Attention all you readers out there who love a good story, I have one for you. I’m talking no fancy-shmancy writing techniques; nothing experimental. I mean a good yarn. A story that can transport you to a different place even if you have no frame of reference to this place.

A few years ago Kate Morton released her first American book The House at Riverton. I was immediately sucked into this tale of an English country estate house with a history and a mystery. Well this seems to be a recurring theme that Kate can’t quite get away from, and that is fine by me. Her second book The Forgotten Garden was even better than the first. You absolutely fall in love with her female protagonists in every story she writes.

Well Kate Morton is giving us a new great story this year, The Distant Hours. I am about 265 pages into my advanced reader copy and I can’t put it down. The story starts out with a long lost letter written decades ago being delivered to the addressee. And this begins a whole world of memories and secrets flooding back into the narrator’s mother’s life and into the narrator’s life for the first time. Edie, our main character, is at once curious about this letter from the past. It is a letter from the woman who took Edie’s mother in as an evacuee during part of WWII. Edie’s mother stayed with this woman, Juniper Blythe, and her two significantly older twin sisters for over a year. Did I mention that the sister’s lived in an old family castle named Milderhurst? Well they do and the house is just overflowing with secrets.

Although Ms. Morton has already written two books focused around old English country estates the stories couldn’t be more different. All three of these books are absolute gems in themselves and all deserve to be read.

In the meantime, there’s an unusual video to make you even more curious about Kate’s next book. -Ellen

The Distant Hours by Kate Morton from Pan Macmillan on Vimeo.

The Distant Hours was released in November of 2010.

by Kelly Pickerill

I somehow overlooked it on the longlist for the Booker prize — it was somewhere there among other titles that caught my attention, The Slap, Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas’s controversial novel in which eight characters share their stories after an inciting incident (guess what?) occurs at a barbecue, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell’s latest opus that has infected Lemuria with Mitchell fever (see here, and here, and here), Skippy Dies, a cutely packaged novel (it comes in three boxed paperbacks or one hardback) by Paul Murray that has one of the most fun dust jacket blurbs I’ve read in a while,

Why does Skippy, a fourteen-year-old boy at Dublin’s venerable Seabrook College, end up dead on the floor of the local doughnut shop?
Could it have something to do with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight genius who is determined to open a portal into a parallel universe using ten-dimensional string theory?
Could it involve Carl, the teenage drug dealer and borderline psychotic who is Skippy’s rival in love?
Or could “the Automator” — the ruthless, smooth-talking headmaster intent on modernizing the school — have something to hide? (more)

not to mention the highly anticipated C by Tom McCarthy, and the (very good so far, though I feel like I’m all of a sudden reading tons of French Revolution novels . . . too many?) Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey — but when Emma Donoghue’s Room was shortlisted (along with the last two longlister’s I mentioned), I noticed, and since I had been planning on reading it anyway, I started it that evening. Evening turned to night and then to 3 a.m., and I finally decided it wasn’t worth being a zombie at work the next day to finish it, though it was still very hard to put it down.

I don’t want to tell you much about the story of Room; in fact, please don’t read what the Booker site has up about it — it reads like a TV show synopsis that someone would use to catch up after missing an episode. I will say this, though: Donoghue’s storytelling choices, the fact that she has chosen a five year old as the narrator, affords her opportunities (which she never wastes) to show her readers that the way they see the world is completely and irrevocably colored by their experiences. When I started reading the novel I thought I wouldn’t be able to make it through it — I thought I would get claustrophobic. Because I will tell you this about the plot: as you start reading Jack’s story you realize that he calls his bed “Bed” and a wilting plant “Plant” (as though they are the singular instances of those things) for the same reason he says that other children are “only TV” — because he has never been outside the twelve foot square shed that his mother has been locked in for seven years.

