There are ten of them in the limo’s plush passenger bay, the eight remaining soldiers of Bravo squad, their PA escort Major Mac, and the movie producer Albert Ratner, who at the moment is hunkered down in BlackBerry position. Counting poor dead Shroom and the grievously wounded Lake there are two Silver Stars and eight Bronze among them, all ten of which defy coherent explanation. “What were you thinking during the battle?” the pretty TV reporter in Tulsa asked, and Billy tried. God knows he tried, he never stops trying, but it keeps slipping and sliding, corkscrewing away, the thing of it, the it, the ineffable whatever.

“I’m not sure,” he answered. “Mainly it was just this sort of road rage feeling. Everything was blowing up and they were shooting our guys and I just went for it, I really wasn’t thinking at all.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (FEB 27, 2014)

It is, perhaps, a fortuitous accident that I turned the last pages of Ben Fountain’s absolutely brilliant novel during Memorial Day…a day when rhetoric about courage, support, sacrifice, and patriotism overflows.

Billy Lynn – the eponymous hero of this book – is a genuine American hero. He and his fellow Bravo Squad members decimated an insurgency – caught on film by an embedded Fox News crew — and became overnight sensations in a nation starved for good news about Iraq. They are brought home for a media-intensive “Victory Tour” – in cities that happen to lie in an electoral swing state — to reinvigorate support for the war. We meet them at the end of that tour, on a rainy Thanksgiving, hosted by America’s Team, The Dallas Cowboys.

They are, in more ways than one, anonymous to an American public; their reinvented names are meant to erase their identity (Major Mac, Mango, Lodes, Billy, etc.) In the fabled Texas Stadium, their faces are interspersed on a JumboTron screen with ads for Chevy cars and Cowboy-brand toaster ovens and high-capacity ice-makers.

Surrounded by so-called patriots, Billy and his friends are bombarded with words stripped of meaning: “rerrRist, currj, freedom, nina leven, Bush, values, support.” Billy reflects: “They hate our freedoms? Yo, they hate our actual guts! Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity.”

The people that surround him are insatiably expecting Billy to impart wisdom in sound bites. Amid a world of plenty, multi-millionaires who have never put themselves in harm’s way let loose a stream of platitudes but Billy “truly envies these people, the luxury of terror as a talking point…” At another point, he reflects, “Never do Americans sound so much like a bunch of drunks as when they are celebrating at the end of their national anthem.”

Nineteen-year-old Billy – still a virgin, with major lust going on for a Cowboys cheerleader who believes that cheerleading is a “spiritual calling” – has the necessary replies to inane questions down pat. He is as real as he can be, as American as he can be.

And in this way, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk –marketed as a satire and blurbed as a new Catch-22 – is anything but. There is nothing surreal about it; in fact, it is an entirely apt portrayal of the times we live in. I thought this book was absolutely brilliant – well-crafted, filled with insight and wisdom, and heart-wrenching. In fact, I’d go so far as to call it the quintessential American novel, asking that all-important question: who are we and what do we want to become?

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 506 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ecco; First Edition edition (May 1, 2012)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Ben Fountain
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:

Bibliography:

• Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (2007)
• Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012)

“[Americans] are the most turbulent, unpeaceful, least-contented people[…] Clearly there is nothing less suited to meditation than democracy. You will never find, as in aristocracies, one class that sits back in its own comfort and another that will not stir itself because it despairs of ever improving its status. In America, everyone is in a state of agitation: some to attain power, others to grab wealth, and when they cannot move, they rock.”

Book Review:

Review by Mike Frechette (APR 23, 2010)

The quote above makes Americans seem certifiably insane. And perhaps this is how many Americans appeared to French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville during his now famous visit to America’s shores in the early nineteenth century. Though not wildly popular for many years, Tocqueville’s masterpiece Democracy in America has become standard university reading and has been heralded as the greatest, most prophetic assessment of America ever produced. Scholars have poured over its pages, and multiple biographers have attempted to capture the man who penned its eloquent insightful lines. Most recently, award-winning author Peter Carey has created an imaginative historical fiction based on the life of Tocqueville and his fruitful time in the new nation.

The novel is called Parrot and Olivier in America, a title whose drabness thankfully does not match the excellence of the storytelling. The structure is simple, with chapters that alternate between the first-person viewpoints of the two main characters, Parrot and Olivier. Parrot, so nicknamed because of his ability to imitate, grows up the lower-class son of an itinerant printer until authorities arrest his father for counterfeiting. Thereafter raised by a one-armed marquis, Parrot is forced to spend his adult life as the marquis’s servant instead of becoming an artist as he envisioned in childhood.

