Recent reading update:
Continuing to dip into Daniel Mason’s North Woods. Each chapter, or episode, could stand on its own. It’s a novel worth taking my time over.
Raced through two crime fiction novels, both with deep, dark looks at aspects of the human character. S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed is a fantastic novel of a Virginia small town Black sheriff dealing with racism and corruption. It was definitely worth waiting for my turn to come up on the library hold list.
Scheduled for release this spring is the latest Charlie Parker novel by John Connolly. This series is a combination of noir detective, horror based on old folklore and sharp looks at shallow hatred among the losers in society. The Instruments of Darkness is indeed dark. I had to put it aside at one point because of what happened to one victim. But the rest of the story is another successful narrative in which Connolly continues to mix genres into one strong continuing story.
Both the Cosby and Connolly novels show me once again that being a genre snob is losing out on great fiction. And, it’s like the late Peter Straub told me once in an interview: That he chose horror as his genre in which to write because it allowed him freedom to write about a great many things.
It’s the depth of the story and what it has to say about the human condition that makes a work of fiction worthwhile. Which is why I still seek out literary fiction as well.
What book has captured your attention lately?
The following books are scheduled for release today. These links are from Indiebound.org but please consider purchasing from our DK colleague DebtorsPrison at The Literate Lizard.
From the publisher:
On a cold February afternoon, Stella catches sight of a man she hasn't seen for many years, but instantly recognises. Or thinks she does. At the same moment on the other side of the globe, in the middle of a crowd of Chinese New Year revellers, Jake realises that things are becoming dangerous.
They know nothing of one another's existence, but both Stella and Jake flee their lives: Jake in search of a place so remote it doesn't appear on any map, and Stella for a destination in Scotland, the significance of which only her sister, Nina, will understand.
From the publisher:
Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, is found dead in a snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agnes's Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its young wards a grounding in the gift--an inherited ability to tune into the voices and sounds of the past.
When she dies, Selda's gift passes down to her grandson Wolf, who must make sense of her legacy, and learn to live with the newly unleashed voices in his head. Ambitious and exhilarating, The Variations is a novel of startling originality about music and the difficulty--or impossibility--of living with the past.
From the publisher:
Told through the alternating perspectives of five childhood friends from the same housing estate in England, I See Buildings Fall like Lightning is a story about friendship, place, loss, addiction and the ways in which lives, minds, and bodies can be limited by material conditions; it also speaks powerfully to the ways in which humor, loyalty, and family can bestow meaning and life even in the toughest circumstances.
From the publisher:
It's spring 1999, and 25-year-old Lia Cope and her prickly 73-year-old grandmother, Mineko, are sharing a bedroom in Curtain, Texas, the ranching town where Lia grew up and Mineko began her life as a Japanese war bride. Both women are at a turning point: Mineko, long widowed, moved in with her son and daughter-in-law after a suspicious fire destroyed the Cope family ranch house, while Lia, an architect with a promising career in Austin, has unexpectedly returned under circumstances she refuses to explain.
Though Lia never felt especially close to her grandmother, the two grow close sharing late-night conversations. Mineko tells stories of her early life in Japan, of the war that changed everything, and of her two great loves: a man named Akio Sato and an abandoned Japanese country estate they called the Turtle House, where their relationship took root.
From the publisher:
Inspired, in part, by Moira McCavana's own family history in Bilbao, these inventive short stories inhabit the Spanish Basque Country in the fifty years following the Spanish Civil War.
In these stories, characters struggle with allegiances both political and personal, their attempts at independence coinciding with the region's growing nationalist fervor.
From the publisher:
The novel that launched the career of one of Australia's greatest writers, following the doomed infatuations of a young, single mother, enthralled by the excesses of Melbourne's late-70s counterculture.
Set in Australia in the late 1970s, Monkey Grip follows single mother and writer Nora as she navigates the tumultuous cityscape of Melbourne's bohemian underground, often with her young daughter Gracie in tow. When Nora falls in love with the flighty Javo, she becomes snared in the web of his addiction. And as their tenuous relationship disintegrates, Nora struggles to wean herself off a love that feels impossible to live without.
From the publisher:
A rediscovered classic, and the only known novel by Black abolitionist and political exile Louis Timagène Houat, The Maroons is a fervid account of slavery and escape on nineteenth-century Réunion Island.
Frême is a young African man forced into slavery on Réunion, an island east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Plagued by memories of his childhood sweetheart, a white woman named Marie, Frême seeks her out--but when they are persecuted for their love, the two flee into the forest. There they meet other "maroons" formerly enslaved people and courageous rebels who have chosen freedom at the risk of their lives.
Now available in English for the first time,
From the publisher:
A freaky tale of isolation and the porous membranes between us, Rebecca Gisler's slim novel renders a collapsing world with equal parts aversion, fascination, and tenderness--for readers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sayaka Murata.
At an age when she'd rather be making her own way in the world, an unnamed young woman finds herself moving to a small town at the seaside to care for her uncle. He's a disabled war veteran with questionable habits, prone to drinking, gorging, and hoarding--not to mention the occasional excursion down into the plumbing, where he might disappear for days at a time.
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