A Word About Awards

CHINA ROOM by Sanjeev Sahota   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2021, Carnegie Longlist 2021, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2022   Date Read: November 14, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “Two teenagers come of age in India’s Punjab region, one in 1929 and one in 1999.   Although 15-year-old Mehar Kaur is a newlywed, she isn’t sure who her husband is: She and her sisters-in-law, Gurleen and Harbans, spend most of their time doing chores or cloistered in a small room known as the china room, where they eat and sleep. The three brothers in the family had been married to the three women in a single ceremony, and their domineering mother, Mai, makes sure to keep Mehar, Gurleen, and Harbans in the dark. Each woman sometimes meets her husband at night in a “windowless chamber,” but their identities remain a mystery. Mehar can’t help wanting to find out the identity of her husband, and her curiosity winds up having disastrous consequences. Meanwhile, decades later, Mehar’s great-grandson...

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...

BENEDICTION by Kent Haruf   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2015, James Tait Black Finalist 2013, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2014   Date Read: December 6, 2023   From Kirkus Review: “A  meditation on morality returns the author to the High Plains of Colorado, with diminishing returns for the reader. As the cliché has it, Haruf caught lightning in a bottle with his breakthrough novel,  Plainsong  (2000), an exploration of moral ambiguity in the small community of Holt. With his third novel with a one-word title set in Holt, the narrative succumbs to melodrama and folksy wisdom as it details the death of the owner of the local hardware store, a crusty feller who has seen his own moral rigidity soften over the years, though not enough to accomplish a reconciliation with his estranged son, a boy who was “different” and needed to escape “from this little limited postage stamp view of things. You and this place both.” Or so the dying man, known to all as “Dad” Lewis, ...

SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE by Claire Keegan   Award: Oprah Book Club 2024 Nominations: Booker Finalist 2022, Dublin Longlist 2023, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2022   Date Read: July 21, 2023   Bill Furlong is a coal & timber merchant, married with five daughters. Yes, five. What makes Furlong remarkable, however, is his ability to look at his life with gratitude – for his wife, his five daughters and having enough to put food on the table.   Having been raised by a single mother who was disowned by her own family for falling pregnant while unmarried, Furlong is especially sensitive to Sarah and how she is being treated. On a delivery to the convent, he find her locked inside the coal shed with no coat or shoes, no food or comfort. He realizes his own mother could have been treated like her had it not been for the kindness and generosity of Mrs. Wilson.   Furlong understands the fundamental truths about humanity: if you treat people well, they will treat you well; ...

WEST by Carys Davies   Nominations: BookTube Longlist 2019, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2019   Date Read: March 30, 2023   West is a strange novella about a man, John Bellman, who has recently lost his wife and has found himself frustrated and dissatisfied. He has a daughter, Bess, who is only 12 years old. Bellman encounters a news article that describes bones that were found in Kentucky of a creature that no one has ever laid eyes on and Bellman is instantly obsessed.   The bones, from the description in the book, seem to be from a wooly mammoth, which are already extinct when Bellman decides to head west from his farm in Pennsylvania in search of these mysterious creatures. To say his quest is ill-advised would be an understatement. While Bellman knows the journey ahead is treacherous, the loss of his wife compels him to reorient his life focus and do something monumental to begin again.   Bellman packs only what is necessary for the journey and what he believes...

INDELICACY by Amina Cain   Nominations: Center For Fiction Finalist 2020, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2021   Date Read: March 21, 2023   Indelicacy is a timeless tale of a woman searching for her own truth and purpose in life. Vitoria’s dilemma as a woman could have happened last century, last year or tomorrow. She is a poor woman, cleaning a museum for a living with no prospects for upward mobility. The one thing she does have is her mind; she’s an avid writer and appreciator of the artwork she is surrounded by.   One of the patrons of the museum essentially sweeps her off her feet. He is wealthy, older and aware of her circumstances. She is never quite clear if she truly loves this man, but the math definitely works out. Vitoria goes from rags to riches – from working herself to the bone to a woman of leisure. She tells her husband she is afraid of growing bored because he does not want her to take classes or be consumed by anything that would distract from him. ...

ASSEMBLY by Natasha Brown   Nominations: LA Times Finalist 2021, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2022   Date Read: November 5, 2022   Assembly is a short but mighty novel about a black British woman and the discrepancies in her experiences versus her white counterparts. Waiting for a large anniversary party to begin, hosted by her white boyfriend’s wealthy parents, our unnamed protagonist is caught in a sort of limbo. She has done everything she was expected to do – college, career, boyfriend, owning property, keep your head down and carry on. So what gives?   She is at an inflection point, having recently been diagnosed with cancer which has metastasized. How does she want to handle it. Her usual method of pretending events are happening to someone else is no longer working as the pain is all too real, the implications all too dire. Her boyfriend, towards the end of the novella, spontaneously proposes but she knows in the next day or the next week, he will wish to take it ...

