A Word About Awards

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 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...

A BOOK OF AMERICAN MARTYRS by Joyce Carol Oates   Award: LA Times Winner 2017   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2019   Date Read: August 20, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Wounded families survive two men’s martyrdom. Once again drawn to America’s heart of darkness, Oates ( The Man Without a Shadow , 2016, etc.) takes on the incendiary issue of abortion in a long, contorted, and ultimately unsatisfying tale focused on the killing of Gus Voorhees, an abortion provider, by Luther Dunphy, an evangelical. The shooting itself interests Oates less than the aftermath, as each man acquires “a mythic-heroic reputation” and each man’s family is plagued by grief “that is not pure but mixed with fury. Murderous grief, that no amount of tears can placate.” It feels, says Voorhees’ daughter, like “an autoimmune disease.” Both Voorhees and Dunphy emerge as stereotypes: idealistic Voorhees was radicalized in “the sour aftermath of the Vietnam War” when he was a pre-med student at the Uni...

THE RETURN OF FARAZ ALI by Aamina Ahmad   Award: LA Times Winner 2022   Date Read: March 20, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “A  young Pakistani police officer’s investigation leads him deep into his own past.   The story begins with a crime: Sonia, an 11-year-old sex worker in Lahore’s red-light district, has been killed. Though Faraz Ali has been dispatched by his father, a local politician, to cover up the murder, he can’t bring himself to follow orders. In late-1960s Pakistan, against the backdrop of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s rise to power, Faraz’s unwillingness to play politics, to simply do as he’s told and reap the rewards, has grave consequences. He's reassigned to East Pakistan, where he's seen as an occupier by those fighting for a free Bangladesh, yet another test of his moral fiber. Throughout, his relationship to his powerful father remains a secret, as does the fact that his own mother is a sex worker and he was born in the red-light district himself. Whil...

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...

THE BLAZING WORLD by Siri Hustvedt   Award: LA Times Winner 2014   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2014, Dublin Longlist 2016, Kirkus Finalist 2014   From Kirkus Reviews: “ An embittered female artist plays a trick on critics that goes badly awry in Hustvedt’s latest ( The Summer Without Men,  2011, etc.).   An “Editor’s Introduction” sets up the premise: After the 1995 death of her husband, art dealer Felix Lord, Harriet Burden embarked on a project she called  Maskings,  in which she engaged three male artists to exhibit her work as their own, to expose the art world’s sexism and to reveal “how unconscious ideas about gender, race, and celebrity influence a viewer’s understanding of a given work of art.” Readers of Hustvedt’s essay collections ( Living, Thinking, Looking,  2012, etc.) will recognize the writer’s long-standing interest in questions of perception, and her searching intellect is also evident here. But as the story of Harry’s life cohe...

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...

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA by Gabriel Garcia Marquez   Awards: LA Times Winner 1988, Nobel Prize Winner 1998 Nominations: NY Times Finalist 1988, Oprah Book Club 2007   Date Read: March 16, 2022   Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a master. His writing is so seductive, sensual and beguiling. I want more, more, more. Every time. Always. His Nobel Prize is well-deserved.   Love In The Time Of Cholera is about longing. It is about love that doesn’t waver and that is everlasting. As a young boy, Florentino Ariza is captivated by the even younger Fermina Daza. She inspires in him a love so passionate that flows from his pen in pages and pages of love letters that leave Fermina breathless. She is slowly won over by his ardor and they begin an exchange of love letters - sometimes through acquaintances, others by hiding them throughout the city – that would leave seasoned lovers heaving.   But Florentino is not the man Lorenzo Daza, Fermina’s wayward father, has in mind for he...

SCHINDLER’S LIST by Thomas Keneally   Awards: Booker Winner 1982, LA Times Winner 1983 Nomination: NY Times Finalist 1982   Date Read: April 14, 1999   From Kirkus Reviews: “Like Raoul Wallenberg, Oskar Schindler was one of those precious few "righteous gentiles" personally responsible for the saving of Jewish lives (estimated at about 1300) during the Holocaust. But what makes Schindler's story of compelling interest to novelist Keneally--who terms this book a "nonfiction novel," an act of reconstruction and homage prompted by meeting one of the Schindlerjuden survivors in a Los Angeles store--seems to be Schindler's moral stance, a more equivocal one than that of brave, heedless Nordic-knight Wallenberg. Schindler owned and operated Nazi-sponsored factories--first one producing enamel-ware in Cracow; then a munitions plant in Brinnlitz, near Auschwitz. And the Jews whom he put on his list worked for him under S.S. guard, providing material for the Reich. S...

THE GREAT BELIEVERS by Rebecca Makkai Awards: Carnegie Winner 2019, LA Times Winner 2018 Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2020, National Book Finalist 2018, NY Times Finalist 2018, Pulitzer Finalist 2019 Date Read: June 7, 2020 The Great Believers is a novel about the early AIDS epidemic in Chicago, following a gay community that is largely wiped out due to the disease. These men already carry the prejudices of society on their shoulders and the AIDS crisis almost seems to reinforce that shame. While society has progressed significantly with acceptance, there is still a long way to go, particularly with the trans and non-binary communities. As Yale, Charlie and the intimate community that surrounds them try to come to terms with a terrifying virus that, at the time, meant a death sentence, their suspicions about the early tests sound so similar to the antivax sentiment today. Further on, as AZT is presented as an early medication, the discussions about affording it ar...

THE NIX by Nathan Hill   Award: LA Times Winner 2016 Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2018   Date Read: January 30, 2017   From Kirkus Reviews:   “Sparkling, sweeping debut novel that takes in a large swath of recent American history and pop culture and turns them on their sides.   The reader will be forgiven for a certain sinking feeling on knowing that the protagonist of Hill’s long yarn is—yes—a writer, and worse, a writer teaching at a college, though far happier playing online role-playing games involving elves and orcs and such than doling out wisdom on the classics of Western literature. Samuel Andresen-Anderson—there’s a reason for that doubled-up last name—owes his publisher a manuscript, and now the publisher is backing out with the excuse, “Primarily, you’re not famous anymore,” and suing to get back the advance in the bargain. What’s a fellow to do? Well, it just happens that Samuel’s mother, who has been absent for decades, having apparently run off in t...

THE HANDMAID'S TALE by Margaret Atwood Award: LA Times Winner 1986 Nominations: Booker Finalist 1986, NY Times Finalist 1986 Date Read: September 6, 1988 The Handmaid's Tale has recently become popular again due to the series created by Hulu. With the discourse regarding women's rights happening right now, the timing couldn't be better. And allegedly, Atwood is working on a sequel named The Testaments that should be published sometime this year (fingers crossed). The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopian novel set in the undefinable future and follows Offred's life, her name being that of the male master she serves - in this case, Of Fred. The novel jumps from the past to the present and back again, describing how women lost their rights and how they secretively struggle for individualism and independence. Women do not control their own bodies, fates or desires but are completely at the whim of men.  The Handmaid's Tale is not only masterfully written but p...