“She says nothing but stares hard at her husband. She presses a palm to her jaw, though any attempt to stop the vibration is useless. Put it back, George. Put it back. And then you stay. You’ve got no heart for any of this, anyway.

He takes a deep breath, exhales, then tilts his head back and breathes again as though the oxygen he needs were at a height he can’t quite reach. Closed up like this the house can’t take in the sun’s heat, and whiskey won’t help with the chill of an empty house. George refolds the towel, then picks up the bundle.

I’ll pack the tent, he says. Mildew smell and all.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shultman  (DEC 31, 2013)

The simple plotting of Larry Watson’s Let Him Go – the quest of Margaret and George Blackridge to reclaim their young grandson, who lives with his mother and rotten-to-the-core stepfather – belies the strong emotional impact of this exquisitely powerful book.

The power sneaks up on the reader when it is least expected – in a snatch of dialogue, a perceptive insight, a small detail that turns everything around. Larry Watson is a master of breathing life into his characters through ordinary conversations and actions that hint at extraordinary revelations that bubble right beneath the surface.

The story takes place in Dalton, North Dakota in 1951 in what some people refer to as the “real America” – a place where people don’t waste words, where hard work and straight talk is respected, and where the people and the land are reliant on each other. Their grown son met with tragedy, and Margaret prevails upon her taciturn husband to travel to Gladstone, Montana to find his namesake Jimmy…a boy who has been caught in the web of his stepfather’s violent Weboy family.

Larry Watson walks a delicate tightrope; what he doesn’t reveal is every bit as meaningful as what he describes. Is the long and tender marriage of Margaret and George more complex than it appears? What were they like as parents to their twins – James, who is now dead, and Janie, who is estranged from them? Does raising Jimmy give them the right to another chance?

Along the way, there are brutal surprises and heartbreaks and words so true they cause the reader to gasp at their validity. Take this, for example: “A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel them as sensation, like a texture that was once at his fingers every day but now is gone and no matter how he gropes or reaches his hand he cannot touch what’s no longer there.”

At the end of the day, Let Him Go is about what’s worth fighting for and what’s worth sacrificing for along this rocky road of life. Gutsy, authentic, and downright riveting, it’s a book that succeeds at blurring that thin barrier between fiction and the outside world. Quite simply, it’s hard to believe that these characters are anything but 100% real.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 31 readers
PUBLISHER:	Milkweed Editions (September 3, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shultman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Larry Watson
EXTRAS:	Book Trailer with excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Orchard

Bibliography:

• In a Dark Time (1980)
• Montana 1948 (1993)
• Justice (1996)*
• White Crosses (1997)
• Laura (1999)
• Orchard (2003)
• Sundown, Yellow Moon (2007)
• American Boy (2011)
• Let Him Go (September 2013)

*Justice is a prequel to Montana 1948

“Don’t overthink what’s happening here, Vicky. I am not a swamp monster, Vicky. I’m not an invisible man. I’m not a vampire, and I’m not God. I’m just an incredibly interesting person.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (OCT 6, 2011)

It was more than one hundred years ago that H. G. Wells penned the science fiction classic, The Invisible Man, which subsequently paved new paths in the horror genre. The idea of a mad scientist who makes himself invisible and becomes mentally deranged as a result, is one that has taken root in popular culture ever since.

In his genre-bending new novel, Chuck Klosterman borrows the essential elements from Wells’ classic with some modifications. For one thing, he fixes the science. There has been some discussion that a truly invisible man would have been blind whereas Wells’ lead character, Griffin, clearly was not. So Klosterman’s protagonist, referred to simply as Y_, is not invisible — he is the visible man. But Y_ , much like Griffin, has an ability to make himself invisible to others.

At the novel’s outset, Y_ calls a therapist Victoria Vick and sets out some pretty elaborate conditions for his therapy sessions: she will ask no questions, meetings will be only over the phone, no forms will be filled out and payments will be sent by cash. “I came to you so I could manage the guilt I don’t deserve to have,” Y_ tells her.

Not sure what to make of the situation, Vicky tentatively agrees. So begins a series of sessions during which Vicky finds out that Y_ is a scientist who has developed technology that can make him invisible. Y_ once worked for the NSA in Chaminade, Hawaii, creating a special “cloaking” device—a membranous suit which when slathered with a special cream can make anyone invisible to others.

Y_, who has always been obsessed with trying to figure out what really makes people tick, uses this device to make himself invisible and spy on all kinds of people. He slips into their homes and watches the minutiae of everyday life — an extreme form of voyeurism. Quite psychotic, Y_ never suspects this could be a problem but instead justifies his activities as essential to his understanding of the human spirit. “How was I supposed to relate to these people if I didn’t even know what they were really like or who they really were?” he asks, “I knew how they acted, but that’s not the same thing.”

