“You put together two things that have not been put together before; and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Pilâtre de Rozier, the first man to ascend in a fire balloon, also planned to be the first to fly the Channel from France to England. To this end he constructed a new kind of aerostat, with a hydrogen balloon on top, to give greater lift, and a fire balloon beneath, to give better control. He put these two things together, and on the 15th of June 1785, when the winds seemed favourable, he made his ascent from the Pas-de-Calais. The brave new contraption rose swiftly, but before it had even reached the coastline, flame appeared at the top of the hydrogen balloon, and the whole, hopeful aerostat, now looking to one observer like a heavenly gas lamp, fell to earth, killing both pilot and co-pilot.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  FEB 10, 2014)

Julian Barnes’ memoir of grief for the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh in 2008 after a thirty-year relationship, must be one of the most moving tributes ever paid to a loved one, but also the most oblique. So let’s start with something simple, a photograph. Look up the title in the Daily Mail of London, partly for the marvelously-titled review “Lifted by Love, Grounded by Grief” by Craig Brown, but mostly for the photograph that accompanies it. Julian is seated. Pat stands behind him, her arms around his shoulders, her chin resting on the crown of his head. Her love is obvious, she whom Barnes refers to as “The heart of my life; the life of my heart.” But equally striking is the unusual vertical composition. Pat, who on the ground was a small woman beside the gangling Barnes, here appears above him, like a guardian angel reaching down.

Which is relevant, because Barnes’ book is about verticality, about love and loss, and incidentally about photography. The first of its three sections, “The Sin of Height,” is essentially an essay. It begins with three ascents by balloon: the English adventurer Colonel Fred Burnaby in 1882, the French actress Sarah Bernhardt in 1876, and a French entrepreneur named Félix Tournachon in 1863. Tournachon was to become one of the most famous early photographers under the name Nadar; it was he who took the iconic photographs of Bernhardt, and it was in his studio in 1874 that the first Impressionist exhibition was held. Barnes’ second section, “On the Level,” is typical of many of his short stories (and also longer works such as Flaubert’s Parrot and Arthur & George), starting off from fact and developing it in the imagination. In this case, his subject is the passionate affair between Fred Burnaby and Sarah Bernhardt in the mid-1870’s, the remarkable openness of the actress with the soldier (on the level, indeed), and its inevitable end. All the way through these sixty-plus pages, you can see the author conjuring examples of daring and discovery, love and loss, and creating a language of metaphor with which to describe it.

My assumption was that in the third and longest part, “The Loss of Depth,” he would apply these things directly to his wife, giving us a portrait of her more intimate and revealing even than those Nadar took of “the divine Sarah.” But no, he does almost exactly the opposite; in photographic language again, what he gives us is the negative, leaving it for us to develop. Almost immediately, he plunges into a description of grief, the constant reminders of things no longer shared, the intolerable intrusion of friends with euphemistic circumlocutions or bracing suggestions, or worse still avoidance of the subject altogether. Pat (whom he never names except in the dedication) is present only in the spaces she has left in his heart; one of the things that turns him away from thoughts of suicide is the knowledge that he retains the mould of her memory; without him, that too would be lost. He comes back, to a degree, through art: through the discovery of opera, through reading, and above all through writing. As you read on, you see him using links to the earlier sections, a phrase here, an idea there, and you think: “Ah, now he is going to pull it all together, and himself too.” But it is never as easy as that. Barnes has great skill, but also the daring to leave doors open and loose ends untied; I am sure that “closure” is one of those words he hates. And that is fine, because this strange asymmetrical hybrid is Barnes’ tribute to a love that will never end, and probably the best book he has ever written.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 82 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (September 24, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Julian Barnes
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Pulse The Lemon Table And: A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Bibliography:

