A Word About Awards

BLACK BUTTERFLIES by Priscilla Morris   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2025, Dayton Literary Peace Finalist 2025, Womens Prize Finalist 2023   Date Read: November 23, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews (starred): “ The human costs of the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s are recounted in a compelling debut. Zora, a 55-year-old painter and art instructor, lives a busy life  in Sarajevo with her older husband, Franjo. When, during the early days of the partisan conflict, the family’s equanimity is upset by squatters trying to take possession of Zora’s mother’s apartment, Zora and Franjo decide that he will accompany her mother on an earlier-than-planned visit to their daughter and son-in-law (and beloved granddaughter) in England. Unable to believe or comprehend that the military action beginning to envelope the city will last for very long, Zora stays behind to watch the family’s properties and continue her work. Over the course of the following year, Zora struggles to surv...

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...

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...

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...

CIRCE by Madeline Miller   Awards: Goodreads Winner 2018   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2019, Dublin Longlist 2020, Women’s Prize Finalist 2019   Date Read: January 14, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “A  retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch. “Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for  The Song of Achilles  (2012). This time, she dips into  The Odyssey  for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their c...

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...

A CHILD’S BOOK OF TRUE CRIME by Chloe Hooper   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2004, Women’s Prize Finalist 2002   Date Read: November 24, 2023   I think this book was trying to be suspenseful and intriguing but it missed the mark for me. Premise: a primary school teacher, Kate Byrne, embarks on an affair with the father, Thomas, of one of her students, Lucien. Thomas’s wife, Vanessa, is a true crime author who has just published a book about a murder that happened nearby. As strange phone calls and mysterious car malfunctions occur, Kate begins to think the same circumstances surrounding that murder are happening to her.   The murder at Black Swan Point saw a vet having an affair with his very young assistant. When the wife discovered the affair, she confronted her husband and hit him in the head with a wine bottle, cutting him badly. He passed out and woke to find blood all over their room and word makes it to him that his lover is dead and his wife is missing. They f...

THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ by Anne Enright   Award: Carnegie Winner 2012   Nomination: Women’s Award Finalist 2012   Date Read: October 22, 2023   This beautiful novel and my favorite so far by Enright, follows a love affair between Gina and Sean. When I say love affair, I mean affair. Both are married to other people – Gina to Conor and Sean to Aileen. They make a spectacular mess of their lives when the fallout of their affair comes due. But Gina believes she is truly in love with Sean.   All of this drama ensues during a financial recession of Ireland and Gina needs to get out from under two properties that just won’t sell – her mother’s house who has recently passed away and the house she purchased with Conor which she can no longer afford. Until the uncertainty becomes certain, Gina is living, somewhat occasionally with Sean, in her mother’s home she co-owns with her sister.   Sean, Gina discovers, has never left his wife. While Conor and Gina have split, Sea...

I WAS AMELIA EARHART by Jane Mendelsohn   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 1998, LA Times Finalist 1996, Women’s Prize Finalist 1997   Date Read: August 25, 2023   In this fictionalized account of Amelia’s life and disappearance, Mendelsohn has created the most ideal of all endings – landing safely on a deserted island that provides all of the basics of existence and she and Noonan, her navigator, find a way to live together in harmony until their natural end.   With all the speculation and intrigue surrounding her disappearance (I mean, what actually happened to her?), this ending is perhaps the kindest. Some believe she, Noonan and her plane are at the bottom of the sea. Some believe she landed somewhere and was interned by the Japanese. Some believe she was eaten by cannibals (seriously). And some, like Mendelsohn, believe she landed on a deserted island.   What is not in dispute is that Amelia was truly one-of-a-kind, with an adventurous spirit and an unconventi...

FIRST LOVE by Gwendoline Riley   Nominations: James Tait Black Finalist 2018, Women’s Prize Finalist 2017   Date Read: August 21, 2023   First Love is such a frustrating novel because the entire read I wanted to smack Neve upside her head and tell her to just leave. She is married to Edwyn and although I believe she loves him, they are so ill-suited for each other, their relationship can be explained as nails on a chalkboard. Actually, Neve is fine. Edwyn is like nails on a chalkboard.   We are privy to Neve’s background, her relationship with her father who, not shockingly, is very similar to Edwyn. He seemed to delight in other’s pain, was manipulative and violent and there was a brief allusion to molestation? An early relationship with a musician who went in and out of town at random intervals also left her wanting and was never emotionally fulfilling.   And then she settled on and even married, Edwyn. Edwyn is one of those guys that can turn any conversation...

THE GREEN ROAD by Anne Enright   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2015, Carnegie Longlist 2016, Dublin Finalist 2017, LA Times Finalist 2015, Women’s Prize Finalist 2016   Date Read: August 2, 2023   The Madigan Family is having a reunion of sorts. The widows matriarch, Rosaleen, has managed to get all of her adult children to come home for Christmas. This is a family with some harmony, a lot of disharmony and a large splash of crazy. And they are bringing it all under one roof for the last time. Rosaleen has decided to sell the family home and this will be their last get-together there.   Only Constance (hence the name?) has remained in their hometown. She is the one her mother turns to for support and a sympathetic ear but it wears Constance down. Not to mention she has children of her own and has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. She is literally on the ragged edge.    Dan is the golden child and favored by Rosaleen. He was supposed to join the pri...

