Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies.

We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches for the mother he lost - and whom Olive comforts by her mere presence, while her own son feels overwhelmed by her complex sensitivities.

A penetrating, vibrant exploration of the human soul, the story of Olive Kitteridge will make you laugh, nod in recognition, wince in pain, and shed a tear or two.

The novel is structured to form a series of short stories: case histories through which is woven the character of Olive Kitteridge who may play a significant part, or almost none at all.  All the members of my Dorset group rated this highly.





A Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr : Bernie Gunther Mystery 5

Philip Kerr writes an excellent thriller.  He also writes for children.  You can find out more about him following this link: http://philipkerr.org/about/   or

https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/philip-kerr/198811/?mkwid=sSZLll4oZ|dc&pcrid={creative}&pkw=books&pmt=b&plc={placement}&utm_term=books&utm_campaign=Search+%7C+Dynamic+Search+Ad+Test&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=bing

In A Quiet Flame, posing as an escaping Nazi war-criminal Bernie Gunther arrives in Buenos Aires and, having revealed his real identity to the local chief of police, discovers that his reputation as a detective goes before him. A young girl has been murdered in peculiarly gruesome circumstances that strongly resemble Bernie's final case as a homicide detective with the Berlin police. A case he had failed to solve.

Circumstances lead the chief of police in Buenos Aires to suppose that the murderer may be one of several thousand ex Nazis who have fetched up in Argentina since 1945. And, therefore, who better than Bernie Gunther to help him track that murderer down?

Redolent with atmosphere, this novel ends up asking some highly provocative questions about the true extent of Argentina's Nazi collaboration and anti-semitism under the Peróns.   It is this engagement with political and historical issues that authenticates Kerr's novels and sets Kerr's thriller in a higher rank than the traditional crime/detective/thriller genre which makes for extremely popular reading.               

Days without End and Confederates

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

I've just started a Reading Forum using the Slack chatroom programme.  We are five readers, I am the common factor, the others are friends of mine, geographically spread but women who, I think, would find each other interesting to know.  So I sent them an email proposing my idea and waited to see what the response would be.  The response was favourable, our reading group is established.  Here is what I wrote in that first email:

"I am prompted to write because I have just finished Days without End by Sebastian Barry.  His latest novel has been longlisted for the Man Booker (I follow the Man Booker prize).  Some of you may know that I set myself the task of reading the whole sequence of Short-listeds and Winners.  I have read all Barry's other books which follow the history of two Irish families.  All Dunne/McNulty novels have been prize-winners, two were Booker short-listed.

....... A “searing, magnificent” depiction of a gay relationship during the bloody founding of modern America, described by judges as “one of the most wonderful depictions of love in the whole of fiction”, has won the Costa book of the year award.........  Read more here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/31/days-without-end-wins-sebastian-barry-second-costa-book-of-the-year#img-1

Opening para from the Guardian review of Days without End:

Sebastian Barry's commitment to telling the stories of two Irish families, the Dunnes and the McNultys, over several novels and multiple time frames and locations, has led to one of the most compelling, bravura and heart-wrenching fictional projects of recent memory. Its gaps and fissures, its silences, its elaboration of attachment, separation and loss amount to a profound meditation on the nature of national identity, enforced emigration and the dispersal of a people into lands frequently inhospitable and alienating, there to forge a new life.

I leave this 'serving suggestion' there.  So what else have I read recently?"

I 'read' this book thanks to Audible. Sebastian Barry has alluring Irish good looks, and the voice of the narrator, Aidan Kelly, had a wonderful sense of authenticy.  Kelly is an Earphones Award–winning narrator and a Dublin/London-based actor with extensive stage, film, television, and radio experience. He has appeared as Tom in the Druid Theatre’s production of The Good Father, directed by Garry Hynes for the Galway Arts Festival. He won the Sunday Tribune Award for his performances in Howie the Rookie and Comedians.

Confederates by Thomas Keneally  Man Booker Prize: shortlisted 1979

Confederates is a novel by the Australian author Thomas Keneally which uses the American Civil War as its main subject matter.

As the Civil War tears America apart, General Stonewall Jackson leads a troop of Confederate soldiers on a long trek towards the battle they believe will be a conclusive victory. Through their hopes, fears and losses, Keneally searingly conveys both the drama and mundane hardship of war, and brings to life one of the most emotive episodes in American history.

