A Word About Awards

  COMMONWEALTH by Ann Patchett   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2017, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2016   Date Read: December 13, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Two families are fused, atomized, and reconfigured by a stolen kiss, a child’s death, and a bestselling novel. In her seventh work of fiction, Patchett ( This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage , 2013, etc.) turns from the exotic locales and premises of  Bel Canto  (2001) and  State of Wonder  (2011) to a subject closer to home: the evolution of an American family over five decades. The story begins on a very hot day in Southern California at a christening party for Beverly and Fix Keating’s second daughter, Franny. A lawyer named Bert Cousins shows up uninvited, carrying a bottle of gin. With its help, the instant infatuation he conceives for his stunning hostess becomes “the start of his life.” After Bert and Beverly marry and move to Virginia, the six newly minted stepsiblings are...

BESIDE THE OCEAN OF TIME by George MacKay Brown   Nominations: Booker Finalist 1994, Dublin Longlist 1996   Date Read: December 2, 2025   From Graeme Fife Review: “ The great skua is known in the Scottish islands as a bonxie, a Shetland name of Norse origin. He flies low over the sea but think of him cruising into a higher slipstream and circling the string of rocky outcrops that make these other islands, ‘the green hills and the blue waters of Orkney’, the treeless open ground where the men and women of the small population tend the planticrus (walled vegetable patches) and haul up their boats from the chafing sea onto the noust (a scooped-out trench atop a beach, protected by a shallow wall of stones), ready for the next foray into the waters for fish. The low walls are everywhere, sign of the need to win shelter from the wind that sweeps over the low ground, the wind that tosses the bonxie as he espies the pattern of existence that has been the same and changed endless...