MOLLY FOX’S BIRTHDAY by Deirdre Madden   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2010, Women’s Prize Finalist 2009   Date Read: July 18, 2023   Molly Fox’s Birthday is a unique novel in that the entire work is a reminiscence about the past and the present of our unnamed main character’s best friend, Molly. Unnamed has done a house swap with her best friend, moving in to Molly’s Ireland house and Molly has moved into her London house. What makes these particular women remarkable is that Molly is a famous actress on the stage and Unnamed is a revered playwright.   Molly and Unnamed have known each other since Unnamed was in university. She had seen Molly in a play and was bewitched by her talent. Having known from a young age she wanted to be a playwright, she hope to someday write a play that Molly could perform in. Indeed, this is what came to pass and from that moment on, they both played a key role in each other’s lives.   Although a lot of the reminiscences occur in the...

THE AUTOGRAPH MAN by Zadie Smith   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2002, Dublin Longlist 2004, Women’s Prize Finalist 2003   Date Read: June 1, 2023   I have been so excited to read this novel and it being my first foray into Zadie Smith’s work, a double excitement. I was so disappointed. While I can see the draw for many readers and critics alike, this just wasn’t my cup of tea. The prologue was incredibly promising and I was drawn in by Smith’s witty insights, nuanced understanding of juvenile love/hate and a tolerant father hell-bent on having these boys enjoy the day, knowing this will be an indelible memory for them.   The remainder, however, when readers fast-forward to the late twenties in these boys’ lives, but most notably from Alex-Li’s point of view, I felt the entire remainder was tedious, wandering and (dare I say it?) pointless. Alex lost his father on that indelible day from his childhood and also met another boy, Joseph, who would have a profound impact ...

THE COLOUR by Rose Tremain   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2005, Women’s Prize Finalist 2004   Date Read: May 12, 2023   The Colour is almost an epic in mini form. Joseph Blackwell, leaving behind a shady past and the death of a woman he had ravished, marries Harriet Salt in England and they immediately set sail to New Zealand. There, both Joseph and Harriet are determined to begin their lives again on cheap land and rich dreams. Arriving with them is Lillian, Joseph’s mother.    Harriet is a unique woman in that she has an adventurous spirit and is just as excited as her husband to begin this new life. After their temporary home is built and they have all settled into its meager confines, Harriet slowly begins to realize that she does not love Joseph nor will she ever. The same is true for Joseph. Nevertheless they persevere on their farm.   While Joseph is fishing one day, he observes the “colour,” gold on the banks of the stream that crosses their land. He...

WEATHER by Jenny Offill   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2021, Women’s Prize Finalist 2020   Date Read: April 26, 2023   Weather isn’t so much a novel as a series of vignettes that fit together to form a narrative about a woman struggling with career, marriage, motherhood and a brother who is struggling with addiction. Lizzie is intelligent, observant and most definitely not a librarian, a job for which she is grateful but is judged by her coworkers because she doesn’t have a degree in library science. Being less immersed in the library world than her peers, she is an amateur psychologist, delving into people’s psyches in her spare time.   In addition to her husband and son, Lizzie’s brother, Henry, is a recovering drug addict. He has recently fallen in love with Katherine and after losing his own apartment, they move in together. After heading down the road of matrimony and parenthood, Henry begins to overreact to the pressures of fatherhood and begins using again t...

THE VANISHING HALF by Brit Bennett   Award: Goodreads Winner 2020   Nominations: Aspen Words Longlist 2021, BookTube Finalist 2021, Carnegie Longlist 2021, Dublin Longlist 2021, National Book Longlist 2020, NY Times Finalist 2020, Women’s Prize Finalist 2021   Date Read: February 3, 2023   Two Black twins with aspirations for a bigger life decide to leave the small town of Mallard for the big city of New Orleans. Although this had been Desiree’s dream forever, once they had actually left home, Stella was the one who was determined to make it. The harsh realities of city life began to wear down Desiree’s dream, but Stella adopted her sisters’ dream and ran with it.   Keeping in mind this story began in the 1950s, the difference between black and white lives were still profoundly different. Not much has changed now except Americans love to say racism is dead while it still happens all around us. I would think it was almost easier back then because you knew what it...

PURPLE HIBISCUS by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2004, Women’s Prize Finalist 2004   Date Read: January 15, 2023   The father of a prestigious Nigerian family attempts to maintain control over a family slipping away from his authoritarianism, while the country around them spins out of control. Papa Eugene has always been abusive toward his family, all in the name of God. His warped Catholic beliefs cause him to excessively punish his wife and children – from broken fingers and bones to a beating that results in Beatrice’s, his wife’s, miscarriage. As the novel progresses, his violence becomes even more egregious and puts Kambili in the hospital, clinging to life and causes yet another miscarriage. To muddy the waters and emphasize that no one person is all good nor all bad, Papa Eugene is also overwhelmingly generous to his community.   Jaja and Kambili have learned how to be invisible, to swallow their rage, to never – even for a moment – l...

LADDER OF YEARS by Anne Tyler   Nomination: Women’s Prize Finalist 1996   Date Read: December 29, 2022   You know how make-up tutorials that look like a hot mess say “trust the process.” And then they end up stunning. I would have to say the same about Ladder Of Years. While the story was engrossing and the characters rich and vivid, I couldn’t understand Delia’s motives for walking away. It was never quite clear. Yet, I know that there is nothing more invisible than a middle aged woman.   Delia is married to Sam, a doctor, and has three children – Susan, Ramsay and Carroll. Her kids are all in their late teens and early twenties and on the precipice of starting their own lives. As Delia begins to realize she is no longer needed – by her kids or her husband – a chance encounter at a grocery store begins an affair with a neighbor. Although never consummated, Delia relished being desired, seen and sought after. Who doesn’t?   Realizing this grocery store man is no...