A Word About Awards

LILA by Marilynne Robinson   Award: National Book Critics Circle Winner 2014   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2015, Carnegie Longlist 2015, Dublin Finalist 2016, National Book Finalist 2014, Oprah Book Club 2021   Date Read: May 27, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ More balm in Gilead as Robinson ( When I Was a Child I Read Books , 2012, etc.) returns to familiar ground to continue the saga of John Ames and his neighbors. Ames, Robinson’s readers will know, is a minister in the hamlet of Gilead, a quiet place in a quiet corner of a quiet Midwestern state. Deceptively quiet, we should say, for Robinson, ever the Calvinist (albeit a gentle and compassionate one), is a master at plumbing the roiling depths below calm surfaces. In this installment, she turns to the title character, Ames’ wife, who has figured mostly just in passing in  Gilead  (2004) and  Home  (2008). How, after all, did this young outsider wind up in a place so far away from the orbits of most people? What secrets does she be

THE BOOKS OF JACOB by Olga Tokarczuk   Award: Nobel Prize 2022   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2022, Kirkus Finalist 2022, National Book Longlist 2022, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2022   Date Read: May 23, 2024   “If God is all things, then evil is a part of God.”   “Now, to create the world, God had to withdraw from Himself, leave within His body a blank space in which the world could take up residence. God vanished from this space. The word  disappear  comes from the root word  elem , and the site of that disappearance is known as  olam: world . Thus even the name for the world contains within it the story of God’s departure. The world was able to arise solely because God was not in it. First there was something, and then that something was gone. That is the world. The world then, in its entirety, is lack.”   From Kirkus Reviews: “A charismatic figure traverses Europe, followers in tow.   The latest novel by the Polish Nobel Prize winner to appear in English is a behemoth, b

THE BERRY PICKERS by Amanda Berry   Award: Carnegie Winner 2024   Date Read: May 12, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “An Indigenous family is forever changed after one of their own goes missing.   Peters’ debut novel explores the lives of a Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia as they grapple with their decades-old trauma. In 1962, Ruthie, the family’s youngest daughter, goes missing from the berry farm in Maine where they work every summer. Told from alternating perspectives, the novel follows Joe, Ruthie’s older brother and the last person to see her before she went missing, and Norma, a young girl living in Maine with an aloof father and overbearing mother. Lying on his deathbed, Joe thinks back on his life, which has been filled with grief, rage, and all-consuming guilt: “People have given me their time, their love, their bodies, their secrets. And I’ve given so little.” After a brutal act of violence, Joe spent the next few decades running from himself and his sins, so as not to inflict mo