The Nest is contemporary-family-behaving-badly fiction—a genre I generally enjoy. Oh, who am I kidding- I like any family behaving badly in fiction! I mean, why not; it’s so much more fun. Sadly, what makes The Nest contemporary is its all-too-realistic theme: people living out their material dreams through credit. In the case of Leo, Jack, Beatrice, and Melody Plumb the credit ... Read More...
Guapa: A Novel
At 27 Rasa lives with his grandmother in al-Sharqiyeh, a large city in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. He works as a translator for foreign journalists because he speaks fluent English after going to college in America. The novel Guapa by Saleem Haddad spans 24 hours in Rasa’s life that are an emotional flash point. He has participated in the Arab Spring protests, ... Read More...
An Untamed State
When Mireille Jameson returns to Haiti with her husband and infant son to visit her wealthy family she knows of the tensions between the island’s poor and its rich. What she cannot anticipate is that on their way to an afternoon at the beach a gang of men will stop their car, beat her husband and kidnap her at gunpoint. For almost two weeks these young men will hold her ... Read More...
All Things Cease to Appear
Last week I reviewed The Undertaking which is a marvelous read in that it allows the reader to fully revel in feelings of rage, disgust and retribution (which is necessary relief if you’re watching political news these days). This is not the case in Elizabeth Brundage’s novel All Things Cease to Appear. It is much more attuned to contemporary times, when even though a ... Read More...
The Undertaking: A Novel
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of novels set in Berlin in the midst of World War II. Novels that document the trampling of many people’s lives into oblivion. Author Audrey Magee does not go the route of the victim or the innocent bystander. Instead, in her novel The Undertaking we meet Peter Faber, a German soldier stationed on the Russian front who decides to take ... Read More...
Green Island: A Novel
Past, present, and future too swirl together, distinguishable but not delineated by any sort of grammar beyond the one our hearts impose. The narrator in Green Island is born on the night in 1947 when the tension between the factions in Taiwan explode into civil violence. Her father, a doctor, in attending a community meeting the next night and quietly asking ... Read More...
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