What would it mean for someone literally to have grown up in Plato’s cave, only seeing shadows on the wall, representations of “true” things and people and experiences, for five years of his life, suddenly to come into the world for the first time?  It was fascinating to see through Jack’s eyes as his vision of what the world is really like shifts, and to gain through him the unique perspective of one who takes nothing for granted, for whom everything is new.

Anna Karenina. Nearly two inches thick and a hardcover copy weighing in at about one and a half pounds. At first glance tackling one of Tolstoy’s giants appears a cumbersome task, and I think some readers might even be deterred from attempting such a voluminous work for a fear of not being able to finish the story even though it has achieved a “classic” status.

Though I have not yet even reached the halfway mark, if any such fears existed before they are certainly gone now.  Originally published in the 1870s it is still engrossing, and I think its engaging style is part of what makes the classics classic. The ability to transcend context and continue speaking long after generational expiration dates have passed is no small task, but is very meaningful and enjoyable to read.

Never dull or theatrical, it hasn’t taken long to discover what makes Anna K. a classic, and while Russian realism may not scream “Summer Reading,” looking past page numbers and taking on a giant in literature promises no regrets.

-John P.

by Kelly Pickerill

Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves.

They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. Sometimes he thought that they had ended up in that sequence by mistake, that they’d been trapped, like pearls strung on a necklace. Other times he suspected that they too would have preferred to be like all the others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they couldn’t do it. This second thought struck him mostly at night, in the chaotic interweaving of images that comes before sleep, when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies.

Paolo Giordano’s international bestseller from Italy, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, chronicles the relationship between two misfits: Mattia, a math genius who, because of his intense remorse for abandoning his twin sister when they were very young, punishes himself with burns and cuts, and Alice who, after a crippling skiing accident as a young girl, nurtures a skewed perspective of her body and anorexic eating habits.

The novel follows Alice and Mattia through their solitary lives, beginning with a recounting of the events that severely affected them as children and picking up when they meet as adolescents. Recognizing in each other an inability to connect with others and to master the “machinery of life,” as they become adults Alice and Mattia cling to each other while managing never really to touch. Then Mattia decides to accept a mathematics grant at a university in England, and Alice fumbles to find a connection to the world without him.

Such a novel, in the hands of a less adept writer, could quickly turn into a melodrama, but Giordano’s debut reads more like intricate portraits of people whose loneliness has been etched in relief. Even the “adjusted” adults in the novel, the parents of Alice and Mattia, Alice’s housekeeper, Sol, and the successful doctor Alice marries (she spends much time at the beginning of their relationship noticing his “normalcy”), struggle to reach beyond themselves.

While reading Solitude, I couldn’t keep myself from noting the insightful ways Giordano portrayed the struggle to connect with another — I am against underlining for the most part, so by the end of the book I was repeating numbers, much like Mattia would do, in order to remember pages and chapters that I wanted to go back to.  The quote above is one of them; it’s the opening of chapter 21.  There were also chapters 11, 15, 20, and pages 77, 115, and 131. I’ll refrain from sharing all of those with you, but I would like to end with the conclusion to which Mattia comes after the passage above, which gives the title of this impressive novel its significance:

Twin primes are pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching. Numbers like 11 and 13, like 17 and 19, 41 and 43. If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. You encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of ciphers, and you develop a distressing presentiment that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true destiny. Then, just when you’re about to surrender, when you no longer have the desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tightly. There is a common conviction among mathematicians that however far you go, there will always be another two, even if no one can say where exactly, until they are discovered. Mattia thought that he and Alice were like that, twin primes, alone and lost, close but not close enough to really touch each other.

First of all, I liked the title and the beautiful cover (be sure to take the jacket off to get the full effect)  from the moment the ARC  landed in my hand. I was not disappointed after I had read even a few chapters. Mesmerizing, captivating,  and clever The Hand That First Held Mine is indeed! So, a reader first sees the title and usually thinks about it for at least a few moments, even if unconsciously. For most of us, the hand that first held our own would be the sweet hand of our mothers. If that statement jars you, then this book is for you.  They say that nothing is as strong as a mother’s love.

