This story is so full and moving; the characters linger long after you finish.
The story takes place in rural Ireland, where a young girl is sent to stay with relatives, the Kinsellas, a couple whom she has never met. With nuanced, delicate prose, the child narrates her
experience as she unexpectedly finds love and joy with the Kinsellas.
She also
discovers the couple are grieving the loss of their own child. They become the
parents she wishes she had. When I reached the end, as Edna Kinsella, the wife,
says, “If you were mine, I’d never leave you in a house with strangers,” I had
to return to page 1 and re-read the entire novel again. It’s short, powerful, and resonant.
** Adapted into the Oscar-nominated film adaptation, An Cailin Ciuin / The Quiet Girl **
From the author of the Booker-shortlisted Small Things Like These, a heartbreaking, haunting story of childhood, loss and love by one of Ireland's most acclaimed writers.
'A real jewel.' Irish Independent
'A small miracle.' Sunday Times
'A thing of finely honed beauty.' Guardian
'Thrilling.' Richard Ford
'As good as Chekhov.' David Mitchell
It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm, not knowing when she will return home. In the strangers' house, she finds…
The voice in this coming-of-age novel was smart,
funny, raw, caustic, and filled with heart and truth. You will start this book, you
won’t put it down, and you’ll wish it didn’t have to end because you want to keep
that narrator with you.
Joey’s in art school in San Francisco, but her family
is poor and dysfunctional in Lodi. Her sister’s an addict, and Joey has to
constantly navigate disparate worlds while under relentless financial strain and the pressure of trying to make art.
The prose was full of surprises, and I
totally related on every level.
"Portrait of the artist as a broke and brilliant, hungry and funny young woman" (Lynn Steger Strong, author of Want), this hilarious and incisive coming-of-age novel about an art student from a poor family struggling to find her place in a new social class of rich, well-connected peers is perfect for fans of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot and Weike Wang’s Chemistry
At her San Francisco art school, Joey enrolls in a film elective that requires her to complete what seems like a straightforward assignment: create a self-portrait. Joey inexplicably decides to remake Wes Anderson’s Rushmore despite having never seen the…
I don’t know why I stopped reading this
quartet of novels after the first one, My Brilliant Friend, which I loved.
Maybe it was the hype? A few years later, I finally picked up Book Two of the Neapolitan Novels and could NOT put it down.
The breadth and depth of the
world of Naples in the 1960s-70s, the violence, the patriarchy, and the deep
and conflicted friendship between Lila and Elena, who need and hate and love
each other, is impossible to summarize. In this story, Lila gets married,
and Elena pursues her education—but so much more!
Sheer life is portrayed with
such force that my lived experience pales in comparison. Suffice it to say, I did
not take a hiatus after finishing this book, and I moved immediately on to the next
one and the last one. Now, I want to reread them all.
The Story of a New Name, the second book of the Neapolitan Quartet, picks up the story where My Brilliant Friend left off.
Lila has recently married and made her entree into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighbourhood that she so often finds stifling. Love, jealousy, family, freedom, commitment, and above all friendship: these are signs under which both women live out this phase in their stories. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure to excel is at times…
What if the one thing you can't have is the only thing you want? When Mary and Ann agree to a surrogacy partnership everything goes awry. Ann, a pre-school teacher, is desperate for the children she physically can't have. Mary, a 50-year-old pagan jeweler, hopes to make amends for years of maternal neglect. Together, they plunge into the expensive, morally complex world of reproductive technology and an intimacy neither they, nor Ann's husband, Joel, are prepared for. Financially hard-pressed, Joel goes behind Ann's back and agrees to help Mary grow a marijuana crop in her attic. Ann struggles with the rigors and enforced togetherness of the reproductive regime. And Mary's delight in being a "bountiful earth mother" is offset by the physical ordeal of bearing multiple fetuses. The stakes escalate as the police start sniffing around the grow house, a pagan ritual goes tragically awry, and the pregnancy becomes more perilous, forcing Ann, Joel, and Mary to confront the potentially calamitous consequences of pursuing their deepest desires. Sharp and audacious, Made by Mary is a black comedy using magic realism to blow up myths about women, mothers, and motherhood, where even the most extreme situations are rendered with candor, intelligence, and empathy.
