A Word About Awards

ALL THE BIRDS SINGING by Evie Wyld   Nominations: James Tait Black Finalist 2013, Women’s Prize Longlist 2014   Date Read: January 30, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ The second novel from award-winning Australian author Wyld ( After the Fire, A Still Small Voice , 2009) explores the checkered past of a self-reliant young woman, a sheep farmer.   When we first meet Jake Whyte, she’s tending her flock on an island off the coast of England. This is no Little Bo Peep: Jake is a tall, muscular Australian who can shear a fleece with the best of them. She’s also a loner; after three years on the island, she has no friends. To understand her, we must delve into her Australian past, which Wyld alternates with her English present. In a further twist, Wyld uses reverse chronology for the Australian sections. In the Outback, Jake is the only female member of a team of shearers, contract workers moving between sheep farms. Wyld is at her best capturing their work rhythms and cheerful profanity. Jake

DAISY JONES & THE SIX by Taylor Jenkins Reid   Award: Goodreads Winner 2019   Date Read: January 28, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ What ever happened to Daisy Jones and The Six, the iconic 1970s rock band that topped the charts and sold out stadiums? It’s always been a mystery why the musicians suddenly disbanded.   Reid ( The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo , 2017, etc.) takes an unusual approach to dissecting the breakup of the fictional rock band by offering a narrative composed solely of transcribed interviews. At the center of the documentary-style novel is the relationship between lead singer Billy Dunne, recovering addict and aspiring family man, and sexy bad girl Daisy Jones, whose soulful voice and complex lyrics turn out to have been the missing ingredient The Six needed. When Daisy joins the band, the group catapults to fame, but not without cost. She refuses to simply fall in line and let Billy make the artistic decisions. In doing this, not only does she infuriate the ba

BOLLA by Pajtim Statovci   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2023, James Tait Black Finalist 2022, Kirkus Finalist 2021   Date Read: January 26, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Two men fall for each other in the wrong place at the wrong time in this bleak tale of love and war. The third novel by the Kosovo-born Finnish novelist Statovci is structured around the alternating narratives of Arsim, a closeted gay man and aspiring Albanian writer, and Miloš, a medical student. Arsim is in emotional retreat twice over, entering a loveless marriage to hide his homosexuality and treading carefully in Pristina, Kosovo, where he’s an “Albanian in a world run by Serbs.” His furtive relationship with Miloš is exhilarating but short-lived: It’s 1995, and the Bosnian War soon sends Miloš to the front and Arsim to exile in an unnamed city. As the story follows the two into the 21st century, each has suffered badly, and an attempt at reconnection only reveals the depth of the damage. Miloš’ chapters are brief

REEF by Romesh Gunesekera   Nominations: Booker Finalist 1994, Dublin Longlist 1996   Date Read: January 22, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ The simple pleasures of the domestic arts well done become the stuff of metaphor in this wise and poignant tale of loss, both political and personal, by Sri  Lankan born Gunesekera (short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1994).    The narrator, Triton, is brought to work for Mister Salgado in 1962, “the year of the bungled coup,” by his uncle, who has arranged a new life for him because he is in trouble at home. The setting is Sri Lanka, a place that some think was the original Eden, and as the story begins, life is still sweet and mostly tranquil. Eager to please and learn, Triton soon becomes the perfect servant and cook for Salgado, an affluent gentleman and scholar who studies local marine life, coral reefs in particular. Triton polishes silver until “the pieces shone like molten sun”; makes superb cakes, curries, and even roasts and stuffs a Chri

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN by Lionel Shriver   Award: Women’s Prize Winner 2005   Date Read: January 20, 2024   From Kirkus Review: “The bad seed/nurture vs. nature theme updated as a teenaged sniper’s mother tries to understand the  why  behind her son’s criminality, in a series of letters to her not so mysteriously absent husband.   Two years earlier, when he was not quite 16, Kevin Khatchadourian went on a murderous rampage and now lives in a juvenile facility, where his mother Eva visits him regularly if joylessly. Although she has won a civil suit brought by a grieving mother who held her parenting responsible for Kevin’s acts, Eva does not doubt her accountability any more than she doubts Kevin’s guilt. Is she a bad mother? Is he a devil child? The implied answer to both is yes. Eva and her husband Franklin were happily married until she became pregnant in her late 30s. The successful publisher of bohemian travel guides who loves her work, Eva is more ambivalent than Franklin ab

THE BLUE FLOWER by Penelope Fitzgerald   Award: National Book Critics Circle Winner 1997   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 1997, NY Times Finalist 1997, Women’s Prize Longlist 1996   Date Read: January 16, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ The German poet Novalis (1772-1801) was really Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg and Fitzgerald ( The Gates of Angels , 1992;   Offshore , 1987, etc.) here re-creates him, his family, his doomed young lover Sophie von Kühn, and Sophie's huge family—not to mention the era all of them lived in—in the most human-sized and yet intellectually capacious narrative a reader could wish for. Times were once better for the Hardenbergs, who've sold two estates, may have to sell another, and meanwhile live in a more manageable house in town. The pious and old (he's 56) father of the many-childrened family is Director of the Salt Mining Administration of Saxony, one of the few vocations (the military is another) not forbidden to members of the aristocracy, and

