I was blown away by the complicated interweaving of times and story lines. The more I read, the more I had to rethink what I thought had happened earlier in the book (which might have actually happened later in the book's twisty, five-century timeline). Even the smallest details were carefully planted.
And it wasn't just the craft and plotting that were awesome: All of the individual stories were interesting in themselves. Underneath them all—whether in 1912 or 2401—these were people trying to find their place in the world.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.
One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads
“One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times
Beneath the descriptions of what would seem the drab life of a drab woman in shabby postwar England, author Barbara Pym dings with just one or two carefully chosen words. She can say paragraphs with one adjective, or one person's hand reaching for a cup of tea. (Honestly, I think she's better at this subtle revelation than Jane Austen.)
I also was fascinated by the portrait of a time and place I really haven't reach much about. Finally, it was that gut-punch of an ending—Oh!!
Cover design by Orla Kiely Mildred Lathbury is one of those 'excellent women' who is often taken for granted. She is a godsend, 'capable of dealing with most of the stock situations of life - birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sales, the garden fete spoilt by bad weather'. As such, though, she often gets herself embroiled in other people's lives - and especially those of her glamorous new neighbours, the Napiers, whose marriage seems to be on the rocks. One cannot take sides in these matters, though it is tricky, especially when Mildred, teetering on the edge of spinsterhood,…
This story of domestic abuse was sometimes so painful that I was actually holding my breath. The father's sly psychological manipulation and physical battering; the mother's self-justification; the son's and daughter's changing attitudes as they grew—were all raw and vivid.
On top of that, the book is actually three alternating versions of how the story might have unfolded, depending on what name the mother had chosen for the son at birth, so it was interesting to compare what-ifs. And the end: Perfect!
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“Dazzling. . . The Names is startlingly joyful. . . Knapp tirelessly and beautifully replicates not just loss and grief but endless rebirth and delight.” —The Washington Post
“Elegant. . . this is a wholly original work.” —People Magazine "Book of the Week"
“A magnificent novel, thrumming with life in all its pain and precariousness, yet suffused with the glorious possibilities of love and redemption.” —Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Horse
The extraordinary novel that asks: Can a name change the course…
"I'm only telling you in case the police contact you. Esme was arrested, but I'm handling everything, and she doesn't want to hear from you."
That email from her ex-husband is almost the only information Alice Wilson has had about her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Esme, in the six years since Esme abruptly ended all communication.
As Alice, an environmental activist, scrambles to learn why Esme was arrested and what might happen next, she inevitably also rethinks the past. Her obsessive search up and down the California coast antagonizes her friends and jeopardizes her job. But none of that matters to Alice as she uncovers hints of a daughter she'd never known-and of her then-husband's role in their estrangement, even while they were married.
Who is the Robert Corning who was arrested with Esme, and why did she pay his bail? Why did Esme become bulimic in college? Why is she continuing to push Alice away while still being chummy with her father? Most importantly, will Esme agree to meet with Alice? And if she does, will Alice say the wrong thing-whatever that wrong thing is?