• Metroland (1980)
• Before She Met Me (1982)
• Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)
• Staring at the Sun (1986)
• A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters (1989)
• Talking It Over (1991)
• The Porcupine (1992)
• Cross Channel: Stories (1996)
• England, England (1998)
• Love, etc (2000) (prequel to Talking it Over)
• The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003)
• The Lemon Table: Stories (2004)
• Arthur & George (2005)
• Nothing to be Frightened of (2008)
• Pulse: Stories (2011)
• The Sense of an Ending (2011; 2012 in US) 

Essays:

• Letters from London (1995)
• Something to Declare (2002)
• Levels of Life (2011; September 2013 in US)

“When I think of Nilsen now, how he came and vanished again in the one day, I don’t feel any warmer towards him in the remembering than I did when he was here.  I don’t even feel grateful for what he gave me, because he and his kind kept it from me for so long.  But I do think of the difficult journey he made, and why he made it.  What set him off, he told me, was seeing me being interviewed on television, after Khalil Khazar’s death.  He said he’d watched the interview over and over.  He’d wanted to feel what I felt.  But you cannot feel what another person feels.  You cannot even imagine it, however hard you try.  This I know.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (DEC 28, 2014)

On December 21, 1988, almost exactly twenty-five years ago as I write, Pan American flight 103 from London to New York was brought down by a bomb and crashed over the small town of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people aboard and eleven more on the ground. Although others may have been implicated, only one man was convicted of planting the bomb, a Libyan national who was released several years later on compassionate grounds; he died of prostrate cancer in 2012. His death may well have been the trigger for Scottish author James Robertson’s imaginative and morally profound novel; it is certainly the event with which it opens. Not that Robertson mentions real names: the airline, places, and foreign countries involved are left anonymous, and the convicted bomber, his presumed accomplice, and the chief witness are given pseudonyms. But as every detail that Robertson does give — even down to the date, time, and 38-minute duration of the flight — are precisely the same as the Pan Am crash, he is clearly not trying to disguise his intended subject.

Or rather, not his subject. For although he goes into the crash and subsequent investigation in detail, his focus is on aspects of such a story that are not put to rest by a simple verdict. Do law enforcement agencies ever bend the facts to fit a politically expedient narrative? Can vengeance be exacted against a scapegoat who may not in fact be guilty? Is there such a thing as true closure? What happens when a man’s grief turns to an obsession that prevents him from leading a meaningful life? When truth is found, will it stand out like a pristine shining object, or will it be a tarnished affair of accident and compromise?

Alan Tealing is a Lecturer in English at a new university in an old Scottish town (I imagine Stirling). After losing his American wife and six-year-old daughter in the bombing, he devotes his research skills to following the case in every aspect. But some things at the trial convince him that they have got the wrong man, and he takes his doubts public. As the book opens, he is giving a television interview proclaiming that the death of the convicted bomber will change nothing. But it does change something. It brings to his door a former CIA/FBI operative named Nielsen who needs to make peace with his own conscience before dying. What he tells Alan will send him off to Australia, where the novel reaches its climax in the midst of a series of devastating bush fires. The antipodean leap from the first part, entitled “Ice,” to the second, “Fire,” is the one weak point in an otherwise superb novel, requiring that the reader shares Alan’s obsession enough to follow even the slimmest of clues. But his encounters with the two principal people he meets there will propel the story into new depths, and open him to disasters other than his own. The action climax is magnificently handled, but even more magnificent is the quiet settling that follows it, so much more meaningful than a pat solution to some mystery or conspiracy theory. A truly fine book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Other Press (September 10, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on James Robertson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another real event fiction: An Accident in August by Laurence Cosse The Submission by Amy Waldman

Bibliography:

• Close: Stories (1991)
• Ragged Man’s Complaint: Stories (1993)
• Scottish Ghost Stories (1996)
• The Fanatic (2000)
• Joseph Knight (2003)
• The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006)
• And the Land Lay Still (2010)
• Republics of the Mind (2012)
• The Professor of Truth (2013)

“Mo was tired of the bellicose, lachrymose religion the attack had birthed, was sickened by the fundamentalists who defended it by declaring the day sacred, the place sacred, the victims sacred, the feelings of their survivors sacred – so much sacredness, no limit to the profanity justified to preserve it.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (OCT 25, 2011)

Ten years have gone by since the Twin Towers came down on 9/11, and through those years, a wide array of talented fiction writers have attempted to make sense of that pivotal experience: Lynn Sharon Schwartz, John Updike, Jonathan Safran Foer, Claire Messud, to name just a few.

