The character development in this book is phenomenal. When my siblings and I were growing up, one of the (many) key concepts emphasized by our dad was to avoid judging others but to put ourselves in their shoes.
Author Dubus has developed characters in this book in a way that allows readers to form judgments over one set of pages only to revise those judgments in subsequent pages as more information comes to the fore. By its end, this tragic tale has enlightened and humbled the reader at every turn.
A recent immigrant from the Middle East-a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force-yearns to restore his family's dignity in California. A recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck struggles to hold onto the one thing she has left?her home. And her lover, a married cop, is driven to extremes to win her love.
Andre Dubus III's unforgettable characters-people with ordinary flaws, looking for a small piece of ground to stand on-careen toward inevitable conflict. Their tragedy paints a shockingly true picture of the country we live in today.
This memoir, like one I too have written, details the ups and downs of loving a spouse struggling with dementia.
It was helpful to see both the parallels and the differences in our experiences. The big difference was the author’s husband’s desire to die on his own timeline, and her decision to make that possible for him. How she did that is an important story, and I applaud her telling it.
A poignant love letter to Bloom's husband and a passionate outpouring of grief, In Love reaffirms the power and value of human relationships.
In January 2020, Amy Bloom travelled with her husband Brian to Switzerland, where he was helped by Dignitas to end his life while Amy sat with him and held his hand. Brian was terminally ill and for the last year of his life Amy had struggled to find a way to support his wish to take control of his death, to not submerge 'into the darkness of an expiring existence'.
Mainly, I love a good horse story. This one, a historical novel, weaves tons of research into a seamless story about a (real) racehorse in the 1850s; the (partly fictionalized) people who owned, worked with, or painted him; and (partly fictionalized) people in 2019 who discovered the history and had reasons of their own to want to do well by that horse and all he represented.
Each chapter left me wanting to keep reading, and I was grateful at the end of the story to find that the author then devoted many pages to letting the reader know in unusual detail which aspects of the book were fact and which were fiction.
"Brooks' chronological and cross-disciplinary leaps are thrilling." -The New York Times Book Review
"Horse isn't just an animal story-it's a moving narrative about race and art." -TIME
A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history
Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an…
In a coastal Maine tourist town, despite the low crime rate, empty nester Mallory Cooper fears most everything. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, she misses her happier self—and so does her husband, Dwight. To please him, she steps out to explore. A chance comment to a store owner seals fates while Mallory chases her own demons for an overdue showdown.
