A Word About Awards

CIRCE by Madeline Miller   Awards: Goodreads Winner 2018   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2019, Dublin Longlist 2020, Women’s Prize Finalist 2019   Date Read: January 14, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “A  retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch. “Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for  The Song of Achilles  (2012). This time, she dips into  The Odyssey  for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their c...

THE PERFECT MAN by Naeem Murr   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2006, Dublin Longlist 2008, PEN/Open Book Finalist 2008   Date Read: January 6, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “Both literary and lurid, Murr’s third novel ( The Genius of the Sea,  2003 etc.) uses the perspective of an alienated soul to examine a Missouri community in the 1950s stewing in a broth of violence, sexuality, bigotry and secrets.   London-born, U.S.-based Murr stirs many extreme ingredients into the pot. He tells a tale of seething emotions, elegantly-phrased yet feverish, that’s surely destined to erupt in dramatic fashion. The opening serves as a prologue, in which Gerard Travers leaves his illegitimate Indian son Rajiv with his brother Haig in post-World War II London. Rajiv is smart, a talented mimic and a misfit who will be passed on to the third Travers brother Olly, cohabiting with Ruth, a romance writer in Pisgah, Mo.—except that by the time Raj arrives, Olly is dead. But Ruth befriend...

THE SMELL OF APPLES by Mark Behr   Award: LA Times Winner 1996   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 1997   Date Read: January 1, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “An ambitious debut novel from young Johannesburg writer Behr revisits 1970s South Africa here, to tell of a family that conveniently embodied many of that country's familiar pathologies and distortions. While not exactly a morality tale, the story that ten-year-old Marnus Erasmus tells is nonetheless shaped and determined by the phrase ``the smell of apples,'' apples that are sweet until they rot and stink. This handy metaphor for the society Behr describes is carefully worked out in the narrative that young Marnus relates, alternating with brief dispatches from the 1988 Angolan front, where the now-adult Marnus is reluctantly fighting. As he recalls what was in many ways a typical summer, he innocently reveals all the bigotry and hypocrisy that he learns at school, at church, and to some degree at home. Marnus's fathe...