Marianne and Connell live very different lives in the same small Irish town. She has a wealthy family and a big house, but is an outcast at their school, while he is everyone’s best friend, a natural athlete, a good student. His mother cleans her family’s mansion, so he comes over every afternoon to pick her up. On one of these afternoons they talk. This innocuous circumstance ... Read More...
Anatomy of a Miracle
Cameron Harris is a patriotic young man who goes to Afghanistan and returns home paralyzed from the waist down after stepping on an IED. When Jonathan Miles’s new novel, Anatomy of a Miracle opens he is back in his hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi living with his sister Tanya. Days are spent watching TV, smoking, taking the cornucopia of pills he’s been prescribed, and ... Read More...
The Heart’s Invisible Furies
Cyril Avery’s birth was not a propitious one. He came into the world onto the floor of a tiny apartment, next to the unconscious body of his mother’s roommate, with the roommate’s lover lying dead on the stairs below. It was Ireland in 1945 and the roommate and the lover were also teens, but they were men and as such had been hunted down by one’s father. From this ... Read More...
Beautiful Animals: A Novel
But things settled down and flowed on, because it was the law of summers among the rich that the season of leisure should flow like a large and charming river. The imperative was to have a good time and float on the luminescent surface. Meet Naomi, a bored, twenty-three-year-old Brit vacationing on the beautiful Greek island of Hydra. She’s staying at the lovely ... Read More...
White Fur by Jardine Libaire
Two weeks ago I wrote about The Heirs, a novel that surprised me by going well beyond its blurb to become a 5-star read. I had a similar surprise with White Fur by Jardine Libaire except it’s not the blurb that is surpassed, it’s the beginning of the novel itself—which is a much greater feat. Elise is twenty-years-old and has seen way more of the worst of the world than ... Read More...
The Shore: A Novel by Sara Taylor
The Shore by Sara Taylor may qualify as one of the most unusually formatted books I’ve read in a long time. Take a family tree composed of over fifty members, stretching from the 1850s to 2143. Close your eyes, throw a dart at the tree and wherever it land--that’s a chapter. So, even though Medora Slater is the matriarch who gets this clan started, she doesn’t make an ... Read More...
