A Word About Awards

FINGERSMITH by Sarah Waters   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2002, Dublin Longlist 2004, Womens Prize Finalist 2002   Date Read: July 4, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Imagine a university-educated lesbian Charles Dickens with a similarly keen eye for mendacity and melodrama, and you’ll have some idea of the pleasures lurking in Waters’s impudent revisionist historicals: Tipping the Velvet (1999), Affinity (2000), and now this richly woven tale of duplicity, passion, and lots of other good stuff. It begins as the narrative of 17-year-old Susan Trinder, an orphan resident of the criminal domicile run by Hogarthian Grace Sucksby, a Fagin-like “farmer” of discarded infants and den-mother to an extended family of “fingersmiths” (i.e., pickpockets) and assorted confidence-persons. One of the latter, Richard Rivers (a.k.a. “Gentleman”), engages Susan in an elaborate plot to fleece wealthy old Mr. Lilly, a connoisseur of rare books—as lady’s maid “Susan Smith” t...

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...

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...

LOST CITY RADIO by Daniel Alarcon   Nominations: Center For Fiction Finalist 2007, Dayton Literary Peace Finalist 2008, Dublin Longlist 2009   Date Read: December 1, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “The host of a radio show finds herself increasingly tangled in the legacy of her country’s wearying history of war.   Like the dystopian settings of  Brave New World  and  1984 , the nation that Alarcón describes in his jarring and deeply imagined first novel feels at once anonymous and very familiar. Norma lives in the capital city of a South American nation that has spent ten years recovering from a long civil war that pitted the army against a failed cadre of rebels called the Illegitimate Legion. The reasons for the fighting are obscure, but Norma has become a national folk hero by helping to pick up the pieces; as the host of “Lost City Radio,” she reunites listeners with family members who were among the “disappeared” during the war. She’s not wholly disp...

WIDE OPEN by Nicola Barker   Award: Dublin Winner 2000   Date Read: November 11, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “A wayward, often puzzling, but ultimately rather haunting story about a group of outcasts, all in flight from a variety of real or imagined horrors, who collide on a desolate patch of British seacoast. British writer Barker (Love Your Enemy, stories, 1994, not reviewed; etc.) is exceptionally audacious; for much of the novel, the forces that have set her characters in motion and the odd ways in which several are related are only vaguely suggested. She depends on the sheer strangeness of them, their skewed mental states, and on her precise descriptions of their fractured interpretations of the world to propel the reader on. There are, to begin with, two men who meet in London—one is homeless, absorbed by weird rituals, perhaps suicidal; the other makes a living applying toxic sprays to urban weeds. Alarmed and fascinated by the homeless man, the latter takes him al...

THE BRIGHT FOREVER by Lee Martin   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2007, Pulitzer Finalist 2006   Date Read: October 15, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “Few things cause as much distress as the abduction of a little girl; second-novelist Martin ( Quakertown,  2001) milks that situation for all it’s worth in a multiply narrated story.   Katie Mackey is nine and lives with older brother Gilley and her parents in the small town of Tower Hill, Ind. The Mackeys own a glassworks, the town’s largest business, and Katie is a child of love and privilege, aglow with innocence. On the other side of the tracks is Henry Dees, a lonely bachelor and math teacher, who is Katie’s private tutor this summer of 1972. His neighbor is the equally lonely widow, Clare Mains, who has taken up with the self-styled Raymond R., a new arrival and, like Dees, victim of a grim childhood. Ray is not well liked for his know-it-all ways and synthetic folksiness, but Clare, all heart and no brains, is ...

THE CHILDREN’S BOOK by A.S. Byatt   Award: James Tait Black Winner 2009   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2009, Dublin Longlist 2011   Date Read: October 4, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “Byatt ( A Whistling Woman , 2002, etc.) encompasses the paradigm shift from Victorian to modern England in a sweeping tale of four families.   The deeper subject, however, is the complex, not always benign bond that attaches children to adults. As the novel opens in 1895, Olive Wellwood seems the model New Woman: popular author of books that reinvent fairy tales for contemporary children, tolerant wife to Fabian Society stalwart Humphry, devoted mother pregnant with her seventh baby. She takes in Philip Warren, a working-class boy who longs to make art, and connects him with Benedict Fludd, a master potter whose family belongs to the Wellwoods’ progressive, artistic circle. As the long, dense narrative unfolds, we see the dark side of these idealists’ lives. Three of the children Ol...

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 ...

THE HIDING PLACE by Trezza Azzopardi   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2000, Dublin Longlist 2002, James Tait Black Finalist 2000, Women’s Prize Longlist 2001   Date Read: July 4, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Azzopardi brings the immigrant and poverty-stricken underbelly of Cardiff, Wales, during the 1960s to disturbing life as a young child bears witness to the gradual disintegration of her troubled family. Dolores “Dol” Gauci is one of six daughters of Frankie Gauci, a Maltese immigrant, and his Welsh wife Mary. A charming but unlucky gambler, Frankie loses his money, his home, and his share in the Moonlight Café the night Dolores is born. Months later the infant Dol loses most of her left hand in a house fire while her mother is attempting to seduce the rent collector out of his money. For what he sees as the good of the family, Frankie barters away one of Dol’s older sisters, who may or may not be Frankie’s daughter. Out of misguided protectiveness, he gives another in ...