The Visible Man is written in an interesting format; it is narrated by Vicky and laid out mostly as a collection of reports from each therapy session. This format allows the reader to not only peek into Y_’s bizarre temperament but it also lets us see Vicky’s increasingly impaired judgment as she lets Y_ continually break traditional patient-therapist rules.

Over the weeks, as Y_ keeps up with his stories Vicky finds herself spellbound. Her normal life is disrupted and she gets pulled into an elaborate web that Y_ weaves. “To this day, whenever I slipped into boredom, I find myself fantasizing and reimagining the stories he told me,” Vicky remembers.

As the novel moves along, The Visible Man gets incrementally creepy until the very end. Klosterman, whose Downtown Owl was a gem, does a great job of using science fiction as a frame against which to pin a very contemporary story. It is to Klosterman’s credit that the idea of a delusional man creating a suit and cream that would make him invisible, doesn’t seem extremely far-fetched.

Even more fascinating is the fact that the readers too will come to find much of interest in Y_’s subjects’ lives. By boiling down life to its very essence — to the level of mere existence — Klosterman does a wonderful job in pointing out what matters to most of us. “I learned that people don’t consider time alone as part of their life. Being alone is just a stretch of isolation they want to escape from,” Y_ says, quite observantly.

“People need their actions to be scrutinized and interpreted in order to feel like what they’re doing matters. Singular, solitary moments are like television pilots that never get aired. They don’t count. We’re self-conditioned to require an audience, even if we’re not doing anything valuable or interesting,” Klosterman writes. If that is not a mirror held up to contemporary society, I don’t know what is.

The Visible Man sometimes gets too caught up in its own ingeniousness and the story strains under the weight of the novel’s structural construct. The letters, the bullet points, they start to seem restrictive after a while.

Nevertheless, The Visible Man eventually proves to be a worthy follow-up to the fantastic Downtown Owl. It is creepy precisely because the story is just ever so plausible. When gawking through Twitter and Facebook is possible, it doesn’t seem to be too much of a stretch to have an invisible man checking you out during your most intimate and mundane moments. You’ll be sure to look over your shoulder more than once.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 66 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Chuck Klosterman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review: Chuck Klosterman: Chuck Klosterman IV

Bibliography:

• Downtown Owl (2008)
• Visible Man (October 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota (2001)
• Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto (2003)
• Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story (2005)
• Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Minds (2006)
• Eating The Dinosaur (2009)
• I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined) (July 2013)

“It was time it happened, the determination that this should never be allowed to repeat itself, the hatred and the bitterness of not being able to decide whether to thrust a knife in her or start to weep so that she could console me like a second Linda, for I was no child any more and yet I was, and I wanted to be neither, but someone else, again.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (SEP 28, 2011)

Navigating that shaky bridge between childhood and adulthood is never easy, particularly in 1961 – a time when “men became boys and housewives women,” a year when Yuri Gargarin is poised to conquer space and when the world is on the cusp of change.

Into this moment of time, Norwegian author Roy Jacobsen shines a laser light on young Finn and his mother Gerd, who live in the projects of Oslo. Fate has not been kind to them: Gerd’s husband, a crane operator, divorced her and then died in an accident, leaving the family in a financially precarious position. To make ends meet, she works in a shoe store and runs an ad for a lodger for extra money.

To complicate the situation, Finn’s father’s second wife – a now-widowed drug addict – views the ad and unloads on the family Finn’s half-sister, Linda – a young girl who appears to have mysterious problems that are only gradually revealed. Figuratively, this “poor mite got off the Grorud bus one dark November day with an atomic bomb in a small light blue suitcase and turned our lives upside down.”

Linda becomes the mirror in which Gerd, Finn, and others (including the lodger Kristian) eventually define themselves. Gerd, who identifies strongly with Linda, is transported back to an abusive childhood and views herself in the little girl. Finn — who is the first-person narrator — battles jealousy, bewilderment, and eventually, stirrings of love as he defends Linda from the Norwegian educational system and the school bullies. He reminisces: “Linda was not of this world, one day I would come to understand this – she was a Martian come down to earth to speak in tongues to heathens, to speak French to Norwegians and Russian to Americans. She was destiny, beauty and a catastrophe. A bit of everything. Mother’s mirror and Mother’s childhood. All over again.”

Not unlike his regional compatriot, Per Petterson, Roy Jacobsen is (as one publication stated about the latter), “a master at writing the spaces between people.” He succinctly and beautifully captures the incomprehension of a young boy who is trying to make sense of the adult world and his place within it. The increasing bond between the boy and his accidental sister is explored painstakingly and is exquisitely poignant. The portrayal of Linda’s evolution to her new family is genuinely heartrendering.

A pedestrian and at times downright awkward translation does not serve the stream of consciousness sections well. In the best translations (such as the talented Ann Born’s translation of Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses), the reader loses sight that the book is a translation. It takes a little while to get into the cadence and the rhythm.