Olivier, representing Tocqueville, grows up in post-revolutionary France as a child of a declining aristocracy. With democracy on the rise, the political world has increasingly less space and tolerance for the social class to which Olivier belongs. Like Tocqueville, Olivier journeys to America as an adult to study its penal system. And Parrot, whose marquis has a vaguely defined relationship with Olivier’s mother, is sent along to be Olivier’s transcriber and spy. What develops is, as one might suspect, a friendship that could only be possible in a brave, new nation where social class has been turned on its head in favor of industriousness, the accumulation of wealth, and unprecedented social mobility.

Having already been published abroad, early reviews noted that this newest publication continues Carey’s best traits as a writer. Most novels contain maybe a handful of memorable, quote-worthy lines. However, entire passages in Parrot and Olivier in America will strike readers with their eloquence and truthfulness, particularly American readers who discern themselves in Olivier’s assessment of the new nation and its inhabitants. At one point he thinks, “It is strange in New York and Philadelphia, to see the feverish enthusiasm which accompanies Americans’ pursuit of prosperity and the way they are ceaselessly tormented by the vague fear that they have failed to choose the shortest route to achieve it.” Like Tocqueville, Olivier finds much to celebrate about America, but he remains critical of the nation’s obsession with accumulating wealth and its potential to prevent the development of high culture. The destructive commercialization of art in America is a theme that preoccupies a significant portion of the story. Whereas Parrot takes advantage of the ready market, Oliver worries that such commercialization will lead to a culture completely dictated by the tastes of the middle class.

In addition to writing well, Carey should also be praised for keeping the story at the forefront of the novel. Parrot and Olivier in America is somewhat reminiscent of Sinclair’s The Jungle, another novel about a young America with political ideology at its center. While The Jungle deteriorates into an ideological manifesto, though, Parrot and Olivier never loses sight of the plot, characters, and their personal struggle. America and political ideologies are certainly additional characters in Carey’s book, but only as a backdrop to the more engaging, personal narratives of Parrot and Olivier.

In short, this novel offers much to be enjoyed, even for those unfamiliar with Carey or Tocqueville. The alternating inner monologues of Parrot and Olivier are never dull, and Carey clearly recognizes the importance of humor in storytelling. Witty, snobbish criticisms come easy for a French aristocrat surveying a provincial new nation. After dining at the home of one of his new acquaintances, Olivier remarks, “That night I dined as the Americans dined, that is, I had a vast amount of ham. There was no wine at all and no one seemed to think there should be.” Skillful plot management also stands out as one of Carey’s strengths. Much like a Dickens novel, characters from the beginning surprise the reader by unexpectedly reappearing later on and proving to be essential catalysts for plot and character development. In a novel about realizing great expectations, underdogs like Parrot discover a place where their own volition leads to success and is not stamped out by a rigid social hierarchy. In this sense, Australian-born writer Peter Carey has recreated the classic rags-to-riches American tale. Certainly there is much to criticize in America as Olivier points out, but for the likes of Parrot, at least “there is no tyranny.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 83 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; 1 edition (April 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Mike Frechette
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Peter Carey (check out the Granta interview)
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Theft His Illegal Self

Bibliography:

• The Fat Man in History: Stories (1974)
• War Crimes: Stories (1979)
• Bliss (1981)
• Illywhacker (1985)
• Oscar and Lucinda (1988)
• Exotic Pleasures: Stories (1990)
• The Tax Inspector (1991)
• The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994)
• Jack Maggs (1998)
• True History of the Kelly Gang (2001)
• My Life as a Fake (2003)
• Theft: A Love Story (2006)
• His Illegal Self (2008)
• Parrot and Olivier in America (2010)
• The Chemistry of Tears (May 2012)

Young Readers:

• The Big Bazoohley (1995)

Nonfiction (sort of):

• 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001; 2008)
• Wrong About Japan (2005)

Related:

• Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter Carey’s Fiction by Anthony J. Hassell

Movies from Books:

• Bliss (1985)
• Oscar and Lucinda (1997)

“North Koreans learned to swallow their pride and hold their noses. They picked kernels of undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals. Shipyard workers developed a technique by which they scraped the bottoms of the cargo holds where food had been stored, then spread the foul-smelling gunk on the pavement to dry so that they could collect from it tiny grains of uncooked rice and other edibles.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (MAR 27, 2010)

There is much earthy wisdom in the saying: “One death is a tragedy; a thousand is a statistic.” By narrating the life stories of six North Korean defectors and their daily struggles, author Barbara Demick underscores this point beautifully. Her moving book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, lets us look at the human angle behind the news headlines.

