A Word About Awards

ME BEFORE YOU by Jojo Moyes   Nomination: Goodreads Finalist 2013   Date Read: November 8, 2014   From Kirkus Reviews: “A young woman finds herself while caring for an embittered quadriplegic in this second novel from British author Moyes (The Last Letter from Your Lover, 2011).   Louisa has no apparent ambitions. At 26, she lives with her working-class family (portrayed with rollicking energy) in a small English town, carries on a ho-hum relationship with her dull boyfriend and works at a local cafe. Then, the cafe closes, and she must find a job fast to ease her family’s financial stress. Enter Will Traynor, a former world traveler, ladies’ man and business tycoon who’s been a quadriplegic since a traffic accident two years ago. Will’s magistrate mother hires Louisa at a relatively hefty salary to be Will’s caregiver and keep him company for the next six months—easygoing Nathan gives him his medical care and physiotherapy—but really Will’s mother wants Louisa to wa...

MAKE YOUR HOME AMONG STRANGERS by Jennine Capo   Nominations: Center For Fiction Longlist 2015   Date Read: January 19, 2016   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Lizet Ramirez, the first in her Cuban immigrant family to attend college, must learn to navigate academia’s culture of privilege alone as her family breaks apart. It's Thanksgiving Day 1999. Overwhelmed with the microaggressions inherent in being one of the few nonwhite students at an elite East Coast university, Lizet saves her work-study wages for a surprise trip home to Little Havana, Florida, to see her family. But this is also the same day that Ariel Hernandez, a 5-year-old Cuban boy who saw his mother die on a raft as they escaped to America, arrives in the state. Advocating for Ariel’s well-being quickly becomes Lizet’s mother’s raison d’être. The twin narratives play off each other in a masterful way: the battle for Ariel to remain in America echoes Lizet’s own story of the breakup of her family and her formation of ...

MY YEAR OF REST & RELAXATION by Ottessa Moshfegh   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2020   Date Read: June 20, 2019   From Kirkus Reviews: “A  young New York woman figures there’s nothing wrong with existence that a fistful of prescriptions and months of napping wouldn’t fix. Moshfegh’s prickly fourth book ( Homesick for Another World , 2017, etc.) is narrated by an unnamed woman who’s decided to spend a year “hibernating.” She has a few conventional grief issues. (Her parents are both dead, and they’re much on her mind.) And if she’s not mentally ill, she’s certainly severely maladjusted socially. (She quits her job at an art gallery in obnoxious, scatological fashion.) But Moshfegh isn’t interested in grief or mental illness per se. Instead, she means to explore whether there are paths to living that don’t involve traditional (and wearying) habits of consumption, production, and relationships. To highlight that point, most of the people in the narrator's life are of...

THE GIRLS by Emma Cline   Nominations: Center For Fiction Finalist 2016, Dublin Longlist 2018, Goodreads Finalist 2016, LA Times Finalist 2016   Date Read: March 4, 2017   From Kirkus Reviews: “An award-winning young author uses Charles Manson and his followers as the inspiration for her first novel.   Evie Boyd is in a city park the first time she sees the girls. With their bare feet and long hair and secondhand dresses they offer a vision of life beyond her suburban, upper-middle-class experience. “Like royalty in exile,” they suggest the possibility of another world, a world separate from the wreckage of her parents’ marriage, from the exacting lessons gleaned from teen magazines, from the unending effort of trying to be appealing. What 14-year-old Evie can’t see that day is that these girls aren’t any freer than she is. Shifting between the present and the summer of 1969, this novel explores the bitter dregs of 1960s counterculture. Narrating from middle age, Evi...

SOPHIE’S WORLD by Jostein Gaarder   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 1996, Dublin Longlist 1997   Date Read: July 21, 2005   From Kirkus Reviews: “ What if we were all just characters from a book written by Major Albert Knag as a philosophical present for his daughter Hilde's 15th birthday? This is the question that Sophie Amundsen must ask as she tackles the history of philosophy in what begins as a personalized correspondence course for which she never signed up. Coming home from school one day, Sophie finds questions in her mailbox, followed by typewritten pages about philosophy. She also gets strange birthday cards apparently intended for a Hilde Miller Knag in Lillesand, whom she has never met. Through these unusual circumstances, Sophie embarks on the study of philosophy with Alberto Knox—a middle-aged mystery man in a beret—only to discover that she is nothing more than the fictional heroine of a novel (called Sophie's World) about the history of philosophy. Hilde, on ...

THE AGE OF MIRACLES by Karen Thompson Walker   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2014, Goodreads Finalist 2012   Date Read: July 11, 2012   From Kirkus Reviews: “In Walker’s stunning debut, a young California girl coming-of-age in a dystopian near future confronts the inevitability of change on the most personal level as life on earth withers.   Sixth-grader Julia, whose mother is a slightly neurotic former actress and whose father is an obstetrician, is living an unremarkable American middle-class childhood. She rides the school bus and takes piano lessons; she has a mild crush on a boy named Seth whose mother has cancer; she enjoys sleepovers with her best friend Hanna, who happens to be a Mormon. Then one October morning there’s a news report that scientists have discovered a slowing of the earth’s rotation, adding minutes to each day and night. After initial panic, the human tendency to adapt sets in even as the extra minutes increase into hours. Most citizens go...

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA by Arthur Golden   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 1999   Date Read: January 31, 2003   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Cherry blossom delicate, with images as carefully sculpted as bonsai, this tale of the life of a renowned geisha, one of the last flowers of a kind all but eliminated by WW II, marks an auspicious, unusual debut. Japan is already changing, becoming industrialized and imperialistic, when in 1929 young Chiyo's fisherman father sells her to a house in Kyoto's famous Gion district. The girl's gray- eyed beauty is startling even in childhood, so much so that her training is impeded by the jealousy of her house's primary geisha, the popular, petty Hatsumomo. Caught trying to run away, Chiyo loses her trainee status until taken under the wing of Mameha, a bitter rival of Hatsumomo. Chiyo flourishes with Mameha as her guide, soon receiving her geisha name, Sayuri, and having her mentor skillfully arrange the two main events vital to a geisha's succe...