Author Maggie O’Farrell centers in on this concept with this beautiful novel set in England in two different time periods, the 1950s and the present. Two stories emerge. The reader is conscious that the two families must be related or joined somehow, or otherwise what’s the point? But not until mid way through this novel does the answer of “how” become somewhat clear, and as the novel speeds up at the end, a light bulb is turned on and shines shockingly at the truth, which has been hidden from one of the characters for his entire life. And on top of all of that, both families have newborns. Those of you who know me know that my mind is on babies right now anyway, so this novel had an added interest to me for the future as well as the past, thinking about the not so long ago when my now adult children were  precious babes in my arms. My how time flies!

Two women emerge as the protagonists; the first is Lexie, a winsome, overly confident 19 year old college dropout who decides, against her family’s wishes, to move to London on her own, when this is certainly not done in the 1950s. She falls in love with an artist type, and begins a  magazine career with this 14 year older boyfriend, who happens to be separated from his wife and her 12 yr. old angry, jealous daughter. That is  how “story one” begins. The ending shall remain untold. “Story two”, set in present day London, revolves around new mother Elina, a talented painter with a  winsome garden studio, and her troubled, distraught husband who is experiencing a challenge with the  physical and psychological demands of young fatherhood. To say that memories of the recent, as well as distant past, plague  the couple’s life is an understatement.

So, I keep asking myself why this novel is “SO good”!  I usually like psychological realism, so that fits here. I also like fulfilling character development, and that fits here as well. Additionally, I like clever language, and that also fits here with the added pleasure of reading truly “English phrases” such as “bedsit”, which in England means “apartment”. (The author, a mother of two and native of Wales and Scotland, who currently resides in London, two years ago wrote the popular foreign fiction hit The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, which Maggie said she liked a lot. )

One more thing, before I forget it…….the way the novel is written, that is the phraseology and diction, reminded me of  the use of the term “camera obscura” , the concept of the roving  omniscient camera seeing all, with the dedicated use of the present tense. It’s been some time since I have read a novel written in this manner, and it was very effective for me.  For instance, the author writes, “Lexie nods as if interested, but she is thinking about the bombsites she has seen around London–blackened craters choked with nettles, terraces with a sudden raw gap, windowless buildings with that sightless, vacant appearance–and she is thinking she wouldn’t go anywhere near them, wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”

I’m still thinking about the characters, and it’s been about two weeks since I savored the last few pages of this memorable novel. To me, that’s  a mark of a well written, enticing novel.  I’ll be trying to persuade customers to buy this little gem, The Hand That First Held Mine, for some time to come.  -Nan

This is going to be a joint blog on Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil which is due to be released on Tuesday, April 13. I just asked Lisa if she was on board for doing something that has never been done on our blog: two staff members reviewing the same book without our knowing what each other is writing. So, here goes!

Nan:

I finished reading Beatrice and Virgil two nights ago and waked in the middle of the night thinking about it and could not go back to sleep for quite some time. This is a very, very, very complex novel. I am keeping my fingers crossed that Yann Martel might come to read from his new novel and sign for us someday, for I would have a multitude of questions for him. I regret that I could not be at the  Lemuria signing for Life of Pi in late 2007.It is a huge regret I have, not being here for that reading.

So, how to begin this discussion alludes me, but I guess I’ll just jump in. Beatrice and Virgil is an allegory. And yes, there are animals who talk, specifically the donkey, Beatrice, and the monkey, Virgil.  It is correct at this point to think of Dante, if you are, but to think of Hell in a different physical light. We all know that “living in Hell” , or having lived in Hell takes various forms.  Having  just read Robert Olen Butler’s Hell a few months ago, Beatrice was still on my mind!

