A Word About Awards

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

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

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

CHARMING BILLY by Alice McDermott   Award: National Book Winner 1998   Nominations: Dublin Finalist 2000, Women’s Prize Longlist 2000   Date Read: August 7, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ McDermott (At Weddings and Wakes, 1992, etc.) extends her view of Irish-American life with this gentle portrait of an alcoholic freshly dead from drink, and of the family he leaves behind to reveal and remember. Everyone at the wake agreed that Billy Lynch was a fine man--when sober. But they also knew something of his pain, born from the long-ago death of his fiancée just before she was to come back to Brooklyn after a trip to Ireland. Only his cousin and best friend Dennis, though, knew the whole story: Eva didn't die, but she did marry her Irish love--a fact he concealed from Billy for 30 years, not knowing that Billy would mourn what might have been for the rest of his life, even after he met and married the gentle, love-struck Maeve. Then, in Ireland in 1975, to take The Pledge after years of