A Word About Awards

DEMON COPPERHEAD by Barbara Kingsolver   Awards: BookTube Winner 2023, James Tait Black Winner 2022, Oprah Book Club 2022, Pulitzer Winner 2023, Women’s Prize Winner 2023   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2023, Dublin Longlist 2024, NY Times Finalist 2022   Date Read: September 2, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “Inspired by  David Copperfield , Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of...

ALL FOURS by Miranda July   Nominations: LA Times Finalist 2024, National Book Finalist 2024, NY Times Finalist 2024, PEN/Jean Stein Longlist 2025, Women’s Prize Finalist 2025   Date Read: March 28, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “A  woman set to embark on a cross-country road trip instead drives to a nearby motel and becomes obsessed with a local man. According to Harris, the husband of the narrator of July’s novel, everyone in life is either a Parker or a Driver. “Drivers,” Harris says, “are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring.” The narrator knows she’s a Parker, someone who needs “a discrete task that seems impossible, something…for which they might receive applause.” For the narrator, a “semi-famous” bisexual woman in her mid-40s living in Los Angeles, this task is her art; it’s only by haphazard chance that she’s fallen into a traditional straight marriage and motherhood. When the narrator needs to be in New York for work, she decides...

JAZZ by Toni Morrison   Award: Nobel Winner 1992   Nomination: NY Times Finalist 1992   Date Read: March 27, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Morrison, in her sixth novel, enters 1926 Harlem, a new black world then ("safe from fays [whites] and the things they think up"), and moves into a love story—with a love that could clear a space from the past, give a life or take one. At 50, Joe Trace—good-looking, faithful to wife Violet, also from Virginia poor times—suddenly tripped into a passionate affair with Dorcas, 18: "one of those deep-down spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going." Then Violet went to Dorcas's funeral and cut her dead face. But before Joe met Dorcas, and before her death and before Violet, in her torn coat, scoured the neighborhood looking for reasons, looking for her own truer identity, images of the past burned within all three: Violet's mother, tipped out of her chair by the men who took everyth...

JAMES by Percival Everett   Awards: BookTube Winner 2025, Carnegie Winner 2025, Kirkus Winner 2024, National Book Winner 2024, Pulitzer Winner 2025   Nominations: Aspen Words Finalist 2025, Booker Finalist 2024, Dayton Literary Peace Finalist 2025, Dublin Finalist 2025, Goodreads Finalist 2024, LA Times Finalist 2024, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2024, NY Times Finalist 2024, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 2025, PEN/Jean Stein Longlist 2025   Date Read: March 19, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Mark Twain's  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember. This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with ...

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...

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...

CLOUDSPLITTER by Russell Banks   Nominations: NY Times Finalist 1998, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 1999, Pulitzer Finalist 1999   Date Read: December 30, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “An inordinately ambitious portrayal of the life and mission of abolitionist John Brown, from the veteran novelist whose previous fictional forays into American history include The New Worm (1978) and The Relation of My Imprisonment (not reviewed). Banks's story takes the form of a series of lengthy letters written, 40 years after Brown's execution, by his surviving son Owen in response to the request of a professor (himself a descendant of William Lloyd Garrison) who is planning a biography of the antislavery martyr. Owen's elaborate tale, frequently interrupted by digressive analyses of his own conflicted feelings about his family's enlistment in their father's cause, traces a pattern of family losses and business failings that seemed only to heighten ""the Old Man's""...

THE TIGER’S WIFE by Tea Obreht   Award: Women’s Prize Winner 2011   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2012, Dublin Longlist 2013, National Book Finalist 2011, NY Times Finalist 2011   Date Read: August 25, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “Young physician navigating postwar chaos in the Balkans tries to make sense of the mysterious death of her beloved grandfather.   En route to a rural orphanage with plans on inoculating a group of motherless local kids, 28-year-old Natalia gets the sudden, sad news that her grandfather, a well-respected doctor, has passed away. That he died far from home, in a village that appears on no map, raises several questions, in spite of the fact that the old man had been suffering from cancer. Natalia takes it upon herself to investigate the clinic he was last seen in, and collect his affects, while trying to fulfill her medical obligations to the orphans. A clear-eyed realist who came of age during the bloody dissolution of the former Yugosl...

FALCONER by John Cheever   Nominations: National Book Critics Circle Finalist 1977, NY Times Finalist 1977   Date Read: February 13, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ It is many years since we left the Steuben glasshouse world that was, so unmistakably, Cheerer country. Via Bullet Park, a gentler, more vulnerable book than this, he introduced his broader and deeper ranging metaphysics of life and death, always in mysterious tandem. They're constants here in Falconer prison where Farragut, 734-508-32, a fratricide and a drug addict, is serving a zip to ten sentence. The drug he really hopes to find is a "distillate of earth, air, water, and fire." While Farragut reflects on his mortality and courts "death's dark simples," filth and degeneracy—redolent of Genet—are all around him. The Valley, for instance, is a urinal trough where you really go to relieve other needs unless you've turned homosexual. Farragut is briefly drawn to Jody, indicted on 53 counts, Jod...

THE BLUE FLOWER by Penelope Fitzgerald   Award: National Book Critics Circle Winner 1997   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 1997, NY Times Finalist 1997, Women’s Prize Longlist 1996   Date Read: January 16, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ The German poet Novalis (1772-1801) was really Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg and Fitzgerald ( The Gates of Angels , 1992;   Offshore , 1987, etc.) here re-creates him, his family, his doomed young lover Sophie von Kühn, and Sophie's huge family—not to mention the era all of them lived in—in the most human-sized and yet intellectually capacious narrative a reader could wish for. Times were once better for the Hardenbergs, who've sold two estates, may have to sell another, and meanwhile live in a more manageable house in town. The pious and old (he's 56) father of the many-childrened family is Director of the Salt Mining Administration of Saxony, one of the few vocations (the military is another) not forbidden to members of the aris...

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 ...

THE BEE STING by Paul Murray   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2023, BookTube Winner 2024, Kirkus Finalist 2023, NY Times Finalist 2023, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2024   Date Read: January 6, 2024   From Kirkus Review: “ An Irish family’s decline is rendered in painful, affecting detail.   The opening line says “a man had killed his family” in another town, and “rumours swirled about affairs, addiction, hidden files on his computer.” Are these portents of what awaits the Barnes family, who will inhabit the next 650 pages? Certainly they are struggling with an array of problems. In the wake of a recession, the Volkswagen dealership run by Dickie Barnes has seen sales plummet amid a surge in complaints about repair work. A disgruntled client’s son threatens to beat Dickie’s boy, PJ, with a hammer. PJ's sister, Cass, is struggling with a fickle bestie and booze. Their mother, Imelda, facing her neighbors’ schadenfreude, has stopped shopping and dreams that a flood is taking...

  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...

A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul   Award: Nobel Prize 1979   Nominations: Booker Finalist 1979, NY Times Finalist 1979   Date Read: November 21, 2023   Salim accepts a job as a trader in a remote part of Africa, bringing Metty, the son of a slave he had grown up with. The store he in charge of is at a bend in the river, the river being a prevalent symbol in throughout this novel. Salim engages with the local intellectuals at a precarious time in the village’s development.   Moving from colonialism to a newly independent state, the future of this part of Africa is in flux and everyone has ideas about the direction the state should take. Of course, none of the paths forward are straight and what could be a bright future eventually descends into chaos. Corruption and greed abound while the basic tenets of society come crashing down. The only future is one of killing and death.   Salim manages to escape with barely his life and relegates Metty to a very unce...