Within this novel, however,  the narrator, named Henry, meets Beatrice and Virgil at a weird taxidermist’s studio. The donkey and the monkey are “stuffed” naturally, being in this studio.  The taxidermist has written a play about Beatrice and Virgil and has enticed the narrator, who is a famous author, coincidentally aligned with Yann Martel the author, himself, to help with a specific question that has occurred during the writing of the taxidermist’s play. Simultaneously, the reader is aware of the parallel story occurring in the narrator’s career, the particular occurrence of writer’s block mixed with severe questions by his publicists and reviewers who have read his new manuscript or galley of his proposed next book.  The narrator and author Henry does not realize why these readers do not “get” it! In fact, they keep asking, “What is this story about?” Juxtaposed with this idea, is Henry’s inability to determine what the taxidermist’s point is in his play about a speaking donkey and a speaking, loyal monkey whose disturbing, painful to hear howls halt all life in the forest. In fact, the taxidermist has recorded these howls from “real” howler monkeys in the forest which are as equally disturbing for Henry to hear. Have I said yet that the symbolism is abundant in this novel?

Does Henry have another life and why is he spending so much time with the taxidermist? This is the question which starts plaguing the reader who has been informed that yes, Henry, does, in fact, have another life, one which is rich and full with a wife, a baby on the way, a winsome dog and cat and a very successful career as a writer. But, Henry has been hit at the core: his publicist does not “understand” his new manuscript. The taxidermist, who becomes more and more mysterious, never giving his real name, appears distant, rude, and sinister. Yet, Henry continues to go back to his studio to be read to. Why does the taxidermist insist on reading his play out loud instead of Henry being able to read it while holding it in his own hands? Why does Henry have to sit on a stool, like a dutiful school boy, being read to? What is up with all of this? And, in the midst of all of this “action” , which is indeed very little, throw in allusions to the Holocaust sprinkled throughout.

I’m going to take a stand and tell you, faithful reader, up front that this is a novel driven by thematic implications! Remember, who Virgil and Beatrice are! Remember that evil takes many forms, alluring, disturbing, cunning! Remember that we as human beings can often overlook “evil” when it appeals to our own interests, such as two writers getting together to discuss one another’s writing. (I forgot to mention that the taxidermist had already read Henry’s first book about animals.)  Illusions persuade in most questionable and mysterious ways in this unforgettable puzzling novel. Yann Martel won the Man Booker for Life of Pi. Could he be nominated  for even win the National Book Award for this novel? Maybe!

Lisa:

I was not a huge fan of Life of Pi. Although I enjoyed reading Pi in a general way, I was disappointed that Martel did not expand on some of themes more thoroughly. I found myself pulled in more deeply to his new book Beatrice and Virgil.

The theme of the relationship between author and reader, both of whom are named Henry, appealed to me the most and this sets up the basic structure of the novel. Henry is a successful novelist and has just pitched his latest work to his publisher. They are not so excited about his idea to bind a fiction and nonfiction work into the same book. The reader really gets a feel for these relationships in the book world: writer to publisher to reader.

The other Henry is a reader of the author Henry. Henry the reader has sent the author a letter requesting his help, with what the letter does not say. He also has sent a copy of part of a play and a short story by Flaubert. The author Henry eventually ends up on the reader’s doorstep as they live in the same town. The reader Henry owns and runs a taxidermy business. As in Life of Pi, animals play significant roles in Martel’s work. I believe it is Martel and Henry the author who both believe that animals have the capacity to deal with heavy themes often better than human characters. Which leads me to another significant part of the novel: Beatrice and Virgil. Eventually, you, the reader, are introduced to them in a play, written by Henry the reader. They also happen to be animals of taxidermy in Henry’s shop.

This book is really a difficult one to write about because it is operating on so many different levels. Also, it was a shocking book to me, one that takes a while to settle, for me to figure out what I think about it. And believe me, there is a forceful coming together of questions and actions until the very last page. Martel puts a lot on the  reader. Beatrice and Virgil will make for great discussion.