The brilliance of Amy Waldman’s book is that she does not try to apply logic to why 9/11 occurred, nor does she attempt to recreate the complex and traumatic emotions that most Americans felt that day. Instead, she explores something broader: the fallout of a country confused, divided, and sick with fear, clamoring to make sense of the insensible.

The book begins with an ambiguous title: The Submission. On a concrete level, the submission refers to anonymous submissions by architects – in the best democratic tradition – who vie for the right to build an enduring memorial to Ground Zero. But read those words again, and the meaning is far deeper. Is Waldman referring to the submission of Muslims to Qur’an law, forcing them into outsider positions? Or is she writing of the submission of too many Americans to their deepest fears?

A bit of all three interpretations exist, but it becomes increasingly evident that it is the latter that Amy Waldman is most interested in. The skeleton of the story is this: the winner of the submission is an American Muslim, Mohammad Khan, whose true religion is his vaulting ambition. (At a later point, Mo’s lover will say to him, “Now I see that it was about you: your design, your reputation, your place in history.”) Raised in the United States since birth, Mo (as he is universally called) has barely set foot in a mosque his entire life. His design – a garden – is comforting and soothing, particularly to the sole member of the selection jury who is also the widow of a 9/11 victim.

Once Mo’s identity is leaked as the winner, the fervor begins. He is called, among other things, “decadent, abstinent, deviant, violent, insolent, abhorrent, aberrant, and typical.” Amy Waldman, the former bureau chief of the New York Times, knows this territory intimately: the ambitious reporter who will do anything for a scoop (including defecting to the New York Post, which traffics in sensationalism), the equally ambitious governor who strives for reelection while inflaming public sentiment, the radio talk show host who plays into his audience’s prejudices. Before too long, the garden is being depicted as an “Islamic victory garden,” Mo is being called by his full name, and his loyalty to the U.S. is being questioned on all fronts.

Amy Waldman characters are nearly always fully realized: whether she’s writing about Mo, Claire – the wealthy widow and key juror on the selection committee – or a seemingly bit player who is propelled to center stage, the Bangladeshi widow Asma, whose husband, an illegal immigrant, worked as a janitor and was killed in the attack.

Although the author’s point of view is not hard to discern, to her credit, she reveals all sides and that is never clearer than during the scene when the public weighs in about the design. The question becomes: “What history do you want to write with this memorial?” Every side is represented, from the professor of Middle Eastern studies who states, “…Achieving that paradise through martyrdom – murder suicide – has become the obsession of Islamic extremists, the ultimate submission to God: to the author on Islamic gardens who asks, “Since when did we become so afraid of learning from other cultures?”

The pretentious artistic debates… the cynical political showboating… the tactical moves of special-interest groups… the media that fuels rumors rather than reports news – all are depicted here. This well-written, thought-provoking, and nuanced book will appeal to many different kinds of readers. With all the posturing, the truth is often found in just letting go. Or, as Mo eventually discovers, “He had forgotten himself, and this was the truest submission.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 197 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (August 16, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Amy Waldman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Terrorist by John Updike Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud

Bibliography:

• The Submission (August 2011)

“His hand is growing cold; still she holds it. Sitting at his bedside she does not cry. From time to time, she lays her cheek against his, taking slight comfort in the rough bristle of unshaved hair, and she speaks to him a little.

I love you, she tells him.