But the authenticity of Roy Jacobsen’s vision wins out with its universal themes: how others become gifts in our lives, unveiling us, and the lengths we go to preserve relationships with those we love. Or, in the words of the author, “Something happens to you when someone spots you – you see yourself from the outside, your own peculiar strangeness, that which is only you and moves in only you, but which nonetheless you have not known…” This quiet book is a hopeful testimony to transformative change.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Graywolf Press (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Roy Jacobsen
EXTRAS:	Blog with all sorts of Roy Jacobsen info
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Out Stealing Horses by Per Pettersen

Partial Bibliography (translated):

• The New Water (1987; 1997 in English)
• The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles (2005; 2009 in English)
• Child Wonder (2009; September 2011 in English)

“If you take any event and isolate it, blow it up huge so you can study its slightest grain, there’d be a million tiny impossibilities worming every which way across the landscape, all the unlikely variables, all of the unaccounted-for seconds, all of the chance collisions falling too perfectly into place. That’s what life is.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (SEP 19, 2011)

Lightning People is an electrifying book, a high voltage tightrope of five 30-something characters that are walking the edge in the post 9/11 New York City. It’s a book about true connections, missed connections and downright parasitic connections. Its energy strikes and surges randomly, briefly illuminating, sometimes plunging back into the darkness. And by the end, it leaves the reader rubbing eyes as he or she emerges back into a transformed light.

In crucial ways, its theme is similar to the Oscar-winning movie Crash. One of the key characters in that movie said: “In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.”

Move the setting from L.A. to New York. An ensemble of rootless characters crash into each other as they struggle to find meaningful interactions. There is the actor Joseph Giteau, who left his Ohio home and his reclusive and conspiracy-obsessed mother, newly married to Del Kousavos, a snake expert at a city zoo who is on a work visa from Greece. In the aftermath of 9/11, he finds himself at thriving prisonerofearth conspiracy meetings, trying to take stock and make sense of his life.

Joseph and Del are surrounded by others: Raj, Del’s exotic and not-yet-forgotten former lover and his sister Madi, Del’s best friend, an executive at a company outsourcing jobs to India. And lastly, there is William Asternathy, whose career is on permanent hiatus, on “fast live-wire current circulating through the city.”

All of these characters try to remake their fate and their destiny in that shining yet alienated city of re-creation, New York. Del considers: ”The whole city was pulsating with electricity. It had been all of the light that had first attracted her to New York, had brought all of the fresh arrivals beating around the same shine. But what happens when her eyes finally adjusted to the light?” And William thinks, “No one in New York has parents. Or families for that matter. We’re all pretty much immigrants taking shelter here.”

As the action pulsates forward, secrets emerge or remain hidden, and it’s very important for each reader to experience the arc of these secrets individually. Among the questions raised are, “Will a generational health secret derail Joseph and Del’s marriage and end Joseph’s life prematurely? How will William’s dark self-destructive streak affect those around him and what damage will it do? And are the conspiracy theories – deriving from the Latin phrase “breathe together” – a shared paranoia or are they self-fulfilling prophecies?”

As these characters brush against each other – sometimes willingly, sometimes inadvertently – sparks are set off. “Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice until it does,” muses Joe. Coincidences are packed into coincidences, but that is the fabric of the novel; how our lives all intersect and how one shocking personal tragedy can alter our paths, individually and collectively.

This is an intricate novel, beautifully plotted, brimming with high-stakes paranoia and calamity and angst, narrated with vigor and flashes of insight. It is difficult to believe this is a debut novel and it certainly goes on my Top Ten list for 2011.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Soft Skull Press; 1 edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Christopher Bollen
EXTRAS:	Interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Handbook of Lightning Survivors by Michele Young-Stone The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller

Bibliography:

• Lightning People (August 2011)

“His hand is growing cold; still she holds it. Sitting at his bedside she does not cry. From time to time, she lays her cheek against his, taking slight comfort in the rough bristle of unshaved hair, and she speaks to him a little.

I love you, she tells him.

I always will.

Je t’aime, she says.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (SEP 8, 2011)

Lily Tuck`s novel, I Married You for Happiness, is the story of a woman mourning the sudden death of her husband. It was shortly before dinner when Philip came home from his college teaching position. When Nina calls him for dinner he is dead. She lies by his cold body all night remembering their lives together. The prose is spare and lovely, recalling their joys, passions and pains of their forty-two years together.

Recently, I’ve read three memoirs about grieving a spouse after sudden death: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story, and Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name. Lily Tuck’s book covers similar territory as these memoirs but in fictional form.

Nina is an artist and Philip is a mathematician specializing in probability theory. They have one daughter, thirty-five year old Louise. This book takes place over the course of one night following Philip’s death. As the story unfolds, Louise does not yet know her father has died. Nina just wants to spend this one night next to Philip. “In the morning she will make telephone calls, she will write e-mails, make arrangements; the death certificate, the funeral home, the church service – whatever needs to be done. Tonight – tonight, she wants nothing. She wants to be alone. Alone with Philip.”

