A Word About Awards

COLORED TELEVISION by Danzy Senna   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2025, National Book Critic’s Circle Longlist 2024, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 2025   Date Read: February 24, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ When her second novel hits a wall, a biracial California writer makes a desperate attempt to start a TV career. One of the funniest scenes in this brilliant, of-the-moment, just really almost perfect book happens early on, in a flashback to the party in Brooklyn where Jane met Lenny, her husband and the father of their two kids. Feeling that she’s aging out of the dating game, Jane has recently consulted an “intuitive psychodynamic counselor with a specialty in racial alchemy,” aka a psychic, who told her she’s about to meet her future husband, a funny, tall, handsome Black man who would be wearing “West Coast shoes.” But when she meets Lenny, who seems to perfectly fit this description, he’s with a very possessive white girlfriend. “Ebony and ivory, together in disharmony.....

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND by Anthony Doerr   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2022, Dayton Literary Peace Finalist 2022, Dublin Finalist 2023, Goodreads Finalist 2021, National Book Finalist 2021   Date Read: February 20, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ An ancient Greek manuscript connects humanity's past, present, and future. “ Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you ” wrote Antonius Diogenes at the end of the first century C.E.—and millennia later, Pulitzer Prize winner Doerr is his fitting heir. Around Diogenes' manuscript, "Cloud Cuckoo Land"—the author did exist, but the text is invented—Doerr builds a community of readers and nature lovers that transcends the boundaries of time and space. The protagonist of the original story is Aethon, a shepherd whose dream of escaping to a paradise in the sky leads to a wild series of adventures in the bodies of beast, fish, and fowl. Aethon's story is first found by Anna in 15th-century Constantinople; thou...

THE WATER CURE by Sophie Mackintosh   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2018, Dublin Longlist 2020   Date Read: February 19, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Three sisters, secreted away during a global crisis of male violence, learn to fight for their survival in this spare, dystopian debut. Grace, Lia, and Sky follow the rituals enforced by their mother and their father, King, the only man they've ever known. The strange family lives in an isolated, crumbling mansion by the sea, where women arrive to receive the family's storied water cures and heal from violent pasts. They look like "they had been bled out, their skin limp. Eyes watering involuntarily, hair thinning," recalls Lia, and the sisters learn to fear a world that visits so much violence on its women. There are water cures for everything: to purify toxins from the outside world, illness, grief, too much feeling. The rituals themselves are often violent, requiring drowning or self-harm. When the novel opens, the si...

MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER by Oyinkan Braithwaite   Award: LA Times Winner 2018   Nominations: Booker Longlist 209, Dublin Longlist 2020, Goodreads Finalist 2020, Women’s Prize Finalist 2019   Date Read: February 15, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ From the hospital rooms and living spaces of Lagos, Nigeria, comes a dryly funny and wickedly crafty exercise in psychological suspense. Introverted, sensitive Korede is a nurse, a very good one from what we see of her at work. She feels such a connection with her patients that she finds herself taking a coma victim named Muhtar into her confidence. There’s one secret in particular that pours out of Korede like scalding liquid: Her flamboyantly beautiful younger sister, Ayoola, has this habit of killing the men she dates. (Three, so far.) She hasn’t been caught yet because Korede cleans up after her. They both disposed of the most recent victim, a poet named Femi, so efficiently that nobody in his family or with the police...

THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ by Heather Morris   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2020, Goodreads Finalist 2018   Date Read: February 14, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp. Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicin...

THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER by William Styron   Award: Pulitzer Winner 1968   Nomination: National Book Finalist 1968   Date Read: February 13, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Few first novels promised so much for a new writer as Styron's Faulknerian Lie Down in Darkness; with only one flawed major book in between, now sixteen years later it is difficult to relate this to the early book except for the emotional charge of some of the writing, most effective when descriptive. In the fulminating first person of Nat Turner, Just before he is to be killed, this reviews at black heat the "ruction" he incited—a mass murder and rape in the Virginia of 1831. "Nigger preacher," self-designated prophet, Nat is primarily a man who for the last half of his thirty-one years has nursed a "pure and obdurate" hatred for white men (and a less pure desire for their women). In the language of the law he's just an "animate chattel" although he had acquired th...

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD by Gabriel Garcia Marquez   Award: Nobel Prize 1983   Nominations: LA Times Finalist 1983, NY Times Finalist 1983   Date Read: February 8, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ In this new novella by the Nobel Prize-winner, a Colombian-village murder 20 years in the past is raked over, brooded upon, made into a parable: how an Arab living in the town was assassinated by the loutish twin Vicario brothers when their sister, a new bride, was rejected by her bridegroom—who discovered the girl's unchastity. Cast off, beaten, grilled, the girl eventually revealed the name of her corrupter—Santiago Nassar. And, though no one really believed her (Nassar was the least likely villain), the Arab was indeed killed: the drunken brothers broadcasted their intentions casually; they went so far as to sharpen their murder weapons—old pig-sticking knives—in the town market; and the town, universal witness to the intention, reacted with epic ambivalence—sure, at f...

DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE by Isabel Allende   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2001, Oprah Book Club 2000   Date Read: February 7, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Allende’s first novel in six years (The Infinite Plan, 1993, etc.) delivers her gentle, often plush style at extravagant length to tell the life of Eliza Sommers, a Chilean woman who immigrates to San Francisco in the 1840s. Abandoned as a baby in the British colony of Valparaiso, Eliza is raised by Jeremy and Rose Sommers, a prosperous pair of siblings who consider the girl a gift. For unmarried Rose, Eliza is compensation for the child she’s always lacked; brother Jeremy is pleased that the infant legitimizes their odd cohabitation. A thriving seaport, Valparaiso welcomes sailors and hucksters in abundance: Jeremy is a ship’s captain, and one Jacob Todd a Bible salesman without official sanction. Todd quickly falls for Rose, though she misunderstands him and thinks he’s fallen in love with young Eliza. Some 200 pages late...