I always will.

Je t’aime, she says.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (SEP 8, 2011)

Lily Tuck`s novel, I Married You for Happiness, is the story of a woman mourning the sudden death of her husband. It was shortly before dinner when Philip came home from his college teaching position. When Nina calls him for dinner he is dead. She lies by his cold body all night remembering their lives together. The prose is spare and lovely, recalling their joys, passions and pains of their forty-two years together.

Recently, I’ve read three memoirs about grieving a spouse after sudden death: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story, and Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name. Lily Tuck’s book covers similar territory as these memoirs but in fictional form.

Nina is an artist and Philip is a mathematician specializing in probability theory. They have one daughter, thirty-five year old Louise. This book takes place over the course of one night following Philip’s death. As the story unfolds, Louise does not yet know her father has died. Nina just wants to spend this one night next to Philip. “In the morning she will make telephone calls, she will write e-mails, make arrangements; the death certificate, the funeral home, the church service – whatever needs to be done. Tonight – tonight, she wants nothing. She wants to be alone. Alone with Philip.”

Nina tries to remember their lives together, the big things and the little things. She is especially focused on thoughts about a woman that Philip had known before meeting her. Iris and Philip were in a car crash and Iris died. Had Iris lived, Nina wonders, would Philip have married her instead of Nina? She puts together different theories of probability in her mind for different scenarios and tries to think like her husband would in these situations. “What if she finds a photo of Iris? The photo slips out from in between papers, from inside a folder in a desk drawer.”

Simple things cause her great anxiety. What were the exact last words she said to Philip? What did they do yesterday, last weekend? She is not sure and this bothers her. She wants to know and hold the past close to her, remembering all that she can.

She and Philip were so different. Nina paints mostly landscapes and portraits, usually with water colors. Philip gives lectures on probability. She remembers lots of mathematical problems and information that Philip has shared with her even though many are beyond her capacity to understand. “Most mathematical functions, Philip tells her, are classified as two-way functions because they are easy to do and easy to undo – like addition and subtraction, for example. The way turning a light on and turning it off is a two-way function. A one-way function is more complicated because although it may be easy to do, you cannot undo it. Like mixing paint, you can’t unmix it, or like breaking an egg shell, you can’t put the egg back together.” Nina thinks about the physics of alternate universes and wonders if Philip can be alive and dead. Is he really dead?

Nina also gives a lot of thought to the existence of an afterlife and what the great philosophers had to say about it, especially Pascal. Pascal believed it was a better probability to believe in God than not because if God existed and one behaved righteously, they could have eternal life. Still, Nina is not convinced. Ironically, Philip the mathematician had more of a belief in afterlife than does Nina. Philip believes in a libertarian God, “a God who allows room for free will.”

Nina struggles to remember where they’ve lived, what countries they’ve visited, how many houses they resided in, how many animals they’ve owned. These little things help her feel closer to Philip as she spends the night next to him holding his hand and stroking his face. This is her night to be with him, her last night to shower herself in their love.

Philip’s favorite color was red. He once brought her a red embroidered coat from Hong Kong. She rarely ever wore it. However, tonight she puts it on over an old coat she is wearing and parades around the room in it, wondering if Philip would have found this silly.

During their marriage, Nina had an affair and once was raped. She kept both of these occurences secret from Philip. She worries about Philip’s faithfulness to her. “Sometimes when Philip comes back from being away, she sniffs through his laundry, searching for the scent of an unfamiliar perfume – patchouli, jasmine, tuberoses. What is her name? The name of a city. Sofia.”

The prose is spare and the book is written in short vignettes, each about some aspect of their life together or their belief system. As the night progresses, Nina drinks wine, dozes occasionally, but mostly stays up and remembers and imagines their time together. Theirs was a great love and one that has withstood the test of time. Lily Tuck understands what it is like to be with one person for forty-two years. She understands great love and passion.