Nina tries to remember their lives together, the big things and the little things. She is especially focused on thoughts about a woman that Philip had known before meeting her. Iris and Philip were in a car crash and Iris died. Had Iris lived, Nina wonders, would Philip have married her instead of Nina? She puts together different theories of probability in her mind for different scenarios and tries to think like her husband would in these situations. “What if she finds a photo of Iris? The photo slips out from in between papers, from inside a folder in a desk drawer.”

Simple things cause her great anxiety. What were the exact last words she said to Philip? What did they do yesterday, last weekend? She is not sure and this bothers her. She wants to know and hold the past close to her, remembering all that she can.

She and Philip were so different. Nina paints mostly landscapes and portraits, usually with water colors. Philip gives lectures on probability. She remembers lots of mathematical problems and information that Philip has shared with her even though many are beyond her capacity to understand. “Most mathematical functions, Philip tells her, are classified as two-way functions because they are easy to do and easy to undo – like addition and subtraction, for example. The way turning a light on and turning it off is a two-way function. A one-way function is more complicated because although it may be easy to do, you cannot undo it. Like mixing paint, you can’t unmix it, or like breaking an egg shell, you can’t put the egg back together.” Nina thinks about the physics of alternate universes and wonders if Philip can be alive and dead. Is he really dead?

Nina also gives a lot of thought to the existence of an afterlife and what the great philosophers had to say about it, especially Pascal. Pascal believed it was a better probability to believe in God than not because if God existed and one behaved righteously, they could have eternal life. Still, Nina is not convinced. Ironically, Philip the mathematician had more of a belief in afterlife than does Nina. Philip believes in a libertarian God, “a God who allows room for free will.”

Nina struggles to remember where they’ve lived, what countries they’ve visited, how many houses they resided in, how many animals they’ve owned. These little things help her feel closer to Philip as she spends the night next to him holding his hand and stroking his face. This is her night to be with him, her last night to shower herself in their love.

Philip’s favorite color was red. He once brought her a red embroidered coat from Hong Kong. She rarely ever wore it. However, tonight she puts it on over an old coat she is wearing and parades around the room in it, wondering if Philip would have found this silly.

During their marriage, Nina had an affair and once was raped. She kept both of these occurences secret from Philip. She worries about Philip’s faithfulness to her. “Sometimes when Philip comes back from being away, she sniffs through his laundry, searching for the scent of an unfamiliar perfume – patchouli, jasmine, tuberoses. What is her name? The name of a city. Sofia.”

The prose is spare and the book is written in short vignettes, each about some aspect of their life together or their belief system. As the night progresses, Nina drinks wine, dozes occasionally, but mostly stays up and remembers and imagines their time together. Theirs was a great love and one that has withstood the test of time. Lily Tuck understands what it is like to be with one person for forty-two years. She understands great love and passion.

Interestingly, Ms. Tuck has borrowed information from some of the greatest mathematicians, logicians, physicists, and philosophers for this book: Pascal, Einstein, Wilczek, Erdos, Hofstadter, Hawking, and Feynman to name a few. Though the parts about physics and math were sometimes difficult for me to get my head around, they served nicely to illustrate the yin and yang of this marriage. This is a short and lovely book, an homage to a great love, now lost in real time, but forever present in Nina’s heart and mind.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 43 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press; 1 edition (September 6, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Lily Tuck
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Also by Lily Tuck: The News from Paraguay

Bibliography:

• Interviewing Matisse, or the Woman Who Died Standing Up (1991)
• The Woman Who Walked on Water (1996)
• Siam Or the Woman Who Shot a Man (1999)
• Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived (2002)
• The News From Paraguay (2004) 
• I Married You for Happiness (September 2011)
• The House at Belle Fontaine: Stories (April 2013)

Nonfiction:

• Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante (2008)

“A naked man in the freezing cold, with an axe in his hand, opening up a hole in the ice? I suppose, really, that I hope there will be someone out there one of these days, a black shadow against all the white — somebody who sees me and wonders if he’d be able to stop me before it was too late.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JUL 31, 2011)

This is a compact sonata of a novel, composed in four “movements.” The title of the last, “Winter Solstice,” might have been a better title for the whole book, set mainly on a small frozen island off the coast of Sweden. It is certainly an appropriate image: the solstice is the darkest part of the year; after it, the days will get longer, but it will still be winter for a long time. This is a book about resurrection, thaw, the slow flowering of the frozen spirit, but it promises few miracles, and even at the end there are setbacks and reversals — a feeling Nordic people must know well in their long wait for Spring.

Fredrik Welin lives alone on his rocky Baltic island, in a decaying house with an anthill slowly engulfing the table in the living room, breaking the ice on the sea each morning for the chilling plunge that is his principal means of assuring himself that he is still alive. He is not a good person, as other characters in the book will tell him; he is too ready to shrug off his responsibilities. As a young man, he abandoned a woman who loved him. Later, at the height of his career as a surgeon, he abandoned medicine after one horrible mistake. Now in his sixties, he has essentially abandoned life. His only contact with the outside world is the irritating mailman; “it’s not easy when your closest friend is somebody you dislike.”