We hear about North Korea and its repressive regime in the news but it is through these six stories that you can tell the true impact of the totalitarian state—one that President Bush famously labeled one of the three “axes of evil”—on ordinary people.

The participants are drawn from Chongjin, a town in the Northeast that once was home to thriving industries that are now in a severe state of disrepair. Chongjin is also a better representative of North Korea than the showcase capital city, Pyongyang.

The assortment of interviewees is mixed and represents a good cross-section of North Korean society. There’s Mi-ran a young kindergarten teacher whose father’s roots trace back to South Korea and whose family is therefore stained. “The only mobility in the class system was downward. Family status is hereditary. Stained people are called beulsun—tainted blood or impure,” Bemick writes. Mi-ran narrates the details of her first love and how as a teenager, she and a neighborhood boy, Jun-sang, went for long walks after dinner in the dark. The bright Jun-sang eventually heads for college in Pyongyang to study science and the two continue their romance from afar.

Then there’s Mrs. Song, a party faithful who keeps at her job in a local factory till the very end even when the wages and the work have dried up. Their narratives and the others’ are set in the 1990s—a time when North Korea fell off the map in terms of development and meeting basic human needs. “North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s,” Demick, a correspondent for the LA Times, writes. “With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea’s creakily inefficient economy collapsed.”

Demick’s interviewees detail the slow decline of the country and this is extremely tragic to bear. The confluence of many events lead to severe shortages of supplies and eventually to famine. Demick, through the voices of her interviewees, narrates the heart-wrenching details of how famine affects families. Each one of the interviewees is affected. Mrs. Song loses her husband and her son to famine—in the end when she is forced to choose between food and medicine for her son, it is hard not to get choked up as you read. It is also hard to ignore the fact that when America was in the roaring 90s, millions of people in North Korea were scraping bark and eating sawdust to survive. These images are searing and will remain in my mind forever. “By 1998, an estimated 600,000 to 2 million North Koreans had died as a result of the famine, as much as 10 percent of the population,” Demick writes. “Between 1996 and 2005, North Korea would receive $2.4 billion worth of food aid, much of it from the United States.” But only minimal food reached where it should have gone. Most of it ended up in military stockpiles or sold on the black market.

The famine forced young mothers into prostitution desperate to get food for their children. All they were looking for was a bag of noodles or a few sweet potatoes as payment, Demick writes. Elders skipped food insisting that the young ones be fed first. This lead many older folks to die and thousands of children were orphaned. Kim Hyuck, one of the interviewees, was a “wandering swallow” – one of many homeless orphans left behind by the famine.

Nothing to Envy also gives us details of what ordinary life is like in North Korea. Everything, including shoes and clothes, were provided by the government. Major purchases like watches or record players—had to be approved. There is propaganda everywhere you see—television sets are rigged so only one national channel is streamed. Secret police conduct random checks to make sure this procedure is enforced in houses. Even the math problems are worded as propaganda. “Eight boys and nine girls are singing anthems in praise of Kim Il-sung. How many children are singing in total?” is one example.

The book’s title comes from a song that all North Korean children are taught—it sings the praise of the government. Propaganda posters in Pyongyang declare: “Long Live Kim Il-sung; Kim Jong-Il, Sun of the 21st Century; Let’s Live Our Own Way; We Will Do as the Party Tells Us; We Have Nothing to Envy in the World.”

Nothing to Envy shows us just how much irony is loaded in that last statement. A country that has been in the dark for so long both literally and figuratively, might not realize just how much it does have to envy—not just in terms of material comforts but in essential human rights. This is a moving and important book—a must-read for anyone who cares about the plight of fellow world citizens in a country that most of us know little about. Demick’s remarkable book reminds us it’s time we sat up and paid attention.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 62 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau; 1st Edition edition (December 29, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AMAZON PAGE:	Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Barbara Demick
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee

Bibliography:

• Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood (1996)
• Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (December 2009)

“You know what they say about life and making other plans.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (MAR 16, 2010)

So Much for That by Lionel Shriver is a timely novel about the dire straits of our country’s healthcare system. It is also a diatribe about our country’s policies of taxation, what the average Joe gets in return for his taxes, and the government’s rip-off of average tax payers. The novel does not spare the evils of the banking industry, corporate America, or the wealthy as they are vilified for creating an environment that harms poor workers and the middle class.

