A Word About Awards

ACT OF DESTRUCTION by Ronald Hardy   Award: James Tait Black Winner 1962   Date Read: December 30, 2023   From Kirkus Review: “A  vista of a clanging Africa, physical than political, is distinguished by some spectacular scenery and it tells its story of one man's attempt to stem a world he never with a savage effectiveness. This is Hardy's fourth book (Kampong is the best remembered) his most political but his most impassioned- and through Harry Sloan he defends the view, or rather vision, of an untouched land man now challenges and civilization threatens to disfigure. Harry, who had grown up in this country ""wild enough to knock you flat"" had learned to kill hunting with his father, then later in the war, but now is a deputy game warden, defending the plains and the animals as the last sanctuaries of freedom. Harry is a loner, a rogue (i.e. the animal who sets himself apart from the herd) and his attempt to keep his valley inviolate leads to more than one

BLACK RIVER by S.M. Hulse   Nominations: Center For Fiction Longlist 2015, Dublin Longlist 2017,  PEN/Hemingway Finalist 2016   Date Read: December 27, 2023   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Hulse debuts with a stark, tender tale about one man’s quest for faith and forgiveness.   The initial question is whether Wes Carver can forgive Bobby Williams, the inmate who tortured him during a prison riot that left two of his fellow corrections officers dead. He gets a letter informing him Williams is up for parole just days before his beloved wife, Claire, dies of leukemia, so Wes is in shaky condition when he returns to Black River, Montana, site of the prison and home to his stepson, Dennis. It’s been 20 years since the riot, 18 since Wes and Claire moved to Spokane, leaving behind her 16-year-old son after a violent altercation between the two men. Hulse unpacks this back story slowly, reproducing the way past traumas shape the present. We grow to realize that Wes too needs forgiveness: for forcing

  A MERCY by Toni Morrison   Award: Nobel Prize 1993   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2010, James Tait Black Finalist 2008, NY Times Finalist 2008, Women’s Prize Longlist 2009   Date Read: December 23, 2023   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Abandonment, betrayal and loss are the somber themes of this latest exploration of America’s morally compromised history from Morrison ( Love , 2003, etc.).   All the characters she sets down in the colonial landscape circa 1690 are bereft, none more evidently so than Florens, 16-year-old slave of Jacob Vaark and his wife Rebekka. Eight years earlier, Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader Jacob reluctantly took Florens in settlement of a debt from a Maryland landowner. Her own mother offered her—so as not to be traded with Florens’ infant brother, the girl thinks. (The searing final monologue reveals it was not so simple.) Florens joined a household of misfits somewhere in the North. Jacob was a poor orphan who came to America to make a new start; Rebekka’s parents es

PARIS NOCTURNE by Patrick Modiano   Award: Nobel Prize 2014   Nominations: PEN/Translation Finalist 2016   From the New York Journal of Books: “The new English translation of Patrick Modiano’s 2003 novel   Paris Nocturne   defies categorization. Part noir novel, some philosophical musing, coming of age tale, history and mystery, this beautifully written and translated work examines memory and how we construct and reconstruct our pasts. In the opening pages of   Paris Nocturne , the nameless male narrator recalls a pivotal incident when he was a young man in which he was struck by a car crossing the Place de Pyramides in Paris. He hazily remembers a large man and blonde woman who accompany him in a van to the hospital and a mysterious clinic, their disappearance, and being given an envelope full of money. Throughout his narrative he tries to piece together what happened to him and find the people involved in the accident. The narrative jumps back and forth in time as the narrator tries

BLACK SWAN GREEN by David Mitchell   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2006, Dublin Longlist 2008, LA Times Finalist 2006   Date Read: December 18, 2023   From Kirkus Reviews (starred review): “ Adolescent angst during the Margaret Thatcher–inflected year of 1982 is the subject of two-time Booker nominee Mitchell’s lively (autobiographical?) fourth novel.   It contrasts strikingly with the matter, and manner, of the intricate “systems novels” ( Ghostwritten , 2000;  Number9Dream , 2001;  Cloud Atlas , 2004) that made his reputation, if only in the racy anguished voice of its 13-year-old narrator Jason Taylor. Jason, who grows up in a sleepy, quaintly named eponymous Worcestershire village, suffers from a mortifying speech defect (he stammers), his older sister Julia’s stony condescension, his schoolmates’ casual malice and repeated outcroppings of inopportune “boners.” In short, he’s a kid—albeit, in Mitchell’s deft hands, an intriguingly sentient and thoughtful one. There are wonderful sce

THE COVE by Ron Rash   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2013, Dublin Longlist 2014   Date Read: December 17, 2023   From Kirkus Reviews (starred review): “ Lonely young woman meets mysterious stranger. What might have been trite and formulaic is anything but in Rash’s fifth novel, a dark tale of Appalachian superstition and jingoism so good it gives you chills.   Three miles out of town, in the North Carolina mountains, a massive cliff rears up. Beneath it is a cove, gloom-shrouded and cursed, so the locals believe, though all the out-of-state Sheltons knew was that the farmland was cheap. The story takes place in 1918. Both parents have died and their grown children, Hank and Laurel, are trying to cope. Hank is back from the war, missing one hand. Laurel has a purple birthmark; she has been ostracized by the townsfolk of Mars Hill as a witch. Rash’s immersion in country ways and idioms gives his work a rare integrity. One day Laurel hears a stranger playing his flute in the woods; the s

MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES by Gabriel Garcia Marquez   Awards: LA Times Winner 2005, Nobel Prize 1982   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2007   Date Read: December 11, 2023   From Kirkus Reviews: “ An erotic novella from Colombian Nobel laureate García Márquez (Living to Tell the Tale, 2003, etc.), his first fiction in ten years.   The hero is a Colombian journalist who describes himself as second-rate. But García Márquez, perennially enraptured by the wonderful, can’t quite make him lackluster and gives him a newspaper column that has run for 50 years and readers who follow his work with breathless interest. On his 90th birthday, the nameless journalist, who says he had paid to have sex with 514 women by the age of 50, asks a madam to procure a virgin. On the first of many occasions, he enters the room to discover the naked 14-year-old girl asleep. Throughout the year, he obsesses over her; writes columns about her that drive his readers into a frenzy; and kisses her everywhere and

PERFUME by Patrick Suskind   Award: PEN/Translation Winner 1987   Date Read: December 11, 2023   From Kirkus Reviews: “Fr om a West German playwright: an elaborate historical fable about smell, set in 18th-century France--obsessive, showy, heavily (if rather murkily) metaphorical, with a fair amount of black-comic dazzle but only a glimmer or two of genuine narrative magic. Suskind's monster--hero is Jean. Baptise Grenouille, born in stench-ridden Paris in 1738, an instant orphan (his fishwife-mother is beheaded for multiple infanticide), rejected by society, barely allowed to live. But, though ugly, deformed, and hateful, Grenouille has been born with a double-miracle when it comes to odor: he himself is odorless. . .and he has super-powers of smell for the odors around him! And soon, inspired by the glorious aroma of a luscious maiden (whom he kills), young Grenouille vows to become history's greatest perfumer, to ""revolutionize the odoriferous world."" H

BURNTCOAT by Sarah Hall   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2023, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2021   Date Read: December 10, 2023   From Kirkus Reviews: “ The author of  Madame Zero  (2017) and  The Wolf Border  (2015) turns her attention to the pandemic.   “Those who tell stories survive.” This is something Edith Harkness’ mother told her, and it’s the opening line of the book her creator started writing when the United Kingdom went into lockdown in March 2020. This novel was born of a pandemic and is, obliquely, about a pandemic. Its protagonist has lived through and still lives with a world-historical disease, and Hall has earned a place in literary history as one of the first fiction writers to respond in a sustained way to Covid-19. The story is narrated by Edith and addressed to the lover with whom she sheltered from a deadly virus. This summary is available to anyone who reads a synopsis of the novel, but the author takes her time revealing who “you” is, and this gets at so

BENEDICTION by Kent Haruf   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2015, James Tait Black Finalist 2013, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2014   Date Read: December 6, 2023   From Kirkus Review: “A  meditation on morality returns the author to the High Plains of Colorado, with diminishing returns for the reader. As the cliché has it, Haruf caught lightning in a bottle with his breakthrough novel,  Plainsong  (2000), an exploration of moral ambiguity in the small community of Holt. With his third novel with a one-word title set in Holt, the narrative succumbs to melodrama and folksy wisdom as it details the death of the owner of the local hardware store, a crusty feller who has seen his own moral rigidity soften over the years, though not enough to accomplish a reconciliation with his estranged son, a boy who was “different” and needed to escape “from this little limited postage stamp view of things. You and this place both.” Or so the dying man, known to all as “Dad” Lewis, imagines his son saying, as t

PLAINSONG by Kent Haruf   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2001, LA Times Finalist 1999, National Book Finalist 1999   Date Read: December 3, 2023   From Kirkus Reviews: “A stirring meditation on the true nature and necessity of the family. Among the several damaged families in this beautifully cadenced and understated tale is that of Tom Guthrie, a high-school history teacher in small Holt, Colorado, who’s left to raise his two young sons, Ike and Bobby, alone when his troubled wife first withdraws from them and then, without explanation, abandons them altogether. Victoria Roubideaux, a high-school senior, is thrown out of her house when her mother discovers she’s pregnant. Harold and Raymond McPheron, two aging but self-reliant cattle ranchers, are haunted by their imaginings of what they may have missed in life by electing never to get married, never to strike out on their own. Haruf (Where You Once Belonged, 1989, etc.) believably draws these various incomplete or troubled figures toge

LET US DESCEND by Jesmyn Ward   Nominations: Aspen Words Longlist 2024, Carnegie Finalist 2024, Kirkus Finalist 2023, Oprah Book Club 2023   Date Read: December 1, 2023   Annis is living the nightmare of slavery – where humans are not treated as human and are faced with impossible choices. Her reprieve is her mother until her mother is marched off one day by the Georgia Man. Alone and terrified, Annis is comforted by a fellow slave named Safi and that comfort turns to love.   In the midst of their chores, Annis and Safi are discovered and they too are marched off by the Georgia Man, although marched is too kind a word. Taken on foot through a torturous path from North Carolina to New Orleans, the journey is unimaginable in its brutality. Then again, Annis’ entire reality is unimaginable brutality, although Ward is incredibly gifted at giving voice to the unimaginable.   On this journey, Annis discovers Mama Aza who embodies her long-lost grandmother who was a warrior directly from Afri