Then one day he sees a figure on the snow outside his door, an old woman with a walker. It is a figure from his past come back to claim him, to demand an accounting for broken promises, implacable as a Fury, yet offering gifts in return: the opportunity once again to care about others, to move beyond his island fastness, to find a family. Rebirth is painful, and the book is full of violence and anger — but also happiness. Twice, the emotions are so strong that Welin flees back to his island. His is by no means a steady progress, more like a game of Chutes and Ladders; there is one especially shocking turnaround just as you think you’re coming into the home stretch. Mankell resolutely avoids easy endings; but the understated ending he does write is quietly moving and absolutely true.

There are several different Henning Mankells. Welin’s imperfections as a family man are an extension of Kurt Wallander of the detective novels, only without the crime. He has used the Baltic archipelago setting before in his WW1 psychodrama Depths, but this novel is modern, and thankfully less psychotic. Less isolated too, but the global politics that have been a concern of several of his later novels, most especially The Man from Beijing, are only a distant aura. But still a perceptible one; two of the women who enter Welin’s life are involved in a world beyond Sweden, mostly combating intolerance and greed. One of the characters has gone on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in search of God, but failed to find Him. “When I closed that church door behind me, there was nothing else left. But I realized that this emptiness was a sort of consolation in itself.” Mankell works with emptiness, turning it from negative space into a positive one, even a sacred space in a secular world. Long before Christianity, the Winter Solstice has always been associated with religious rites, a magic too mysterious for mere words.

And the title Mankell did choose? A small detail merely, a pair of handcrafted Italian Shoes, made over a period of months by an old Italian craftsman living in retirement in the Swedish forest. A sacrament also, they are a small example of the search for perfection, and a reminder of love where other loves have failed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 35 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (October 19, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Henning Mankell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Daniel The Man from Beijing The Troubled Man The Fifth Women

Bibliography:

Kurt Wallander Series:

• Faceless Killers (1991;1997 in US)
• The Dogs of Riga (1992; 2001in US)
• The White Lioness (1993; 1998 in US)
• The Man Who Smiled (1994; 2005 in US)
• Sidetracked (1995; 1999 in US)
• The Fifth Woman (1996; 2000 in US)
• One Step Behind (1997; 2002 in US)
• Firewall (1998; 2002 in US)
• The Pyramid: The First Wallander Cases (1999; 2008 in US)
• The Troubled Man (2009; 2011 in US)

Stand alone novels:

• Chronicler of the Winds (1985; June 2012 in US)
• The Return of the Dancing Master (2000; 2004 in US)
• Before the Frost (2002; 2005 in US)
• Depths (2004; 2009 in US)
• Italian Shoes (2006; 2010 in US)
• Kennedy’s Brain (2007; 2008 in US)
• The Eye of Leopard (2008; 2009 in US)
• The Man from Beijing (2007; 2010 in US)
• Daniel (2010 in US)

Teen Read:

• Shadows in the Twilight (2008;  2010 in US)

Movies from books:

• Wallander: Sidetracked / Firewall / One Step Behind (2009)
• Wallander (Faceless Killers / The Man Who Smiled / The Fifth Woman) (2010)

“Robbie’s eyes flicked between the [graph] paper and the patio we were building. I could see that he was really studying this stuff. He’d ask me a question and I’d answer and we went back and forth like that. It was great. Before that, I never taught anybody anything.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (MAY 29, 2011)

The world that Alexander MacLeod’s protagonists inhabit is not an easygoing or a comfortable one, it is – a realistic one. Set in different urban milieus, most of his characters are young, struggling to get ahead in life. Some confront personal adversity, hoping for companionship or friendship, others attempt to find solace and even redemption. With his debut story collection MacLeod exhibits an exquisite writing talent that succeeds in capturing, with precision and depth, both the inner workings of the individual’s psyche and their social and physical circumstances. The back cover of the book describes the author – very aptly I find – as a writer of “ferocious physicality.”

Five of the seven stories are written in first person voices, drawing the reader intimately into each of the narrators’ point of view of specific experiences in their lives. In “Miracle Mile,” Michael, while preparing for an important international running meet, reflects back on his long friendship with his closest competitor. As children they always raced together, sometimes at night through a cross-border train tunnel beneath the Detroit river, risking their lives in the process. One dangerous run is so vividly depicted, that I felt myself holding my breath until I knew that the kids were both safely on the other side. In this and other stories the author describes at length the many material details that underpin any physical activity that his protagonists are engaged in: be it running, swimming, holing bricks, or maneuvering a bicycle on the icy roads in winter.

