A Word About Awards

THE PERFECT MAN by Naeem Murr   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2006, Dublin Longlist 2008, PEN/Open Book Finalist 2008   Date Read: January 6, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “Both literary and lurid, Murr’s third novel ( The Genius of the Sea,  2003 etc.) uses the perspective of an alienated soul to examine a Missouri community in the 1950s stewing in a broth of violence, sexuality, bigotry and secrets.   London-born, U.S.-based Murr stirs many extreme ingredients into the pot. He tells a tale of seething emotions, elegantly-phrased yet feverish, that’s surely destined to erupt in dramatic fashion. The opening serves as a prologue, in which Gerard Travers leaves his illegitimate Indian son Rajiv with his brother Haig in post-World War II London. Rajiv is smart, a talented mimic and a misfit who will be passed on to the third Travers brother Olly, cohabiting with Ruth, a romance writer in Pisgah, Mo.—except that by the time Raj arrives, Olly is dead. But Ruth befriend...

THE SMELL OF APPLES by Mark Behr   Award: LA Times Winner 1996   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 1997   Date Read: January 1, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “An ambitious debut novel from young Johannesburg writer Behr revisits 1970s South Africa here, to tell of a family that conveniently embodied many of that country's familiar pathologies and distortions. While not exactly a morality tale, the story that ten-year-old Marnus Erasmus tells is nonetheless shaped and determined by the phrase ``the smell of apples,'' apples that are sweet until they rot and stink. This handy metaphor for the society Behr describes is carefully worked out in the narrative that young Marnus relates, alternating with brief dispatches from the 1988 Angolan front, where the now-adult Marnus is reluctantly fighting. As he recalls what was in many ways a typical summer, he innocently reveals all the bigotry and hypocrisy that he learns at school, at church, and to some degree at home. Marnus's fathe...

CLOUDSPLITTER by Russell Banks   Nominations: NY Times Finalist 1998, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 1999, Pulitzer Finalist 1999   Date Read: December 30, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “An inordinately ambitious portrayal of the life and mission of abolitionist John Brown, from the veteran novelist whose previous fictional forays into American history include The New Worm (1978) and The Relation of My Imprisonment (not reviewed). Banks's story takes the form of a series of lengthy letters written, 40 years after Brown's execution, by his surviving son Owen in response to the request of a professor (himself a descendant of William Lloyd Garrison) who is planning a biography of the antislavery martyr. Owen's elaborate tale, frequently interrupted by digressive analyses of his own conflicted feelings about his family's enlistment in their father's cause, traces a pattern of family losses and business failings that seemed only to heighten ""the Old Man's""...

LOST CITY RADIO by Daniel Alarcon   Nominations: Center For Fiction Finalist 2007, Dayton Literary Peace Finalist 2008, Dublin Longlist 2009   Date Read: December 1, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “The host of a radio show finds herself increasingly tangled in the legacy of her country’s wearying history of war.   Like the dystopian settings of  Brave New World  and  1984 , the nation that Alarcón describes in his jarring and deeply imagined first novel feels at once anonymous and very familiar. Norma lives in the capital city of a South American nation that has spent ten years recovering from a long civil war that pitted the army against a failed cadre of rebels called the Illegitimate Legion. The reasons for the fighting are obscure, but Norma has become a national folk hero by helping to pick up the pieces; as the host of “Lost City Radio,” she reunites listeners with family members who were among the “disappeared” during the war. She’s not wholly disp...

CHINA ROOM by Sanjeev Sahota   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2021, Carnegie Longlist 2021, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2022   Date Read: November 14, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “Two teenagers come of age in India’s Punjab region, one in 1929 and one in 1999.   Although 15-year-old Mehar Kaur is a newlywed, she isn’t sure who her husband is: She and her sisters-in-law, Gurleen and Harbans, spend most of their time doing chores or cloistered in a small room known as the china room, where they eat and sleep. The three brothers in the family had been married to the three women in a single ceremony, and their domineering mother, Mai, makes sure to keep Mehar, Gurleen, and Harbans in the dark. Each woman sometimes meets her husband at night in a “windowless chamber,” but their identities remain a mystery. Mehar can’t help wanting to find out the identity of her husband, and her curiosity winds up having disastrous consequences. Meanwhile, decades later, Mehar’s great-grandson...

WIDE OPEN by Nicola Barker   Award: Dublin Winner 2000   Date Read: November 11, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “A wayward, often puzzling, but ultimately rather haunting story about a group of outcasts, all in flight from a variety of real or imagined horrors, who collide on a desolate patch of British seacoast. British writer Barker (Love Your Enemy, stories, 1994, not reviewed; etc.) is exceptionally audacious; for much of the novel, the forces that have set her characters in motion and the odd ways in which several are related are only vaguely suggested. She depends on the sheer strangeness of them, their skewed mental states, and on her precise descriptions of their fractured interpretations of the world to propel the reader on. There are, to begin with, two men who meet in London—one is homeless, absorbed by weird rituals, perhaps suicidal; the other makes a living applying toxic sprays to urban weeds. Alarmed and fascinated by the homeless man, the latter takes him al...