A Word About Awards

A CRIME IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD by Suzanne Berne   Award: Women’s Prize Winner 1999   Nomination: LA Times Finalist 1997   Date Read: January 31, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “True, this debut by a Massachusetts essayist and storywriter is a coming-of-age tale, but the greater ethical issues its author explores raise it well above typical first-novel fare. It was the summer of 1972 when Spring Hill, a Washington, D.C., suburb, got its first taste of an increasingly violent, insecure modern world. The quiet residential area, whose inhabitants traditionally left their doors unlocked and spent the summers attending one another's cookouts, was rocked by the news that 12-year-old Boyd Ellison had been raped and murdered, his body dumped behind the local mall. While shaken residents organized a neighborhood watch program and clued detectives in on anyone's suspicious behavior, the inhabitants of at least one house were distracted by a tragedy of their own: Ten-year-old Marsha E...

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF JEAN STAFFORD by Jean Stafford   Award: Pulitzer Winner 1970   Nominations: National Book Finalist 1970, NY Times Finalist 1969   Date Read: January 26, 2025   MAGGIE MERIWETHER’S RICH EXPERIENCE Maggie Meriwether is on her first trip abroad from Tennessee. She’s alone and her ability to speak French has abandoned her. At a birthday party, at which she was promised everyone would speak English but did not, she finds herself the odd woman out from the other sophisticates present. She encounters wonders she’s never seen such as clothing, food, men walking a tightrope over a swimming pool, a tree house with a nargileh inside. After crying on her way home, she realizes that the experience, when recounted to her friends, actually makes her sound sophisticated and world-wise.   THE CHILDREN’S GAME At a casino in Belgium, the widow Abby is questioning her life abroad. She moved to Europe upon the death of her husband but now finds herself missi...

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...