Interestingly, Ms. Tuck has borrowed information from some of the greatest mathematicians, logicians, physicists, and philosophers for this book: Pascal, Einstein, Wilczek, Erdos, Hofstadter, Hawking, and Feynman to name a few. Though the parts about physics and math were sometimes difficult for me to get my head around, they served nicely to illustrate the yin and yang of this marriage. This is a short and lovely book, an homage to a great love, now lost in real time, but forever present in Nina’s heart and mind.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 43 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press; 1 edition (September 6, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Lily Tuck
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Also by Lily Tuck: The News from Paraguay

Bibliography:

• Interviewing Matisse, or the Woman Who Died Standing Up (1991)
• The Woman Who Walked on Water (1996)
• Siam Or the Woman Who Shot a Man (1999)
• Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived (2002)
• The News From Paraguay (2004) 
• I Married You for Happiness (September 2011)
• The House at Belle Fontaine: Stories (April 2013)

Nonfiction:

• Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante (2008)

“It’s taken me years to understand that dying doesn’t end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur and epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of another’s lives until not death, but distance, does us part – time and space and the heart’s weariness are the blander executions of the human connection.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  AUG 24, 2011)

Let’s Take The Long Way Home is, at its core, a love story. It’s a story of how a close connection with a friend can ground us and provide us with a life worth living. And it’s a story that any woman who has ever had a friend who is like a sister – I count myself among those fortunate women – will understand in a heartbeat.

Gail Caldwell, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, met Caroline Knapp, also a writer, over their mutual love of their dogs. Ms. Caldwell writes, “Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived.”

Both women – about a decade apart in age – are passionate about writing and their dogs and have successfully dealt with alcohol addiction that knocked them to their knees. “We had a lot of dreams, some of them silly, all part of the private code shared by people who plan to be around for the luxuries of time,” Ms. Caldwell shares.

Quickly, Gail and Caroline and their two dogs become a “pack of four.” They are both self-described moody introverts who prefer the company of dogs. Yet, “…we gave each other wide berth – it was far easier, we learned over the years, to be kind to the other than to ourselves.” As they grow closer, Gail and Caroline learn that nurturance and strength “were each the lesser without the other.”

It is almost inconceivable that this close friendship would ever end, but Caroline is a smoker and at 42, she learns she has stage 4 lung cancer. Her death comes quickly, in a matter of weeks. Gail Caldwell reflects, “Death is a divorce nobody asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage form what you thought you couldn’t stand to lose.” And later: “Caroline’s death had left me with a great and terrible gift: how to live in a world where loss, some of it unbearable, is as common as dust or moonlight.” Eventually, she comes to realize “…we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.”

This memoir is poignant, authentic, unflinching, and genuine – never manipulative or sudsy. In addition to the profound look at an extraordinary friendship, it also focuses on “inter-species” love – between two fiercely private and self-reliant woman and their incredible dogs. The rich and moving portrayal of Gail Caldwell’s Samoyed, Clementine, will be entirely familiar to those of us who have shared our lives with four-legged “fur babies;” love in any guise is still love.

This eloquent book ends up being a celebration of life in all its complexities – including love, friendship, devotion, and grief. As Gail Caldwell writes, “The real trick is to let life, with all its ordinary missteps and regrets, be consistently more mysterious and alluring than its end.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 87 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Interview with Gail Caldwell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Mentor by Tom Grimes

Bibliography:

By Gail Caldwell:

• A Strong West Wind : A Memoir (2006)
• Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship (August 2010)

By her friend Caroline Knapp:

• Drinking : A Love Story (1996)
• Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs (1998)
• Appetites: Why Women Want (2003)
• The Merry Recluse: A Life in Essays (2003)

” ‘I am Fabrissa.’ ”

That was it, that was all she said. But it was enough. Already her voice was familiar to me, beloved.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (JUL 10, 2011)

Mosse gives her beguiling novel an old fashioned gothic framework that suits this eerie story of ghostly love in an insular mountain village of France a decade after WWI. The story opens in 1933 as Frederick Watson visits an antiquarian bookseller in Toulouse. “He walked like a man recently returned to the world. Every step was careful, deliberate. Every step to be relished.” Well-dressed and confident, Watson knows his appearance contrasts sharply with his last visit to Toulouse in 1928 at age 25. “He had been another man then, a tattered man, worn threadbare by grief.”