Shep had spent years building up his handyman business. It flourished, and when he sold it he received a million dollars. Naturally, close to one third of the gross payment went to the feds. Shep’s dream was to use his money for what he called”‘the Afterlife,” his plan to settle on a remote island where he could live the rest of his days cheaply and well, utilizing the proceeds from his business. He hoped that his wife and son would join him but that remained up in the air. Meanwhile, until he could accomplish his dream of the Afterlife, he continued to work at his business, for the man to whom he’d sold it.

Just days before Shep plans to leave for an island near Zanzibar to spend the rest of his days, his wife, Glynis, is diagnosed with a rare and incurable type of cancer – peritoneal mesothelioma. It is caused by exposure to asbestos and Glynis figures that this exposure occured when she was an art student. She is angry at the world and not a pleasant woman. Her anger is not caused solely by the cancer; Glynis was always a difficult and angry person.

Shep doesn’t realize that his medical benefits have been reduced to a pittance by the new owner of the company. Not only must he stay in network, but the “Usual and Customary Costs” seem to be based on an arbitrary formula that was developed in 1959. Trying to decipher the hospital bills is nerve-wracking. He can’t understand the myriad codes and all the charges. Reimbursement is minimal and appears to be based on what charges “should be,” not what they are in the real world. The costs of medication are phenomenal and Shep watches his money fund account begin to dwindle from its original $700,000+ on a downward spiral. He also becomes more cognizant of all the ads for medications, doctors and insurance and realizes that they are all propping one another up at his expense.

Shep’s best friend, Jackson, has a daughter named Flicka with familial dysautonomia (FD), a hereditary disease found in people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Flicka’s life is difficult and she manages to live it with grace and humility. Flicka lives with horrific symptoms. “She did mind waking up with puffy red eyes halfway to conjunctivitis before breakfast. She did mind not being able to talk right when she had plenty to say. She did mind drooling all the time, and sweating all the time.” “She might have been grateful, too, that they’d given up on the chest drainage sessions that had tyrannized her childhood: the tube worked unpleasantly down her nose, the pump’s sickening gurgle and slurp, the grotesque accumulation of mucous in the waste container.” Despite all of this, Flicka is resilient for her sixteen years. However, she’s reached a point where she’s thinking of not going on. The amount of effort, cost, and personal pain that it takes to live is becoming too much for her.

Meanwhile, Glynis is fighting with her life, for her life. She is difficult to live with, nasty and demanding but refuses to let go despite every odd against her. The comparison of Flicka and Glynis is both poignant and profound.

The book, at times, reads like a polemic agains the healthcare system and corporate greed, disguised as a novel. It does make some very salient and timely points. I just wish that more of the book was about Flicka, Glynis and their families, and less about the history of the pharmaceutical, health insurance, medical, corporate and banking systems in the United States. Because this book is so pedantic, it tends to lose its connection with the reader.

The parts that are about Glynis and Flicka are well-written and painful to read. Not only is the reader privy to the agony and struggle of the chronically and terminally ill, we also see the pain and agony that beset their loved ones. This can be a hard novel to read because of its direct and graphic medical descriptions. It is a book for our times and one that is important because of its subject matter and scope.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 50 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper (March 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Lionel Shriver
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of: We Need To Talk About Kevin

Bibliography:

• The Female of the Species (1987)
• Checker and the Derailleurs (1988)
• The Bleeding Heart (1990)
• Game Control (1994)
• A Perfectly Good Family (1996)
• Double Fault (1997)
• We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) 
• The Post-Birthday World (2007)
• So Much For That (2010)
• The New Republic (2012)
• Big Brother (June 2013)

Movies from books:

• We Need To Talk About Kevin (2012)

“Jerry didn’t want to think about credit cards now, seeing how he and his wife were about to go on a weekend vacation. Instead he looked out over the scrubby field scattered with locusts and maples, and dotted with the storage sheds, rusted hulks of defunct cranes, and piles of deteriorating I-beams and concrete blocks. Way up beyond the white pines, out of sight, was the open, hilly land full of bristly mosses, ground birds, deer, and wild turkeys, even.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (DEC 4, 2009)

The story of the slow collapse of Michigan’s economy is well known by now. Built around the automotive industry and a core base of manufacturing, the economy started a slow decline as those manufacturing jobs moved out of state. The state now has an astounding unemployment rate of 14.8%.

The characters in American Salvage, a memorable set of short stories nominated for the National Book Award this year, are all victims of the state’s slow decline. The author Bonnie Jo Campbell narrates stories in which some of the characters have taken to meth or alcohol while still others cling on to jobs that don’t pay much.