EVENING by Susan Minot   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2000, LA Times Finalist 1998   Date Read: January 13, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Minot (Folly, 1992, etc.) aims high in taking a long look at the beginning and end of a love-life—in a project that’s not without its gripping moments but that requires an excess of artifice to stay aloft and doesn't steadily convince.    Ann Lord, 65, is dying of cancer, attended by a nurse and her various adult offspring from three not-so-happy marriages. In matters of love, Ann’s entire life, it seems, has been in one way or another less than blissful—though all might have been otherwise if things had been slightly different back in 1954—when Ann was 25—during a gala seaside weekend celebrating a friend’s marriage. Those were the three days when Ann met (—The person’s face seemed lit from within—), loved (—The great thing was happening to her—),and lost (to another, by a cruel twist of fate) the ultra-handsome doctor and Korea vet whom she (th

THE RABBIT HUTCH by Tess Gunty   Awards: National Book Winner 2022   Nominations: Inside Literary Prize Finalist 2024, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2022   Date Read: January 10, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ An ensemble of oddballs occupies a dilapidated building in a crumbling Midwest city.   An 18-year-old girl is having an out-of-body experience; a sleep-deprived young mother is terrified of her newborn’s eyes; someone has sabotaged a meeting of developers with fake blood and voodoo dolls; a lonely woman makes a living deleting comments from an obituary website; a man with a mental health blog covers himself in glow stick liquid and terrorizes people in their homes. In this darkly funny, surprising, and mesmerizing novel, there are perhaps too many overlapping plots to summarize concisely, most centering around an affordable housing complex called La Lapinière, or the Rabbit Hutch, located in the fictional Vacca Vale, Indiana. The novel has a playful formal inventiveness (

HALF BROKE HORSES by Jeannette Walls   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2011, NY Times Finalist 2009   Date Read: January 7, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ After a fascinating memoir about her vagabond parents (The Glass Castle, 2005), Walls turns her sights on her maternal grandmother Lily Casey Smith, who died when Walls was eight.   Because she uses a first-person narrative voice to capture Lily’s scrappy voice and imaginatively fills in some of the missing details of Lily’s life, Walls calls the work “A True-Life Novel,” but it follows the straightforward linear path of biography. Lily’s father, whose speech impediment belies his native intelligence, is an eccentric who once spent three years in prison for murder, idolizes Billy the Kid and believes child’s play is a waste of time. Lily’s childhood on ranches in west Texas and New Mexico is an idyll filled with chores like breaking horses. She wins academic honors at the Catholic boarding school she attends until her father spends her t

THE BEE STING by Paul Murray   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2023, BookTube Winner 2024, Kirkus Finalist 2023, NY Times Finalist 2023, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2024   Date Read: January 6, 2024   From Kirkus Review: “ An Irish family’s decline is rendered in painful, affecting detail.   The opening line says “a man had killed his family” in another town, and “rumours swirled about affairs, addiction, hidden files on his computer.” Are these portents of what awaits the Barnes family, who will inhabit the next 650 pages? Certainly they are struggling with an array of problems. In the wake of a recession, the Volkswagen dealership run by Dickie Barnes has seen sales plummet amid a surge in complaints about repair work. A disgruntled client’s son threatens to beat Dickie’s boy, PJ, with a hammer. PJ's sister, Cass, is struggling with a fickle bestie and booze. Their mother, Imelda, facing her neighbors’ schadenfreude, has stopped shopping and dreams that a flood is taking everything awa

HOW I BECAME A NORTH KOREAN by Krys Lee   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2017, Center For Fiction Finalist 2016   Date Read: January 2, 2024   From Kirkus Review: “ Glimpses of a hidden world from the award-winning author of  Drifting House  (2012).   Lee’s debut novel begins at a party in Pyongyang. Government officials and celebrities show off Rolex watches and fur coats. They eat fish imported from Tokyo, they toast their Dear Leader with Chivas Regal, and they watch girls in hot pants dance to forbidden American pop. It’s a surreal display of wealth and privilege overshadowed by terror. These elites are protected from the famine and despair that plague their country, but they're still subject to the whims of a mercurial, all-powerful dictator. This scene is narrated by a young man, Yongju, and it culminates in the assassination of his father. This fall from grace leads to an escape into China, and that’s where he meets the novel’s other narrators. Danny is Korean by heritage, C

MR. IVES’ CHRISTMAS by Oscar Hijuelos   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 1997, Pulitzer Finalist 1996   Date Read: January 1, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Pulitzer-winning Hijuelos's fourth sails close to the shoals of sentiment but remains an honest, moving account of a man, his family, and the changing city they live in. Edward Ives was orphaned at two (in 1924), entered a foundling home in Brooklyn, and was adopted by a kindly man named Ives, himself a foundling who now gave his own adoptive son a name and home. From this Dickensian start (Hijuelos gives little nods to Dickens throughout) unfolds a story of belief, loss, hope, and reemergent faith: a seeming recipe for treacle that in Hijuelos's hands somehow stays flavored with a robustness of life. Ives's religious faith, gained from his adoptive father, doesn't deny him a believable depth as his life proceeds: work as an adolescent in his father's print shop; study at the Art Students' League in the late 1940