Confederates uses the American Civil War as a setting for a more personal conflict between neighbours. In the midst of the war's climactic battle  another conflict is underway. Ephie Bumpass' husband Usaph and Ephie's lover Decatur Cate are thrown together to fight in the Shenandoah Volunteers. Cate's emasculating injury in the battle is a symbolic punishment for his sin.


My comment:  I got half way through this book before I was obliged to set it aside because I had another title to read within a timeframe.   

Fish have no Feet

Fish Have No Feet

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017.
Keflavik: a town that has been called the darkest place in Iceland, surrounded by black lava fields, hemmed in by a sea that may not be fished. Its livelihood depends entirely on a U.S. military base, a conduit for American influences that shaped Icelandic culture and ethics from the 1950s to the dawn of the new millennium.

It is to Keflavik that Ari – a writer and publisher – returns from Copenhagen at the behest of his dying father, two years after walking out on his wife and children. He is beset by memories of his youth, spent or misspent listening to Pink Floyd and the Beatles, fraternising with American servicemen – who are regarded by the locals with a mixture of admiration and contempt – and discovering girls. There is one girl in particular he could never forget - her fate has stayed with him all his life.

Layered through Ari's story is that of his grandparents in a village on the eastern coast, a world away from modern Keflavik. For his grandfather Oddur, life at sea was a destiny; for Margrét its elemental power brings only loneliness and fear.

Both the story of a singular family and an epic that sparkles with love, pain and lifelong desire with all of human life.   Fish have no Feet is a novel of profound beauty and wisdom by a major international writer.

By the author of the acclaimed trilogy, Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels and The Heart of Man; you can read a review of Fish have no Feet from the Irish Times:

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/fish-have-no-feet-by-j%C3%B3n-kalman-stef%C3%A1nsson-translated-by-philip-roughton-1.2813844

Murders with a Twist

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s carer in his squalid home and her day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city.

In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a handsome prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the beautiful, charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counsellor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted and unable to resist what appears to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her
wildest imaginings.

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfega was shortlisted for the Man Booker 2016, nominated for three other literary prizes and book of the year for the Times, Observer and Daily Telegraph.  That is quite an accolade.

His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

The year is 1869. A brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands leads to the arrest of a young man by the name of Roderick Macrae. A memoir written by the accused makes it clear that he is guilty, but it falls to the country s finest legal and psychiatric minds to uncover what drove him to commit such merciless acts of violence. Was he mad? Only the persuasive powers of his advocate stand between Macrae and the gallows.

Graeme Macrae Burnet tells an irresistible and original story about the provisional nature of truth, even when the facts seem clear. His Bloody Project is a mesmerising literary thriller set in an unforgiving landscape where the exercise of power is arbitrary.

'The book’s pretence at veracity, as well as being a literary jeux d’esprit, brings an extraordinary historical period into focus, while the multiple unreliable perspectives are designed to keep the audience wondering, throughout the novel and beyond. This is a fiendishly readable tale that richly deserves the wider attention the Booker has brought it.'  Guardian Review.

To read the full review follow this link:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/12/his-bloody-project-by-graeme-macrae-burnet-review

In the Country of Men

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

Nine-year-old Suleiman is just awakening to the wider world beyond the games on the hot pavement outside his home and beyond the loving embrace of his parents. He becomes the man of the house when his father goes away on business, but then he sees his father, standing in the market square in a pair of dark glasses. Suddenly the wider world becomes a frightening place where parents lie and questions go unanswered. Suleiman turns to his mother, who, under the cover

of night, entrusts him with the secret story of her childhood.

In the Country of Men is Matar's debut novel first published in 2006 by Viking. It was nominated for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. It has so far been translated into 22 languages and was awarded the 2007 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize as well as a host of international literary prizes. The book was also nominated for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in the U.S.

The book follows the plight of Suleiman, a nine-year-old boy living in Tripoli in Libya, stuck between a father whose clandestine anti-Qaddafi activities bring about searches, stalkings and telephone eaves droppings by Qaddafi's state police, and a vulnerable young mother who resorts to alcohol to bury her anxiety and anger. The only people he has to turn to are his neighbour Kareem, and his father's best friend Moosa. The book provides a description of Libya under Qaddafi's terror regime, and a narration of ordinary people's lives as they try to survive the political oppression.