Most of the central characters are young men, very few women hold an important place in the stories. One exception is the story of Stace, the central character in “Adult Beginner I.” We meet her when she stands at a roof’s ledge, fearful and reluctant to follow the urging of her gang of friends who have been jumping – at night – from the roof of a hotel straight down into the Detroit river below. The night is dark and only a few lights can guide the direction of her fall into the water… a water that is anything but inviting. Her deep-seated fear has a complex history that is told in flashbacks, going back to her youth and her first exposure to the Atlantic Ocean. MacLeod’s compelling ability to describe vividly both the inner struggles and the outer condition that a character finds him- or herself in, comes to the fore as he evokes the ocean wave that Stace was suddenly forced to confront. “The wall of water came into her vision, looming over her mother’s shoulder like an old-style gangster thug sifting out of the crowd in a grey trench coat with a brim of his fedora pulled low down. He was so thick and so wide, he blocked out the sky. He shoved her mother forward headfirst into the sand before grabbing the girl and carrying her off in the opposite direction.”

For me, this one of the most affecting and richly developed stories in the collection. ‘The Loop” is another favourite of mine. Teenager Allan and his bicycle have been delivering every day for three years medications and other drugstore supplies for old-fashioned pharmacist, Mr. Musgrave. Allan’s description of the wide range of regular customers he meets – from the nice, half-blind old Mrs. McKay, to eighty-nine year old Mrs. Hume, to huge, spooky Barney is meticulous and his relationship to them all is touching and very perceptive. He is fully aware that his customers’ conditions are confronting him with aspects of human life that should be beyond a young teenager’s knowledge or understanding; he nevertheless experiences empathy, and in some cases affection, for his “clients.” And one day, he surprises himself when compassion overrules reserve and even disgust. “The Loop” is one of the gentler stories and with “Adult Beginner I” my favourite in this collection. They both stand out in contract to the somewhat raw and dark emotions and physical aggression that lie beneath many of the stories told. I find myself torn between my attraction to the author’s brilliant writing and my lesser curiosity of most of the topics he expands on and the characters who represent them. Other readers may well find all of the stories captivating and engaging.

Alexander MacLeod was a 2010 Giller Prize finalist with this collection that also has been named “Book of the Year” by other institutions in Canada. He is the son of award winning Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod, who won the International Foreign Fiction Prize (IMPAC) in 1999 for his novel No Great Mischief.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Biblioasis; Reprint edition (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Publisher page on Alexander MacLeod
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Tinkers by Paul Harding

Bibliography:

• Light Lifting (April 2011)

“Her face had only one expression, and she used it to conceal the two major emotions of her life, resentment and love. They were so violently opposed, these passions, that she could not move from one to the other; she lacked flexibility; so she inhabited a grim inexpressive no-man’s-land between them, feeling in some way that she thus achieved a kind of justice.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAY 26, 2011)

Margaret Drabble is a well-known English novelist. I have read several of her books and have always enjoyed them. I had no idea that she was also a writer of short stories. A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman is the first compilation of her stories that has ever been published. They are presented in chronological order beginning in 1964 and ending in 2000. Like her novels, these stories often deal with the plight of women in their times, the socio-cultural aspects of marriage, and the difficulties that women find themselves in while trying to both raise a family and be successful in the business world. The stories are distinctively English;  the countryside of England as well as the urban landscapes are vivid throughout. There is a span of thirty-six years between the first short story and the last, giving the themes a relatively large period of time in which to develop.

The first story is entititled “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Humphrey had met a man at a pub who invited him to a party and when he came to the door, the host acted like he didn’t even know him. “It was the kind of party at which nobody got introduced.” The party was comprised of clusters of people who all seemed to know one another and the conversations that Humphrey overheard were artistic and intellectual. Humphrey knew no one and no one tried to make his acquaintance. Humphrey sets his sights on a long-haired red-headed woman who is waxing pontifically to a group gathered around her. He never knew if it was accident or inspiration that caused him to set her hair on fire but this act gained him exalted entrance to the entourage.

In “A Voyage to Cythera” we watch Helen who loves to travel. Whether it’s 30 miles or to another country, traveling is Helen’s gift in life. She likes the feeling of moving, be it in a car, train, or plane. Traveling opens a new world for her – one of possible intimacy, adventure and the potential of becoming someone other than the lonely, bland person she is.

In “A Pyrrhic Victory,” a young woman is adventuring with three others, trying to be what they want her to be. She represses her own needs and expectations. She finds herself taking on the weight and pain of acting according to what others want rather than risk being herself and seeming uncool or gauche.

“Crossing the Alps” is about two lovers who work together and are having an illicit affair. They are planning to travel from England to Yugosolavia. He comes down with a bad cold and sees her strengths and abilities as she cares for him. It is impossible for them to be together outside this week’s vacation as he is married. He has a lot of difficulty understanding her strength and resourcefulness in the face of her difficult life.

“The Gifts of War” is about a woman who is in a joyless marriage with an abusive husband. Her son is her only solace, her pride and joy. As she sets off to get him an expensive and totally inappropriate birthday present, she reminisces about the time during the Vietnam War when she not only protested the war, but toys of violence.

