A Word About Awards

BURNT SUGAR by Avni Doshi   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2020, PEN/Hemingway Finalist 2022, Women’s Prize Longlist 2021   Date Read: June 27, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Dark emotions color a daughter’s complex connection to her mother in a striking first novel that delves deep into family bonds. “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.” This is the devastating opening sentence of American writer Doshi’s provocative debut, which offers a fierce, compelling depiction of the painfully intertwined lives of a mother and daughter in Pune, India. Tara, the mother, was neglectful and careless; Antara, the daughter, will become her unwilling but affixed life companion. Abandoning a gloomy marriage to join an ashram and become the lover of Baba, its leader, Tara exhibits a pattern of inadequate parenting that continues, four years later, when Baba replaces her with a younger model. Tara and Antara, now 7, are next to be found begging outside the Club in Pune

DANCING IN THE DARK by Caryl Phillips   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2007, PEN/Open Book Finalist 2006   Date Read: June 22, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “A provocative, illuminating novel that imagines the inner life and explores the cultural legacy of Bert Williams, the first popular black stage performer of America’s early 20th century. Born in the West Indies, Williams delighted white audiences and embarrassed his family and associates by playing the bumbling, slow-witted “coon” or “nigger,” corking his visage in blackface. He considered this stereotype a peculiarly American phenomenon, unknown in his homeland. Was he the artistic creator of his role, or was he the prisoner of it? Williams claimed that the caricature should not offend since it had no basis in reality, but it plainly reinforced a popular prejudice, one that put strict limitations on acceptable roles for a performer of his color. West India–born novelist and cultural critic Phillips ( A Distant Shore,  2003, etc.) emp

JACK by Marilynne Robinson   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2021, Dublin Longlist 2022, Oprah Book Club 2021   Date Read: June 19, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “A  sometimes tender, sometimes fraught story of interracial love in a time of trouble. “I have never heard of a white man who got so little good out of being a white man.” So chides Della Miles, upbraiding John Ames Boughton at the opening of Robinson’s latest novel, set in an unspecified time, though certainly one of legal racial segregation. Jack hails from Gilead, Iowa, where so many of Robinson’s stories are set, and he has a grave waiting there that he seems in a headlong rush to occupy. He drinks, he steals, he wanders, he’s a vagrant. Now he's in the Black part of St. Louis, an object of suspicion and concern, known locally as “That White Man That Keeps Walking Up and Down the Street All the Time.” Della is a schoolteacher, at home in Shakespeare and the classics. Jack is inclined to Milton. He is Presbyterian by birt

BIRNAM WOOD by Eleanor Catton   Nominations: BookTube Longlist 2024, Dublin Longlist 2024, Kirkus Finalist 2023   Date Read: June 13, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ An eco-activist group in New Zealand becomes entangled with an American billionaire in Catton's first novel since the Booker Prize–winning  The Luminaries  (2013). Mira Bunting is the brainchild behind Birnam Wood, an “activist collective” of guerrilla gardeners who plant on unused land (sometimes with permission) and scavenge (or steal) materials to grow food. Mira is a “self-mythologising rebel” whose passions are tempered only somewhat by Shelley Noakes, who sees herself as Mira’s “sensible, dependable, predictable sidekick.” This role is starting to chafe—as is the lack of money—and Shelley plans to leave Birnam Wood. Just as Shelley’s about to cut ties, Mira makes an announcement: On a recent scouting trip near Korowai National Park, she located a farming property owned by a Kiwi farmer named Owen Darvish, temporari

RADIANT FUGITIVES by Nawaaz Ahmed   Nominations: Aspen Words Longlist 2022, Center For Fiction Longlist 2021, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 2022   Date Read: June 6, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Muslim Indian family, splintered by forces from within and without, attempts to reconnect over one fateful week in San Francisco. "Oh, Grandmother, you’re not asleep yet. The voices from the kitchen are no lullaby. Your daughters are fighting, and you blame yourself. There must have been something you could have done, before the rifts widened to such chasms." Ahmed's complex, ambitious debut is narrated by a fetus who—like his literary cousin in Ian McEwan's  Nutshell —has narrative art to spare. Having just emerged from his mother's lifeless body in the delivery room, he unfolds a tragedy of classic proportions, fluently incorporating the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats, and the Quran and including masterful descriptions of the skies of San Francisco, of Muslim ritual, of LGBTQ+ pro