Patres nostres

Our Fathers by Andrew O'Hagan

Jamie returns to Scotland with his grandfather, the legendary social reformer Hugh Bawn, now living out his last days on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise.  The young man is faced with the unquiet story of a country he thought he had left behind and now he listens to the voices of ghosts, and what they say about his own life.  It is a story of love and landscape, of nationality and strong drink, of Catholic faith and the end of the old left.  It is a tale of dark hearts and modern houses - of three men in search of Utopia.  Jamie Bawn's journey home will leave him changed beyond words - beyond the words that darkened his childhood.

The story, set in post WWII Scotland, is also about the “coming of age” of Jamie, a young boy growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father and a weak, ineffectual mother. One day, after a brutal beating of his mother by his drunken father, thirteen year old Jamie realizes he can no longer tolerate his home environment and moves in with his father’s parents, who have provided the only source of stability throughout his young life.

Jamie remains with his grandparents until he finishes school and then moves to England to strike out on his own. He returns to Scotland ten years later for an extended visit when he learns that Hugh, his grandfather, is dying. As he and his grandfather reminisce about the past, Jamie thinks to himself: “Once upon a time it was Hugh that had shown me, a young, saddened boy, how to grow up, how to make use of the past, and live with change. And now I was here: I would try to show him.”
Ultimately, this is a story about forgiveness because, in going through this process with his beloved grandfather, Jamie comes to the realization that his parents too were victims of their own personal torments and did the best they could with what they had to work with at the time – which is all any of us can do.

Such is the quality of the writing, the verisimilitude of the narrative, that the novel reads like an autobiographical memoir.

This was O'Hagan's debut novel, shortlisted for the 1999 Booker prize.  He went on to write four more novels and all five have either been nominated for Awards, or received literary prizes, or both.  The fifth novel, The Illuminations, published in 2015, was longlisted for the Man Booker.

Scar Tissue

Scar Tissue by Michael Ignatieff

As part of my reading habits I have been working through the Booker/Man Booker shortlists since the beginning of their time.  I always have several novels waiting in the wings and my reading of these is interspersed with more current titles, and novels which are less demanding and of the more popular thriller variety  As it happens this novel was the first I spotted in my basket of 'wallflowers'. 

The subject matter turns out to be so relevant to my place at the moment.  With my own mother in her last days of the cruel disease which is Alzheimers, this and the way the fictional family in Ignatieff's novel deals with it forms the very relevant core of the novel. 

At the heart of Michael Ignatieff's riveting novel about a woman's descent into Alzheimer's are the tangled threads of a Midwestern family, frayed by time and tragedy yet still connected - as much by pride, embarrassed love, and sibling rivalry as by the painful ties of family loyalty. More than a tale of isolated tragedy, Scar Tissue explores the bonds of memory, their configuartion in self-identity, and their relationship to love, loyalty, and death. 

It is a son's account of his mother's voyage into a world of neurological disease and anyone, and there are so many of us, who has lived their parent through that journey will find much that resonates in this memoir.  I find it a particular point of interest that none of the main characters is given a name...   Wikipedia gives a plot summary as follows:

The book details one woman’s struggle with Alzheimer's (or dementia, it’s not clear) and how her family respond to it. In particular, it is one of her son’s voice the reader hears since he is narrating it. Another son isn’t involved so much as he is living in Boston practicing as a neuroscientist. So it is the narrator who bears most of the burden. And all the while, he is trying to work on his marriage and his career as a philosophy professor. His own family life is hardly acknowledged and tears in his marriage begin to show, towards his wife; there for moral support but can't come to terms with him not being a consistent, central figure at the moment.

While her illness begins with her repeating stories ad nauseam, things get much worse as she starts to be incapable of recognizing her own family. Thus the prime caretaker – the son – ends up separating from his wife and living in derelict conditions. Nonetheless, he remains positive about the nature of life and death, even once he has lost both his parents, concluding that he “know[s] that there is a life beyond this death, a time beyond this time. I know that at the very last moment…I will be face to face at last with a pure and heartless reality beyond anything a living soul can possibly imagine