Let me see if I can sum up with the different levels: the relationship between author and reader; the art and choice of the written genre; how to discuss horrific events such as the holocaust; and I also think there is the consideration of how people deal with actions of horror. Other more abstract considerations as noted on the back cover of Beatrice and Virgil: questions of life and art, truth and deception, responsibility and complicity. I read this before starting the book and didn’t take it very seriously. Martel takes these questions very seriously.

-Nan

Since the St Paddy’s day parade is going on somewhere out there in Jackson, I think it’s only appropriate that I write about the book I just started because it’s by an Irish author!  And so if you’re missing the parade and reading this blog instead, you’ll still get your dose…

Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin, came out last year – but it’s just come out this month in a nice little paperback.  It generated some attention in January this year when he won the Costa ‘novel of the year’ prize.  At the time I was reading a book by another Irish author, Patrick McCabe, and I made a mental note to read Brooklyn.  I’d never read Colm Toibin and, as the above article points out, he’s been churning out books for a while.  Apparently really good ones.

Brooklyn is about Eilis Lacey, who rather passively (she doesn’t have any better options, doesn’t know how to say no, is mostly fine with her small-town life) emigrates from Ireland to New York in the years following World War 2.  She leaves her mum and her sister and begins work in a department store, eventually falling in love and effectively planting herself in America.  When news from Ireland calls her back to her hometown, she experiences that strange lurching of place, where home feels foreign and in fact the idea of what ‘home’ means is called into question.

Newsweek wrote that this book ‘captures the essence of homesickness’, and maybe that’s what has drawn me to it so much.  If I so much as go on a weekend trip somewhere, I wind up getting ‘homesick’ for it at some point – maybe everybody does this.  I guess it’s a version of always wanting something you can’t have.

Not to say that this book is dismal; it’s not.  Not so far, anyway.  I’m not done with it yet, so I suppose I can’t well sum up how I feel about it.  Even though I’d only heard great things about this book, I’m still surprised at just how much I like it.  I’ll miss it when I’m done.

Susie

Alice Munro’s latest short story collection, Too Much Happiness, is not a book for the faint of heart.  The ten stories that comprise this collection seem exceptionally dark, even for a writer not known for happy endings.  Fortunately this bleak outlook is somewhat redeemed (at least for me) by Munro’s practice of giving her protagonists, however fleeting or subtle it may be, some sort of epiphany or moment of awareness at the end.  The stories, of course, are still vintage Munro—carefully observed, always surprising, complex, yet accessible, with fully imagined characters who, because of their striking singularity, emerge as very real people.  Once again Munro manages to transcend the genre in which she labors, creating stories that because of their richness and depth are often as satisfying as full-blown novels.

Here’s one critic’s assessment that captures beautifully the magic of her magnificent talent:

One Alice Munro short story has the power of many novels.  Nothing is wasted.  Nothing is irrelevant.  Every word glows.  Munro is able to capture the shape and mood, the flavor of a life in 30 pages.  She tells us what it is to be a human being.  She is wholly without cliche.  At the end of one of her stories you have to pause, catch your breath, come up for air. (Garan Holcombe writing for The British Council, 2008; read full article here)

Perhaps the only person who could have put it better than that is Munro herself—who is quoted as saying about her work—“I want the reader to feel something is astonishing.  Not the ‘what happens’ but the way everything happens”

Be prepared to be astonished.

-Billie

I got this book for Christmas, a gift from someone who’d also never read it, and somehow I’d never heard much about it – just heard OF it and that it won the Pulitzer a couple of years ago – and so it was one of those nice experiences where I didn’t know what I was getting into.  But!  good news.  I loved this book.  Crazy about it, sort of.

I guess the nicest thing at first was the fact that I’d never read anything even close to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It’s this epic story full of footnotes and Lord of the Rings references and history – recent history – of the Dominican Republic, specifically during the ‘Trujillo Era’, when the country was ruled by one of the bloodiest most awful tyrants of the 20th century (about whom I don’t know enough, I need to admit).