A well-known female English playwright meets an even more well-known American literary figure in “A Success Story.” He is known for his womanizing and comes on to her at a party. This coming on means more to her than having an intellectual conversation. She is happily married and things don’t go anywhere but she feels good that she is desired. The male character is based on the American novelist Saul Bellow.

“A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman” is about a woman who gets a job with her husband’s help at a television station. With time, she becomes very successful and gets to have her own show. Her husband becomes jealous and begins to despise her, sometimes even hitting her in her sleep. She carries herself well and usually has a smile on her face along with a look of success. Inside, however, she feels physically and emotionally ill. Her only comfort is her children who she gets to see very little of because of her grueling work schedule.

“The Merry Widow” is about Elsa who has just been widowed. Her husband was a mean emotionally abusive spouse and Elsa is glad that he is dead. She goes on a vacation alone that they had planned together and has a wonderful time until an old man with a scythe starts working the land. She realizes over time that she has mistaken him for “death” when he’s really a representative of “Father Time.” She is then able to enjoy herself again and look forward to the future.

Many of these stories are about the inner lives of women. The action takes place in their thoughts, hopes and dreams. It is very clear that what is seen on the outside is frequently very different from what is going on inside. Some of the stories seem like sketches for Drabble’s novels, ways for her to work out the characterizations. As a fan of Ms. Drabble, I loved this collection and feel privileged to have read it. I hope that more of her short stories come to light.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (May 18, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Margaret Drabble
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Wikipedia page on Margaret Drabble
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Red Queen

Bibliography:

• A Summer Bird Cage (1963)
• The Garrick Year (1964)
• The Millstone (1965)
• Jerusalem the Golden (1967)
• The Waterfall (1969)
• The Needle’s Eye (1972)
• The Realms of Gold (1975)
• The Ice Age (1977)
• The Middle Ground (1980)
• The Radiant Way (1987) *
• A Natural Curiousity (1989) *
• The Gates of Ivory (1992) *
• The Witch of Exmoor (1997)
• The Peppered Moth (2001)
• The Seven Sisters (2002)
• The Red Queen (2004)
• A Summer Bird-Cage (2006)
• The Sea Lady (2007)
• A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman : Stories (2011)
• The Pure Gold Baby (October 2013)

*Trilogy describing the experiences of three friends living through the 80s

Nonfiction:

• For Queen and Country: Britain in the Victorian Age (1978)
• A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature (1979)
• Safe as Houses (1990)
• The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws (2009)

“…it frightened him to think he might come to know all the things he didn’t know and then there would be no place in the world where he would feel at ease, no place he would not judge or measure, no place that would be his true home…”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (MAY 05, 2011)

Jean Thompson has been aptly labeled “an American Alice Munro,” and as a reader who has been mesmerized time and again by her captivating short-story collections, I wholeheartedly concur.

Now, in The Year We Left Home, Ms. Thompson leverages all her strengths and skills as a short-story writer and creates a sweeping and emotionally satisfying novel composed of interlocking, decade-spanning stories of a family in flux. As her grand theme, she takes on the universal quest for “home,” exploring all the manifestations of that search.

The novel is bookmarked by two wars – the Vietnam War and the Iraqi War. It begins in 1973 when the Erickson family of Grenada, Iowa, gathers to celebrate the continuing of tradition with the marriage of the eldest daughter, Anita. As some family members – the parents, Anita and her new husband Jeff – get ready to take their place in pre-defined roles, others are restlessly searching for a way out of Iowa – notably, her brother Ryan.

As this fiercely American novel takes this family down the road of its personal setbacks and triumphs, the country, too, is going through its own weaving road: from war to peace to war again, through economic booms to heartbreaking farm crises, from conventional values to sweeping changes. Ryan reflects, “The Great State of Alienation. It stretched from sea to shining sea. Everybody in America is one of two things, either in or out. His wife was right, they’d worked so hard and were so proud to be on the outside of everything they’d grown up with. But they were inside of nothing but themselves.”

As the family disperses, each must strive to get back to that central core, a place to feel at ease. Their rebellious cousin Chip, a war-damaged Vietnam vet whose mind has become uncentered, has, perhaps, the further distance to navigate; he must travel geographically and emotionally to reach the place that he has known as home.

But the others must also embark on their own personal journeys – confronting alcoholism, life-altering accidents, divorces, agoraphobia, professional setbacks, low-grade discount and changing standards to reach their own personal centers and to embrace their own realities. Ms. Thompson seems to imply that we all face our own forms of disconnect, but with recognition and a little effort, we will eventually arrive at “true home.”

Only one of the characters – the younger brother, Blake – chooses to stay home and follow what appears to be his predestined path. Although he is the most content of the siblings, he does not escape unscathed. There are days in which he, too, ponders where life has taken him and whether he should have been more of a risk-taker.