In “Fuel for the Millennium,” an older Hal Little has stocked up on at least half a dozen fifty-five-gallon blue-plastic drums of gas, in preparation for what he is convinced will be the end of the world, Y2K. He buys into conspiracy theories as way of clinging on to what little he has: “Hal hoped further that accepting both Jesus and the millennium problem would help Americans recognize the way that banks and Jews and the government were plotting together to deny the impending Y2K disaster,” Campbell writes. In the story, Hal meets a younger couple on one of his service repair rounds—customers who don’t buy into his theories. Campbell beautifully brings out the dichotomy of the two mindsets with the story.

In yet another wonderful story, “Yard Man,” Campbell paints the story of a jobless man who spends his time trying to construct something useful out of industrial scrap. His wife, who is from a richer and higher social status, is quickly tiring of putting her dreams on hold, waiting for things to turn around for them.

My favorite story in American Salvage is “The Inventor, 1972,” in which a hunter with a checkered past hits a teenaged girl and works hard for her survival. What the reader slowly finds out in absolutely brilliant writing is that the two are connected to each other by means of an earlier tragic accident.

American Salvage was nominated for the National Book Award this year. Other nominations, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders; and Let the Great World Spin, include books by first-generation Americans of Pakistani and Irish descent respectively. Two of the five books nominated in the fiction category, American Salvage and Lark & Termite, are painted in the America of destitute poverty—its characters are trying their best to eke out an existence despite overwhelming odds.

It is hard not to view this selection of nominations as a snapshot of America now—a country trying to redefine its place on the world stage in the midst of powerful cultural forces. Together, these books show that even if the promise of the American dream remains elusive for many, the nation’s citizens remain gritty and determined as ever.

Back to American Salvage, in the story “The Trespasser,” for example, the smell of meth hangs in the air as a ghost. A teenaged protagonist recognizes the smell: “she has walked through the ghost of this crime and felt its chill—in the hallways of her school, in the aisles of the convenience store, and in the gazes of men and women at the Lake Michigan beach where she and her friends swim,” Campbell writes. Despite this intense hopeless desperation, the characters in American Salvage show amazing courage and a determination to make the best of their circumstances. That they really don’t have much of a choice but to do so, is almost beside the point.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (December 14, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bonnie Jo Campbell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Our review of:  Once Upon a River More books set in Michigan: Real Life and Liars by Kristina Riggle Second Hand by Michael Zadoorian

Bibliography:

• Women and Other Animals (1999)
• Q Road (2002)
• American Salvage (April 2009)
• Once Upon a River (July 2011)

“My father used to say he decided to leave America when he noticed that the poor had all begun to look alike.

He didn’t mean their faces, and he didn’t mean only the poor of the United States. He meant poor people everywhere.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (OCT 22, 2009)

The narrator of Theroux’s post-apocalyptic novel, Makepeace Hatfield (who lives up to the name), is the last survivor of an immigrant Siberian community – a place Makepeace’s British parents had come to to escape the material world. But the rescue of a starving waif awakens her longing for companionship, love and civilization, spurring the road trip that drives the novel.

Theroux’s vast, harsh landscape complements Makepeace’s lonely, hardscrabble, survivor’s life, and elements of stark beauty parallel human vulnerability and hope. The journey in search of others shares some elements with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and will attract the same readers. It’s a page turner of a road novel without a lot of faith in human altruism, but with plenty invested in communal ingenuity and individual resourcefulness.

Makepeace, disillusioned and battered, has a deep inner resilience that relies on heart for its strength. Theroux shapes Makepeace’s character in language that illuminates the relationship between what we tell ourselves and what actually is and the hope that bridges the gap.

Editor’s note: Far North has recently been selected as a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. A surprising nomination given that the book is set in Siberia (but “written in American idiom” and  the author  was born in Kampala, Uganda, and now lives in London. To qualify for this “American” book award, the author must have an American citizenship, which one assumes he does, since he is the son of the American writer Paul Theroux. (See more on the other selections for this year’s finalists in this interesting The New York Times article.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 40 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (June 9, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Marcel Theroux
EXTRAS:	Excerpt (scroll down)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More post-apocalypse novels: O-Zone by Paul Theroux Our American King by David Lozell Snakeskin Road by James Braziel Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood The Pesthouse by Jim Crace The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Bibliography:

• A Stranger in the Earth 1997)
• The Confession of Mycroft Holmes (2000)
• The Paperchase (2002)
• A Blow to the Heart (2006)
• Far North (2009)
• Strange Bodies (February 2014)