DANCING IN THE DARK by Caryl Phillips   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2007, PEN/Open Book Finalist 2006   Date Read: June 22, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “A provocative, illuminating novel that imagines the inner life and explores the cultural legacy of Bert Williams, the first popular black stage performer of America’s early 20th century. Born in the West Indies, Williams delighted white audiences and embarrassed his family and associates by playing the bumbling, slow-witted “coon” or “nigger,” corking his visage in blackface. He considered this stereotype a peculiarly American phenomenon, unknown in his homeland. Was he the artistic creator of his role, or was he the prisoner of it? Williams claimed that the caricature should not offend since it had no basis in reality, but it plainly reinforced a popular prejudice, one that put strict limitations on acceptable roles for a performer of his color. West India–born novelist and cultural critic Phillips ( A Distant Shore,...

HOME by Marilynne Robinson   Awards: LA Times Winner 2008, Women’s Prize Winner 2009   Nominations: Dublin Finalist 2010, National Book Finalist 2008, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2008, Oprah’s Book Club 2021   Date Read: March 10, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “A  companion volume to Robinson’s luminous, Pulitzer-winning novel  Gilead  (2004).   The focus here shifts from John Ames,  Gilead’s  memorable protagonist, to his lifelong best friend Robert Boughton. A widowed, increasingly frail and distracted former Presbyterian minister, Boughton has eight children scattered across the country. The story unfolds after two of them come home to Gilead, Iowa: Glory, the unmarried youngest, who has resigned her teaching job so she can care for Robert; and ne’er-do-well Jack, who for 20 years has repeatedly broken his father’s indulgent heart with his irresponsible, sometimes criminal behavior and—worse—his absence. “Why did he leave? Whe...

SKYLARK FARM by Antonia Arslan   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2009, LA Times Finalist 2007   Date Read: February 24, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ One family’s heartbreaking experience during the 1915 Armenian genocide.   In a small Anatolian hill town, Turks and Armenians live together in relative harmony for generations. But when, in 1915, the Ottoman Empire allies itself with Germany in the brewing world war, Turkish citizens are forced to take sides. Sempad Arslanian, however, remains oblivious to political change. Head of his large, wealthy clan and benefactor to his neighbors—Turk, Greek and Armenian alike—he spends the Spring of 1915 joyfully preparing for a reunion with his brother Yerwant, who, at 13, left Skylark Farm, the family’s country estate, to study in Italy. Preparations by both brothers rival ceremonial planning for royal visits: Sempad orders stained glass windows from England and levels a pasture for a tennis court; Yerwant outfits a red Isotta F...

THE BLIND ASSASSIN by Margaret Atwood   Award: Booker Winner 2000   Nominations: Dublin Finalist 2002, Women’s Prize Finalist 2001   Date Read: February 21, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Atwood’s skillfully woven tenth novel is her most ambitious and challenging work to date, and a worthy successor to her recent triumph,  Alias Grace  (1996).   It tells two absorbing stories that cast an initially enigmatic, ultimately pitilessly revealing light on each other. The central one is octogenarian Iris Griffen’s bitter reminiscence of her life as the privileged daughter of a prosperous Ontario family, the Chases, and later as wife to Richard Griffen, the businessman who effectively inherits and firmly directs the Chase fortunes. The counterpart story,  The Blind Assassin , is a strange futuristic tale that dramatizes in unusual (faux-Oriental) fashion a nameless woman’s obsession with a science-fiction writer whose imaginings blithely mirror and exploit...

THE FALLS by Joyce Carol Oates   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2006, Women’s Longlist 2005   Date Read: February 3, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Oates ( I Am No One You Know , 2003, etc.) painstakingly examines the impulse toward self-destruction—and the ways we find to heal ourselves.   The story spans nearly 30 years, beginning in 1950 when newlywed Gilbert Erskine leaps into Niagara Falls to his death, forever traumatizing his bride Ariah, a “spinster” music teacher who had awkwardly stumbled into a marriage neither spouse wanted. The hallucinatory opening section traces Ariah’s growing embitterment while introducing young attorney Dirk Burnaby, who impulsively comforts “the Widow-Bride of The Falls,” just as impulsively proposes a year after Gilbert's demise—and is accepted. The Burnabys settle in Niagara Falls, produce three children, and keep their often volatile marriage together (despite Ariah's emotional instability and paranoia) until Dirk, moved by the pas...