As a new generation follows their generation, Ryan again reflects, “They had done so much. They had meant to do so much more. Imagine them slipping off to death regretting the task unfinished, the field unplowed, the child unloved.”

Richly told, finely crafted, authentically explored, The Year We Left Home gives new insights into home, family, and indeed, the American experience. Those who enjoy books such as Elizabeth Stout’s Olive Kitteridge – quiet books that pack a big wallop – this is a must-read.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jean Thompson
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro More by Jean Thompson: City Boy

Bibliography:

• The Gasoline Wars: Stories (1979)
• My Wisdom (1982)
• Little Face and Other Stories (1984)
• The Woman Driver (1985)
• Who Do You Love: Stories (1999)
• Wide Blue Yonder (December 2001)
• City Boy (February 2004)
• Throw Like a Girl: Stories (2007)
• Do Not Deny Me: Stories (2009)
• The Year We Left Home (May 2011)

“And this very book began not as a book but as an obit of a kind for a little girl who up and went missing one simple summer day. On this girl we pinned all hopes of our dying town’s salvation. The longer we went without seeing her even once, the more and more dependent upon her we grew. She became our leading industry, her sudden nothingness a valuable export, and we considered changing the name of our town to hers; we would live in the town of ‘Lenore’. Is it any wonder we refused to give up hope despite all the signs that she’d never existed, that she’d never been anybody – never, not even before she supposedly vanished?”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAY 1, 2011)

The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schaffert is a small gem. Its multi-plotted story takes place in a small Nebraska town with characters who make this novel special. The town is peopled by a lot of old folks. Essie, the protagonist, is 83 and the novel is told in first person from her point of view. “We were all of us quite old, we death merchants – the town’s undertaker (seventy-eight), his organist (sixty-seven)…the florist (her freezer overgrown with lilies, eighty-one). The cemetery’s caretaker, who procured for the goth high schoolers who partied among the tombstones, was the enfant terrible among us (at an immature fifty-six.”

Essie writes obituaries for the town’s local paper which is owned by her grandson, Doc. She feels very close to the people she writes about and wants to know as much about them as possible, both the good and the bad. Essie had a son who died in an automobile accident many years ago, leaving two children – Essie’s grandson Doc and her granddaughter Ivy. Essie also has a teenaged great granddaughter named Tess with whom she is very close. Doc has raised Tess for most of her life as Ivy ran off to Paris with one of her professors when Tess was seven. As the novel opens, Ivy has just returned to town and her relationship with Tess is tenuous.

There are two very eventful things going on in town. The first is the alleged disappearance of a child named Lenore. No one has ever seen or met Lenore. Lenore’s mother, Daisy, says that her boyfriend Elvis abducted her. Supposedly, Lenore was born at home and home schooled. That’s the reason that no one has ever seen her and no records of her birth exist. The town is split into those who believe Lenore existed and was abducted and those who think that Lenore is merely a figment of Daisy’s imagination. Is Daisy delusional or has there really been a crime committed? Much of the book focuses on these questions.

The other big event in town is top secret. There is a young adult book series based on two characters named Miranda and Desiree. Think Harry Potter in terms of popularity. The publishers want a very out of the way place to print it and they choose this small Nebraska town. The paper that the book is printed on is very special. It contains grass seeds and herbs so that its “greenness” won’t harm the environment. The author, William Muscatine, has a correspondence with Essie that is top secret. They are pen pals and friends of a sort.

As word of the abduction gets out and travels around the country, people gather in town to park and camp all around Daisy’s ranch which is called “The Crippled Eighty.” These folks are known as Lenorians. It becomes somewhat cultish and these folks form a tight and closed circle around Daisy. They are hangers-on and try to keep other people away from Daisy.

Meanwhile, Ivy and Tess are trying to rebuild their relationship, which is a very difficult task. Tess had lived with Doc for the past six years and decides to move in with Ivy which hurts Doc’s feelings. Essie tries not to get too involved in their decisions. Tess often comes to Essie for advice and support. Essie and Tess have one of those special relationships that is comprised of love and mutual respect.

Essie attempts to solve the mystery of Lenore and also protect the secrecy of the book printing. She manages to get herself into different sorts of trouble and ends up with a real crisis on her hands. The characters in this gentle and compassionate book truly speak to the reader. In other hands this book would seem too light but Shaffert does an expert job of making the reader care and want to keep reading in order to find out what happens next. He does a good job of poking fun at the publishing industry, painting vivid portraits of dysfunctional families, and showing the sensibilities of a small town. This is quite an enjoyable book, one that leaves a sweet and mellow feeling with me. This is the first book I’ve read by Schaffert but I plan to check out his others.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Unbridled Books; 1 edition (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Timothy Schaffert
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt An interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another good read set in Nebraska: Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos

Bibliography:

• The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (2002)
• The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God (2005)
• Devils in the Sugar Shop (2007)
• The Coffins of Little Hope (2011)
• The Swan Gondola (February 2014)