DEPT. OF SPECULATION by Jenny Offill   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2016, LA Times Finalist 2014, NY Times Finalist 2014, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 2015, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2015   Read: August 15, 2022   In a strange way, the Dept. Of Speculation reminds me of Chemistry in that both novels offer insight and prose in brief observations and vignettes that are pointed and brief. Their brevity releases a kind of insight that perhaps a longer sentence structure might hide. In short, every word matters.   The love letters the husband and wife used to send to each other would always be postmarked “from” the Dept. Of Speculation. Both were well aware that the future was uncertain and their love might not last the test of time. And to that point, the husband has an affair and rather than cut and run, they both stick around to see what’s beyond that betrayal. Is there anything there worth saving?   They have a daughter who understands that their family life is frayed. S...

THE FLAMETHROWERS by Rachel Kushner   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2015, James Tait Black Finalist 2013, National Book Finalist 2013, NY Times Finalist 2013, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2014, Women's Prize Longlist 2014   Date Read: July 5, 2022   The Flamethrowers is a strange novel in that it’s captivating, particularly the level of detail, but you are never quite sure where you’re headed. Indeed, I still am unsure where I went. Is this a novel about a woman finally finding her own identity? We see a lot of Reno becoming but I don’t quite know what she became.   Having finished her art degree in her home state of Nevada, Reno heads to New York to experience the art scene there. She has a one-night-stand with Ronnie, who turns out to be Sandro Valera’s best friend. Ultimately, she winds up in a relationship with Sandro, who is related to the Valera motorbike family, Reno’s favorite brand of bike. She briefly sets the land speed record in Bonneville on her Valera motorc...

EXIT WEST by Mohsin Hamid   Awards: Aspen Words Winner 2018, LA Times Winner 2017   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2017, Carnegie Longlist 2018, Dayton Literary Peace Finalist 2018, Dublin Finalist 2019, Kirkus Finalist 2017, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2017, NY Times Finalist 2017, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2018   Date Read: November 19, 2021   Exit West is an interesting take on immigration and a relationship expedited by the pressures of war. In Hamid’s version of earth, literal doors allow people to migrate to different countries, bypassing paperwork, visas and passports, to simply arrive unannounced in a new country.   This is what happens for Saeed and Nadia, a couple in Syria who had just started dating and were finding the delights in each other’s company. The collapse of their city and Nadia’s vulnerability as a single woman living alone causes Saeed to invite her to come live with his father and him. Saeed’s mother had just recently been killed....

ALL MY PUNY SORROWS by Miriam Toews   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2015, Dublin Longlist 2016, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2015   Date Read: January 15, 2021   Sisters Elf and Yoli are sisters who were raised in a Mennonite household. On the surface, their lives could not be more disparate. Elf has an enviable life on the surface – beauty, a marriage in which her husband adores her. She is wildly talented and in every surface appearance, she is a success. Yoli, on the other hand, is deeply in debt. She is the mother of two teenagers, born of two different fathers, who challenge her in every way. For all that should separate them and drive them apart, they are fiercely close.   The biggest challenge to their relationship is that Elf has been, continues to be, and will always be alienated from life. Not just alienated, but seems to know in her marrow that this life is not for her. She wants, more than anything, to end her life.    Elf’s mother and sister have ...

MILKMAN by Anna Burns  Awards: Booker Winner 2018, Dublin Winner 2020, National Book Critics Circle Winner 2018 Nomination: Rathbones Folio Finalist 2019, Women's Prize Finalist 2019 Date Read: April 25, 2019 After the first paragraph, I could tell that Milkman would be refreshingly different from other novels I've been reading lately. Yet, this same difference would soon grate on me about half-way through.  Milkman is set in some sort of dystopian present, where danger lurks everywhere and life is lived in extremes. A world where certain names are banned, citizens are surveilled, teenagers are expected to marry and communities are segregated based on religion and political leanings. These same members of the community harass one another into conformity. Differing communities loathe each other for, what can only be presumed as, the slightest of differences, which I couldn't help thinking of The Butter Battle Book. For this very reason, Middle Sister immediately ...

10:04   by Ben Lerner   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2016, Rathbone Folio Finalist   Date Read: March 25, 2015   From Kirkus Review: “An acclaimed but modest-selling novelist (not unlike the author himself) muses semiautobiographically on time, life and art. “Proprioception”: The narrator of Lerner’s knotty second novel returns often to that word. It refers to the sense of where one’s own body is in relation to things, a signature theme for an author who’s determined to pinpoint exactly where he is emotionally and philosophically. As the novel opens, our hero has earned a hefty advance for his second book on the strength of his debut and a New Yorker story. This echoes Lerner’s real life, in which his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), was a critical hit; the New Yorker story included in this novel did indeed appear in the magazine. What to make of such self-referentiality? More than you’d expect. Lerner blurs the lines between fact a...