I’ve long been fascinated by what people do when no one is watching. Of course someone is watching all the time, for we are always a witness to our own behavior. The ripples from what we do in the dark emanate in ways that are most often unpredictable, which leads to twists and turns that make for compelling reading and writing. Other variations spring from this theme, like forgiveness, redemption, and growth. They say bad decisions make great stories. I believe it and am constantly looking to explore such ideas in the books I read and the ones I write.
You could describe Fredrik Backman’s Beartown as the story of a broken Swedish forest town whose fate is tied to the success of a kids’ hockey team. This is accurate but woefully incomplete. In fact, I’m confident you’ll feel all the anger, empathy, and tenderness Backman has woven into a sports story that transcends pucks and goals. You will be ushered forward and backward in time. You’ll feel carried ahead even as the author freezes moments that deliver depth and perspective. The pivotal event will make your heart race. And in the end, you will wind up missing the people you come to meet and know in Beartown.
Heaven help the reporter who cannot write, whose skill lies in filling notebooks with facts, quotes, and observations, but who simply cannot tell a story. That readers are willing, eager even, to cheer on clumsy Quoyle—the would-be journalist in The Shipping News—is due to Annie Proulx’s raw, honest prose. It’s hard to find a wasted word throughout. Each and every page moves the story forward or reveals insights that carry us down deep with Quoyle and then, slowly, toward better times. Mostly what you’ll feel is that if this oaf can find happiness, there’s hope for anyone.
Winner of the Irish Times International Fiction Award and America's National Book Award, this story features Quoyle, a failed journalist, a failed husband and a born loser who heads for a remote corner of Newfoundland with his two daughters and eccentric aunt.
Liberty Bell and the Last American
by
James Stoddard,
Americans love their Constitution. In seventeen-year-old Liberty Bell’s era it has become a myth. Centuries after the Great Blackout obliterates the world's digitized information, America's history is forgotten. Only confused legends remain, written in "The Americana," a book depicting a golden age where famous Americans from different eras existed together.…
Laura Hillenbrand spent years writing a non-fiction tale that is packed with well-sourced facts, anecdotes, and grainy photos for delivery to a click-and-get world where thoughts can’t exceed 280 characters and effective communication is measured by how fast we get to the point. But that’s okay, because the tale of Louie Zamperini is too compelling to rush. Zamperini is an optimist and a survivor. He is resourceful, the kind of man who bends without breaking. These traits reappear time and again throughout an incredible wartime obstacle course that would have killed a lesser man. If this book doesn’t inspire you, it’s hard to imagine what will.
From the author of the bestselling and much-loved Seabiscuit, an unforgettable story of one man's journey into extremity. On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane's bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War. The lieutenant's name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood,…
As Shuggie Bain comes of age, he learns some terrible truths—his mother is an alcoholic. His cab-driving father is a wild womanizer. And his older brother and sister can’t do much about any of it.Shuggie and his older siblings have two goals: survival and escape. But Shuggie takes on a third mission. He will save his mother. Make her well and leave the booze behind. What would it be like to wear this kid’s shoes? To battle such a potent enemy? To weather the neighbors’ harsh indifference? And to top it all, question your sexuality before you even understand the difference between straight and gay. This is not an easy read, but the prose is stunning. You’ll walk away enriched by the experience.
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
A stunning debut novel by a masterful writer telling the heartwrenching story of a young boy and his alcoholic mother, whose love is only matched by her pride.
Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher’s policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city’s notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings.
NORVEL: An American Hero chronicles the remarkable life of Norvel Lee, a civil rights pioneer and Olympic athlete who challenged segregation in 1948 Virginia. Born in the Blue Ridge Mountains to working-class parents who valued education, Lee overcame Jim Crow laws and a speech impediment to achieve extraordinary success.
Sometimes the problems we face blow up with such force they become public, and the image we strived for—the one that says all is fine, we’re doing very well, thank you—is shattered forever. That’s what happens to the Swede—the protagonist in American Pastoral—when his precious, stuttering daughter Merry grows into an anti-Vietnam war zealot and dynamites a rural post office in their quiet New Jersey town.Roth’s prose is distinctive. The arguments between the Swede and his daughter will make you feel like you’re behind a curtain in their living room. When all is said and done, you’ll think about America and Americans, and about yourself, your family, and your beliefs. Some of it may be painful; all of it will be worthwhile.
Philip Roth's fiction has often explored the human need to demolish, to challenge, to oppose, to pull apart. Now, writing with deep understanding, with enormous power and scope and great storytelling energy, he focuses on the counterforce: the longing for an ordinary life. Seymour 'Swede' Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant, postwar America. He has a beautiful wife - Miss New Jersey 1949 - and a lively, precocious daughter, Merry. She is the apple of his eye…
A disgraced journalist stumbles on a story that will let him reclaim his career, but redemption comes with a price: he must place his faith in the racist senator he once exposed as a murderer.
Memory's Eyes: A New York Oedipus Novel
by
Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau,
Memory's Eyes is a contemporary New York Oedipus novel. It is written for readers who enjoy playing with concepts and storylines, here namely the classical Oedipus myth, Sophocles' three Theban plays, the psychoanalytic concept of the Oedipus complex, and its pop-cultural adaptations in movies, cartoons, and jokes.
This is a novel about choices. How would you have chosen to act during the Second World War if your country had been invaded and occupied by a brutal enemy determined to isolate and murder a whole community?
That’s the situation facing an ordinary family man with two children, a…