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN by Lionel Shriver   Award: Women’s Prize Winner 2005   Date Read: January 20, 2024   From Kirkus Review: “The bad seed/nurture vs. nature theme updated as a teenaged sniper’s mother tries to understand the  why  behind her son’s criminality, in a series of letters to her not so mysteriously absent husband.   Two years earlier, when he was not quite 16, Kevin Khatchadourian went on a murderous rampage and now lives in a juvenile facility, where his mother Eva visits him regularly if joylessly. Although she has won a civil suit brought by a grieving mother who held her parenting responsible for Kevin’s acts, Eva does not doubt her accountability any more than she doubts Kevin’s guilt. Is she a bad mother? Is he a devil child? The implied answer to both is yes. Eva and her husband Franklin were happily married until she became pregnant in her late 30s. The successful publisher of bohemian travel guides who loves her work, Eva is mor...

EVENING by Susan Minot   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2000, LA Times Finalist 1998   Date Read: January 13, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Minot (Folly, 1992, etc.) aims high in taking a long look at the beginning and end of a love-life—in a project that’s not without its gripping moments but that requires an excess of artifice to stay aloft and doesn't steadily convince.    Ann Lord, 65, is dying of cancer, attended by a nurse and her various adult offspring from three not-so-happy marriages. In matters of love, Ann’s entire life, it seems, has been in one way or another less than blissful—though all might have been otherwise if things had been slightly different back in 1954—when Ann was 25—during a gala seaside weekend celebrating a friend’s marriage. Those were the three days when Ann met (—The person’s face seemed lit from within—), loved (—The great thing was happening to her—),and lost (to another, by a cruel twist of fate) the ultra-handsome doctor and Ko...

HALF BROKE HORSES by Jeannette Walls   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2011, NY Times Finalist 2009   Date Read: January 7, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ After a fascinating memoir about her vagabond parents (The Glass Castle, 2005), Walls turns her sights on her maternal grandmother Lily Casey Smith, who died when Walls was eight.   Because she uses a first-person narrative voice to capture Lily’s scrappy voice and imaginatively fills in some of the missing details of Lily’s life, Walls calls the work “A True-Life Novel,” but it follows the straightforward linear path of biography. Lily’s father, whose speech impediment belies his native intelligence, is an eccentric who once spent three years in prison for murder, idolizes Billy the Kid and believes child’s play is a waste of time. Lily’s childhood on ranches in west Texas and New Mexico is an idyll filled with chores like breaking horses. She wins academic honors at the Catholic boarding school she attends until her ...

  A MERCY by Toni Morrison   Award: Nobel Prize 1993   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2010, James Tait Black Finalist 2008, NY Times Finalist 2008, Women’s Prize Longlist 2009   Date Read: December 23, 2023   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Abandonment, betrayal and loss are the somber themes of this latest exploration of America’s morally compromised history from Morrison ( Love , 2003, etc.).   All the characters she sets down in the colonial landscape circa 1690 are bereft, none more evidently so than Florens, 16-year-old slave of Jacob Vaark and his wife Rebekka. Eight years earlier, Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader Jacob reluctantly took Florens in settlement of a debt from a Maryland landowner. Her own mother offered her—so as not to be traded with Florens’ infant brother, the girl thinks. (The searing final monologue reveals it was not so simple.) Florens joined a household of misfits somewhere in the North. Jacob was a poor orphan who came to America to make a ne...

BLACK SWAN GREEN by David Mitchell   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2006, Dublin Longlist 2008, LA Times Finalist 2006   Date Read: December 18, 2023   From Kirkus Reviews (starred review): “ Adolescent angst during the Margaret Thatcher–inflected year of 1982 is the subject of two-time Booker nominee Mitchell’s lively (autobiographical?) fourth novel.   It contrasts strikingly with the matter, and manner, of the intricate “systems novels” ( Ghostwritten , 2000;  Number9Dream , 2001;  Cloud Atlas , 2004) that made his reputation, if only in the racy anguished voice of its 13-year-old narrator Jason Taylor. Jason, who grows up in a sleepy, quaintly named eponymous Worcestershire village, suffers from a mortifying speech defect (he stammers), his older sister Julia’s stony condescension, his schoolmates’ casual malice and repeated outcroppings of inopportune “boners.” In short, he’s a kid—albeit, in Mitchell’s deft hands, an intriguingly sentient and thoughtful...

MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES by Gabriel Garcia Marquez   Awards: LA Times Winner 2005, Nobel Prize 1982   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2007   Date Read: December 11, 2023   From Kirkus Reviews: “ An erotic novella from Colombian Nobel laureate García Márquez (Living to Tell the Tale, 2003, etc.), his first fiction in ten years.   The hero is a Colombian journalist who describes himself as second-rate. But García Márquez, perennially enraptured by the wonderful, can’t quite make him lackluster and gives him a newspaper column that has run for 50 years and readers who follow his work with breathless interest. On his 90th birthday, the nameless journalist, who says he had paid to have sex with 514 women by the age of 50, asks a madam to procure a virgin. On the first of many occasions, he enters the room to discover the naked 14-year-old girl asleep. Throughout the year, he obsesses over her; writes columns about her that drive his readers into a frenzy; and ki...