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China Room

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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 travels to India f
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Wide Open

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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 along to his sma
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The Bright Forever

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THE BRIGHT FOREVER by Lee Martin   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2007, Pulitzer Finalist 2006   Date Read: October 15, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “Few things cause as much distress as the abduction of a little girl; second-novelist Martin ( Quakertown,  2001) milks that situation for all it’s worth in a multiply narrated story.   Katie Mackey is nine and lives with older brother Gilley and her parents in the small town of Tower Hill, Ind. The Mackeys own a glassworks, the town’s largest business, and Katie is a child of love and privilege, aglow with innocence. On the other side of the tracks is Henry Dees, a lonely bachelor and math teacher, who is Katie’s private tutor this summer of 1972. His neighbor is the equally lonely widow, Clare Mains, who has taken up with the self-styled Raymond R., a new arrival and, like Dees, victim of a grim childhood. Ray is not well liked for his know-it-all ways and synthetic folksiness, but Clare, all heart and no brains, is charmed, and marries him
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The Children's Book

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THE CHILDREN’S BOOK by A.S. Byatt   Award: James Tait Black Winner 2009   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2009, Dublin Longlist 2011   Date Read: October 4, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “Byatt ( A Whistling Woman , 2002, etc.) encompasses the paradigm shift from Victorian to modern England in a sweeping tale of four families.   The deeper subject, however, is the complex, not always benign bond that attaches children to adults. As the novel opens in 1895, Olive Wellwood seems the model New Woman: popular author of books that reinvent fairy tales for contemporary children, tolerant wife to Fabian Society stalwart Humphry, devoted mother pregnant with her seventh baby. She takes in Philip Warren, a working-class boy who longs to make art, and connects him with Benedict Fludd, a master potter whose family belongs to the Wellwoods’ progressive, artistic circle. As the long, dense narrative unfolds, we see the dark side of these idealists’ lives. Three of the children Olive is raising are not h
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The Tiger's Wife

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THE TIGER’S WIFE by Tea Obreht   Award: Women’s Prize Winner 2011   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2012, Dublin Longlist 2013, National Book Finalist 2011, NY Times Finalist 2011   Date Read: August 25, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “Young physician navigating postwar chaos in the Balkans tries to make sense of the mysterious death of her beloved grandfather.   En route to a rural orphanage with plans on inoculating a group of motherless local kids, 28-year-old Natalia gets the sudden, sad news that her grandfather, a well-respected doctor, has passed away. That he died far from home, in a village that appears on no map, raises several questions, in spite of the fact that the old man had been suffering from cancer. Natalia takes it upon herself to investigate the clinic he was last seen in, and collect his affects, while trying to fulfill her medical obligations to the orphans. A clear-eyed realist who came of age during the bloody dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, she is nonetheless
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A Book Of American Martyrs

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A BOOK OF AMERICAN MARTYRS by Joyce Carol Oates   Award: LA Times Winner 2017   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2019   Date Read: August 20, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Wounded families survive two men’s martyrdom. Once again drawn to America’s heart of darkness, Oates ( The Man Without a Shadow , 2016, etc.) takes on the incendiary issue of abortion in a long, contorted, and ultimately unsatisfying tale focused on the killing of Gus Voorhees, an abortion provider, by Luther Dunphy, an evangelical. The shooting itself interests Oates less than the aftermath, as each man acquires “a mythic-heroic reputation” and each man’s family is plagued by grief “that is not pure but mixed with fury. Murderous grief, that no amount of tears can placate.” It feels, says Voorhees’ daughter, like “an autoimmune disease.” Both Voorhees and Dunphy emerge as stereotypes: idealistic Voorhees was radicalized in “the sour aftermath of the Vietnam War” when he was a pre-med student at the University of Michigan
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Gun Dealers' Daughter

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GUN DEALERS’ DAUGHTER by Gina Apostol   Award: PEN/Open Book Winner 2013   Date Read: August 12, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ The stilted reminiscences of a daughter of privilege from the Philippines whose naïve acts of rebellion teach her a tough life lesson. In her third novel, award-winning, Manila-born Apostol delivers a sketchy history of her country’s politics from the solipsistic perspective of a “spoiled brat,” Soledad Soliman, now recovering from a mental breakdown in her family’s luxurious New York mansion. The child of arms dealers, Sol spent the 1970s in the U.S., avoiding the violence at home. Returning to Manila, to a life lived among the elite, she had plans for a foreign education, but illness intervened and instead she attended a local college where she met a political crowd including another Soledad (this one a Maoist) and her wealthy boyfriend Jed. Sol’s attraction to Jed leads to an affair conducted during evening graffiti raids, but her wish to join the political
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