Archive for January, 2014

THE KEPT by James Scott

From the opening line of this striking debut novel, the mood and voice are both haunting and laced with shame.

“Elspeth Howell was a sinner.â€

It is three years shy of the turn of the twentieth century, upstate New York, bitterly cold and snowy with grey, smudgy skies. Elspeth is trudging miles from the train station to her family’s isolated home, and she is carrying gifts for her five children and pious, Bible-quoting husband. She’s been gone for four months, not unusual for her midwifery practice. As she rises up the crest of the last hill, she sees her house…

January 18, 2014 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Character Driven, Debut Novel, Family Matters, Literary

TATIANA by Martin Cruz Smith

Each chapter heading in Martin Cruz Smith’s brilliant novel, Tatiana, is printed on a slant, providing fair warning that not everything in this story is “on the level.” The author manipulates us by withholding facts and feeding us misinformation. Why does Smith lead us astray? He may be informing the uninitiated that his hero, Arkady Kyrilovich Renko, Senior Investigator for Very Important Cases, lives in a society that is off-kilter, warped, and perverse. To survive in today’s Russia, Renko, and others like him, must always be on their guard. Arkady’s cynical colleague, Detective Sergeant Victor Orlov, is tired of wasting his time trying to get the goods on influential miscreants. He insists, “The point is, you can’t win. We’re just playing it out.” He would rather spend his days passed out in his apartment after drinking himself into a stupor.

January 17, 2014 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Russia, Sleuths Series

INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEAT WAVE by Maggie O’Farrell

Almost as though in reference to the title of her best novel, THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX (2006), Maggie O’Farrell’s new one begins with a disappearance. One morning in 1976, in the midst of a heatwave, retired bank manager Robert Riordan, after laying breakfast for his wife Gretta, leaves their North London house, draws some money from his bank, and does not return. Within a day, their three grown children have all returned home to help their mother handle the crisis: Michael Francis from his house a few miles away, where he lives with his wife and two young children; Monica from a farm in Gloucestershire, where she lives with her second husband and, at weekends, his two children; and Aoife*, the youngest, from New York, where she is single with a boyfriend. Thus O’Farrell lays the groundwork for a book about family dynamics, not only Gretta, the absent Robert, and their grown children, but also the individual situations of the offspring, who will each confront and largely resolve their own personal crises over the four-day span of the novel. At this level, it is an extraordinarily well-constructed and heart-warming read.

January 16, 2014 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Family Matters, United Kingdom, y Award Winning Author

HARVEST by Jim Crace

Jim Crace’s Harvest reads like a simple moral fable of a tiny and remote medieval English village, destroyed externally and internally by the conversion of farms into sheep pastures, but wait! There is far more to it than meets the eye.

Mr. Crace is particularly interested in pairings: everything comes in twos, right from the opening pages.. Two signals of smoke rise up: one signaling the arrival of new neighbors who are announcing their right to stay; the second, a blaze that indicates the master Kent’s dovecote is gone and his doves taken.

Both subplots radiate from these two twinned smoke signals. The stories, narrated by Walter – the manservant of Kent who was paired with him from the start by sharing the same milk – is both an insider and an outsider (yet another pairing). He is not of the village although he has become part of it.

January 15, 2014 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Allegory/Fable, Literary, Man Booker Nominee, World Lit

APPLE TREE YARD by Louise Doughty

Yvonne Carmichael, 52 years old, is a respected geneticist, married for many years with two grown children. She works for an esteemed institute called The Beaufort and is also an external examiner for graduate students. Her life is rich in many ways. Thus, it comes as a surprise to her that when she is scheduled to give a report at the House of Parliaments she notices a man who is giving her a come hither look and she begins to follow him. This begins an extraordinary affair. She doesn’t even know his name or what he does, though after some time she surmises that he is a spy of some type. This first time they have sex, he leads her to the Crypt Chapel on the House of Parliaments grounds and in the rank basement they make love. Yvonne thinks “From my empirical knowledge of you I know one thing and one thing only. Sex with you is like being eaten by a wolf.”

January 14, 2014 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Psychological Suspense, Reading Guide

ELIZABETH OF YORK by Alison Weir

ELIZABETH OF YORK: A TUDOR QUEEN AND HER WORLD is not historical fiction, rather a work of history researched and well written by Alison Weir. Here she documents the life of an English Queen Elizabeth – not as well known as Elizabeth I, “The Fairy Queen,” nor Elizabeth II, England’s modern day monarch. Our protagonist is Elizabeth of York, whose obscurity belies the high profile of her connections.

January 13, 2014 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Facing History, Non-fiction