Time of the Child by Niall Williams returns us to the setting for his last novel, This is Happiness. We’re deposited back in the rural Irish village of Faha, where the men work hard and douse end-of-workday frustrations at the local bars while their long-suffering wives tend to domestic chores and ride herd on multiple …
Tag: book-reviews
Two novels to take you elsewhere
Safekeep, a debut novel by Yael van der Wouden, won the 2024 Booker Prize, and the award was well deserved. Set in the Netherlands in 1961, it focuses on Isabel, the only one of three siblings caring for the big old house in which she grew up. Brother Hendrick has moved on to a gay …
Two special novels for Indian summer reading
Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin, translated from a 2018 French publication, is a delicately developing mysterious story about people who are a little offbeat but emerge as complex and interesting characters. The principal character, Violette Toussaint, is introduced to us as “the cemetery lady.” She works as the keeper of a cemetery in …
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Still more summer fiction
The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl is a confection, set in the 1980’s in Paris. Stella, a 20-something copy editor in New York, leads a highly routinized life, the regularity of which is comforting to her. She is estranged from her mother, Celia, who has never expressed love of her. Nor has Celia ever told …
Four Novels by Three Authors, All About Family Life
Long Island by Colm Toibin is a May, 2024 sequel to his notable 2009 novel Brooklyn and follows its principal characters, Eilis Lacey, an Irish immigrant to Brooklyn in the 1950’s, and her husband Tony Fiorella, a plumber from a robust Italian family. When Toibin picks up their story again, it’s the 1970’s, and they …
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Non-fiction books taking us to places both familiar and strange
Knife by Salman Rushdie is an account of the near-fatal attack on the well-known writer in 2022 by a lone knife-wielding terrorist who hated Rushdie for his writings, having read just two pages, and could only aver that Rushdie was “disingenuous.” The assailant, whom Rushdie calls “A” (for ass) but refuses to name, somehow eluded …
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Books as companions when it snows – pt. 1, fiction
North Woods by Daniel Mason is an exquisite book about a house in a forest in western Massachusetts, and all the people who have lived in that house going back to colonial times, starting with a pair of lovers fleeing the constraints of Puritan society. Each chapter is devoted to successive inhabitants of the house, …
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Marjorie Arons-Barron 