The Oscar in the title is this horribly overweight nerd, a Dominican growing up in New Jersey who wants to fall in love and be a great sci-fi writer and all the rest of it but unfortunately he just really can’t help himself from being the loser that he is – a real bind, since Dominican men are typically very successful with women.  This is in stark contrast to the narrator, who at points in the novel is the boyfriend of Oscar’s sister.  He tells the story without waiting for you to catch up – using slang, drifting into Spanish, etc.  He tells the reader about Oscar’s mother growing up in the DR and his grandfather, who is rumored to have spoken against Trujillo one day, therefore incurring a curse that’s haunted Oscar’s family ever since.  Hence Oscar’s disastrous luck – maybe?  Maybe?  We also read about Oscar’s sister and her strained relationship with her mother.  It’s so GOOD.  It’s hilarious and fascinating and then so sweet and sad and tragic that it’s sort of a kick in the teeth.

Diaz also has a short story collection out called Drown.  I’ve never read it.  Can’t wait to.  anyway!

Susie

Okay, well……..Since I had never read Coetzee, I decided to give him a try. So, I picked up Summertime from the literary fiction room since it was staring me right in the face each day I came to work.  What can I say? I was curious! And I very much liked the fact that Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for literature. Then, I went to the foreign fiction shelf and pulled his acceptance speech given in Stockholm in December of  2003 and speed read the first few pages. Surprisingly, Coetzee spends the first few pages referring to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, an unlikely, but interesting  pick, I thought. I digress……

So, back to Summertime, a challenging novel to describe. First of all, the modus operandi exudes cleverness.  The narrator, an English biographer, chooses four women and one man to interview about their relationships with and opinions of the writer Coetzee during the 1970s in South Africa. The women, one a close cousin who spent much time with Coetzee as a child; another, a woman who erroneously suspected him of creating a romantic involvement with her teenage daughter; another, a lover and the fourth a married woman with whom he also had a relationship; and the fifth person interviewed, a male professor who taught with Coetzee at the University of Cape Town, rounds out the unlikely selection.

The biographer, who has already written a basic account of the time each of the interviewees spent with Coetzee, before the reader witnesses the “actual” interview, seems relentless at times in trying to get to the essence of Coetzee, the man himself. Commonalities emerge concerning the basic perceptions that the four women have on the young writer Coetzee. All seem to agree on one basic premise: the young writer is aloof and avoids close heart felt relationships, even though he seems to yearn for them. The reader eventually surmises that part of the problem must lie in the fact that Coetzee’s aging widowed, sick father, probably now in his 70s, is seemingly destitute and lives with his writer son in what is basically a shack with only the merest of modern amenities. One of the most intriguing elements of this complex novel resides in the basic questions that the biograher chooses to ask the four women and one man. He is relentless and  angers the interviewees often for his misconceptions and assumptions, not only about Coetzee, but also about themselves.  They often remind him that he never met the man Coetzee in person!

I had to keep reminding myself that I was not strictly reading an autobiography, nor a biography, but a work of fiction, created by an award winning international writer who created a narrator/biographer to record the writer’s life in the 1970s.  On top of that, Coetzee chose the interviewees, the questions which they would be asked, and even their answers. For that matter, I asked myself, did he fictionalize the people themselves? What if these people, or their exact versions, never existed, but are simply compilations of people he wished he had known or with whom he dreamed that he had relationships? After all, isn’t it a writer’s prerogative to rewrite “the truth”? Maybe he did not fictionalize, however, but did the best he could objectively recording his life. I did not feel like I was being manipulated as a reader at all as I was reading this enigmatic novel. It doesn’t really matter, does it, whether Coetzee was being totally truthful?  I am enamoured of Coetzee, the writer, and will look forward to reading more or his work. Did I mention that this novel was a finalist for the Man Booker for 2009?

Coetzee Photo Credit: The Guardian, September 6, 2008

-Nan