make water accessible to all people, his work threatened by an FBI witch hunt for domestic terrorists...
Against the Day
Thomas Pynchon is known for the brilliant and complex novels that he wrote in the 1960's and 70's: V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon devotees have waited a long time for the author's sixth novel, Against the Day, and want to know - is it brilliant, or just complex?
Only Revolutions
Mark Danielewski's experimental novel, Only Revolutions surrounds a 200 year road journey taken by two teenage lovers, Hailey and Sam. It is narrated by each of these characters, and readers are instructed to flip the book over every 8 pages to switch viewpoints. This sort of experimentalist literature is not new to Danielewski whose experimental horror novel, House of Leaves became a cult favorite and is now dissected in literature classrooms at Universities the world over.
Kafka on the Shore
In "Kafka on the Shore," Haruki Murakami delivers a tour de force of metaphysical reality, powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom.
Paint it Black
Janet Fitch, well known for her 1999 bestselling novel, White Oleander (an Oprah's Book Club pick) is back with her third novel, Paint it Black, about a self-destructive teen runaway as in the 1980's L.A. punk music scene, struggling and searching for answers after her enigmatic Harvard dropout boyfriend commits suicide.
Anansi Boys
"Fat Charlie" Nancy is perpetually embarrassed by his father, a dapper old man who talks to everyone, loves karaoke, and plays practical jokes on everyone-including Fat Charlie. After the elder Mr. Nancy's funeral, Charlie discovers two things: his father was Anansi, the story-telling, spider trickster god; and Charlie was not an only child.
Cloud Atlas
From the Chatham Isles in 1850 to 1931 Belgium, from the West Coast in the 1970s to present-day England, and from a Korean superstate of the near future to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii, David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" ricochets it's way through time, space, and literary genres and characters in an extremely compelling "puzzle book" novel. Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" was a finalist for the 2004 Man Booker Prize and a nominee for the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Awards.
Black Swan Green
Black Swan Green inverts the telescopic vision of Cloud Atlas to track a single year in what is, for 13-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the 13 chapters create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. Pointed, funny, profound, left field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell's subtlest yet most accessible achievement to date.
Freddy and Fredericka
Freddy is the Prince of Wales, Fredericka his troublesome wife. An overeducated, bumbling anachronism, Freddy commits one gaffe after another, for which he is massacred daily in the press. Fredericka, frivolous and empty headed, is particularly fond of wearing spectacular clothing with revealing necklines. Because of the public relations disasters caused by these heirs to the throne, they are sent, in a little-known ancient tradition, on a quest to colonize a strange and barbarous land: America.
Until I Find You
"According to his mother, Jack Burns was an actor before he was an actor, but Jack's most vivid memories of childhood were those moments when he felt compelled to hold his mother's hand. He wasn't acting then." So begins John Irving's eleventh novel, Until I Find You — the story of the actor Jack Burns. His mother, Alice, is a Toronto tattoo artist; his father, William, a church organist who is addicted to being tattooed.
Jpod
Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers are bureaucratically marooned in JPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver video game design company. The six JPodders wage daily battle against the demands of a boneheaded marketing staff, who daily torture employees with idiotic changes to already idiotic games. Meanwhile, Ethan's personal life is shaped by phenomena as disparate as Hollywood, marijuana grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, and the rise of China.
Londonstani
Gautam Malkani's extraordinary comic novel portrays the lives of young Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu men in the ethnically charged enclave of one of the biggest western cities, London. A world usually-but wrongly-portrayed as the breeding ground for Islamic militants is, in actuality, a world of money (sometimes), flash cars (usually), cell phones (all the time), rap music and MTV, as well as rivalries and feuds, and the small-time crooks who exploit them.
The Futurist
He makes a spectacular living traveling the globe and spouting prepackaged wisdom to the leaders of government and business, but a Dear John letter from his girlfriend and minibar's worth of alcohol send the futurist off track at a Johannesburg Futureworld Conference and onto a collision course with his own future. James Othmer walks a perfect line between a hilariously entertaining novel and a sharply sardonic commentary on the role of American Empire.
Adverbs
Adverbs is a novel about love -- a bunch of different people, in and out of different kinds of love. At the start of the novel, Andrea is in love with David -- or maybe it's Joe -- who instead falls in love with Peter in a taxi. At the end of the novel, it's Joe who's in the taxi, falling in love with Andrea, although it might not be Andrea, and in any case it might not be the same Andrea, as Andrea is a very common name...
The Man In My Basement
Walter Mosely, author of the Easy Rawlins detective novels, weaves a more philosophical story in The Man in My Basement. Charles Blakely is an unemployed African-American who rents his basement to a wealthy white man for a large amount of money. What ensues is an exploration of heavy themes: guilt and redemption, power and manipulation, and race.
Fortunate Son
Walter Mosley's novel about two boys, one ensconced in a life of privilege and the other in a life of hardship, explores the true meaning of fortune. In spite of remarkable differences, Eric and Tommy are as close as brothers. Eric, a Nordic Adonis, is graced by a seemingly endless supply of good fortune. Tommy is a lame black boy, cursed with health problems, yet he remains optimistic and strong. The two eventually confront a common enemy and, ultimately, save their lives.
This Book Will Save Your Life
Richard Novak is a modern-day Everyman, a middle-aged divorcé trading stocks out of his home. He has done such a good job getting his life under control that he needs no one—except his trainer, nutritionist, and housekeeper. He is functionally dead and doesn’t even notice until two incidents—an attack of intense pain that lands him in the emergency room, and the discovery of an expanding sinkhole outside his house—conspire to hurl him back into the world.
The Brief History of the Dead
The City is inhabited by the recently departed, who reside there only as long as they remain in the memories of the living. Among the current residents of this afterlife are Luka Sims, who prints the only newspaper in the City, with news from the other side; Coleman Kinzler, a vagrant who speaks the cautionary words of God; and Marion and Phillip Byrd, who find themselves falling in love again after decades of marriage.
The Good Life
On a September 2001 morning in New York, brightness falls horribly from the sky, and people worlds apart suddenly find themselves working side by side at the devastated site, feeling lost anywhere else, yet battered still by memory and regret, by fresh disappointment and unimaginable shock. What happens, or should happen, when life stops us in our tracks, or our own choices do? What if both secrets and secret needs, long guarded steadfastly, are finally revealed? What is the good life?
On Beauty
Zadie Smith made a literary splash as a twenty-five-year-old with her debut novel White Teeth. Five years and two novels later, Smith has all but solidified herself a spot among the modern literary canon as one of a handful of truly important young novelists at work today. Smith's latest is On Beauty, a modern twist on E. M. Forster's Howard's End, updated to the still-stiff-collared world of twenty-first-century ivy-league academia.
Utterly Monkey
Taking place over an intense five-day period - set in London and the fictional town of Ballyglass - Irish novelist Nick Laird's debut novel, Utterly Monkey, looks at who and what we really owe loyalty to: our lovers, our friends, our country, ourselves? And what happens to your soul in an office? And why do jellybeans cost so much in posh hotels?