GHOST LIGHT by Joseph O’Connor
GHOST LIGHT by Joseph O’Connor is a brilliant and complex book. It is one of the best books I have read in the last five years. The language is poetic and hallucinatory and this is a book where one can’t skip passages or lines. Every word is necessary and the whole is a gift put together with the greatest care and love.
February 1, 2011
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Judi Clark · 
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Tags: 20th-Century, FSG, London, Real People Fiction, Time Period Fiction · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Facing History, Reading Guide, United Kingdom
DEATH INSTINCT by Jed Rubenfeld
In Jed Rubenfeld’s sexy, moody, Hitchcockian-cum-Freudian-cum-Jungian literary novel, THE INTERPRETION OF MURDER, Dr. Stratham Younger narrates a story within the framework of a fictional journal, focusing on his experiences with Drs. Jung and Freud on their revolutionary visit to the United States in 1909. Rubenfeld braided historical fact and fiction in this Manhattan corkscrew murder mystery, centering on Freud’s pioneering “talking therapy” and penning some biting dialogue between the three psychoanalysts. Younger’s skepticism and attraction to Freud’s theories enhanced the mesmerizing story of his attempt to cure a damaged, neurotic, and mute woman. The novel was peopled with a sprawling cast of doctors and louche politicians, drawing the reader into a lush, dissecting mixture of cerebral scrutiny and emotional desire.
Rubenfeld’s second and very ambitious novel also weaves fact and fiction, with extensive scope, while adopting some of the motifs and themes from his debut work. This time the author is tacitly paralleling events in the novel to the economic depression of contemporary times, as well as the 9/11 tragedies.
January 21, 2011
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: 1920s, 20th-Century, Freud, Real Event Fiction, Real People Fiction · Posted in: Facing History, Mystery/Suspense, New York City
THE WOLVES OF ANDOVER by Kathleen Kent
There is a brutish energy in Kathleen Kent’s prequel to her well-received HERETIC’S DAUGHTER, a comingling of harsh animalistic dangers with politics, power and passion. The howling wolves that come for their prey are both the two-legged and the four-legged kind, and each will stop at nothing to prevail.
THE WOLVES OF ANDOVER opens with the introduction of Martha Allen, a resourceful and sharp-tongued young woman who is forced to take the position of glorified servant to her weak-willed cousin Patience, who is expecting her third child in colonial Massachusetts. There she meets a giant of a man, the Welshman Thomas Carrier, a hired worker with an air of mystery. It is rumored that for the love of Oliver Cromwell’s cause, he took an axe to the head of King Charles I and now has a bounty on his own head.
December 12, 2010
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: 17th-Century, Real People Fiction, Time Period Fiction · Posted in: Facing History, NE & New York, Reading Guide
THE CASEBOOK OF VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN by Peter Ackroyd
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in 1818, and it stands as a classic marker of the intersection between the Romantic and Industrial Ages. The most superficial aspect of her idea — a being created from human corpses by the use of electricity that turns out to be a monster — has been transformed by Hollywood into a clichĂ© of the horror genre. Yet Mary Shelley’s original work has profound moral and philosophical implications that shed a great deal of light on the thought of the time, and are relevant in many respects to debates in our own age, such as cloning and stem-cell research. Peter Ackroyd’s retelling of the story might seem superfluous, except that for modern readers it manages to cut even closer to the heart of what made the original novel so important, not least in its pitch-perfect evocation of early 19th-century style and intellectual portrait of the age.
December 11, 2010
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: 19th-Century, Gothic, Real People Fiction, Time Period Fiction · Posted in: Facing History, Reading Guide, y Award Winning Author
UNDER FISHBONE CLOUDS by Sam Meekings
If UNDER FISHBONE CLOUDS doesn’t attain the high readership it deserves, there is no justice. It’s quite simply one of the most lavishly imagined, masterfully researched, exquisitely written contemporary novels I’ve read. And if that sounds as if I’m gushing…well, it’s probably because I am.
December 7, 2010
· Judi Clark · One Comment
Tags: Chinese, Communism, love, lyrical, Magical Realism, Myth, Real Event Fiction, Real People Fiction · Posted in: 2010 Favorites, China, Facing History, Family Matters, World Lit
DEVIL’S DREAM by Madison Smartt Bell
This is a slave talking about his master, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a real character who became one of the most respected Confederate generals in the Civil War. At one point, Bedford breaks a pot over Ben’s head in rage at his insubordination, only to realize that there is a better way to gain his cooperation. So at considerable expense of time and treasure, he seeks out Ben’s wife, who had been sold away from him, and buys her back to be his companion. A former slave-trader who nonetheless treats his people with respect, this is only one of the contradictions that make Forrest so fascinating.
November 26, 2010
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Tags: Civil War, Madison Smartt Bell, Real Event Fiction, Real People Fiction, Time Period Fiction, War Story · Posted in: Facing History, US South, y Award Winning Author