He hands the bookseller a parchment document to translate, which, the man tells him, dates from medieval days and is written in the local language of the time. The bookseller asks how Watson came to possess the parchment and Watson tells him the story of his strange visit to the Pyrenees in 1928. This first-person narrative forms the bulk of the novel.

For a decade Watson had been consumed by sorrow for his elder brother, George, killed in the war when the younger boy was in his teens. His parents and his friends have lost patience with him. His father is ashamed of him for his lack of backbone; his mother was never much interested in him in the first place. George had been the center of the family. “It was his presence that had made us a family, the glue. Without him we were three strangers with nothing to say.”

The French motor tour, prescribed by his doctor, has taken him into the foothills of the Pyrenees. One tormented night he steps to the edge of a cliff, then steps back. “Was it courage or cowardice that stopped me? Still I cannot say. Even now, I find it hard to tell those imposters one from the other.” The moment marks the beginning of his recovery. He joins a convivial tavern crowd that evening in toasting the new prosperity of their town and begins to understand the human need to move forward.

Still as his journey into the mountains continues, his mood swings; the landscape grows more alien and menacing, the sky more threatening. His aloneness is tangible and then a voice – singing, whispering – sounds plaintively. Watson goes on, but is soon caught in a sudden violent blizzard. His car goes off the road, narrowly avoiding a mortal plunge into a ravine, and he is left to find his way down the mountain to the nearest village.

Which he does, coming to rest at a charming little inn, where he is invited by the innkeeper to a village fete taking place that very night.

And from here the narration becomes deliciously unreliable as Watson makes his solitary way to the fete through narrow and deserted village streets, getting hopelessly lost in the silent night before torchlight and voices guide him to a hall where he’s swept up in a friendly whirl of villagers dressed in medieval clothing, seated at long tables, eating from trenchers.

His own dinner companion is a girl whose beauty is exceeded only by her instinctive understanding. Watson finds himself falling in love with a woman who seems to know him better than he knows himself. But their evening is not destined for a fairytale ending. Not the happy-ever-after kind anyway.

Mosse’s writing is wonderfully spooky as she explores the emotional resonance of grief, loneliness and an unwillingness to let go and move on (why, for instance, are people impatient with this lingering grief?) meld with the redeeming power of love and the repeating cycles of man’s brutality to man, i.e. war and atrocity.

The novel’s form is comfortingly familiar – did Watson hit his head in the accident or fall prey to a fever as the modern villagers believe, or was his emotional state particularly attuned to the unresolved tragedy that remained hidden in the hills?

Poignant and eerie, and steeped in French country atmosphere, this is a novel that should appeal to fans of literary ghost stories.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 28 readers
PUBLISHER:	Putnam Adult (February 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Mosse
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Trespass by Rose Tremain The Cypress House by Michael Kortya

Bibliography:

• The Winter Ghosts (February 2011)

Languedoc Trilogy:

• Labyrinth (2006)
• Sepulchre (2008)
• Citadel (September 2011 in UK)

“Henry was not used to people disliking him. He had sauntered through life in the glow of easy approval. The incident on Westminster Bridge had not only been an affray, it had been an affront. The instant aggression and then the viciousness of the subsequent persecution had perplexed him. He worried that luck was deserting him.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUN 9, 2011)

David Abbott starts his mesmerizing and haunting debut book, The Upright Piano Player, with a quote from Nietzsche: “The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claims that meanwhile we have improved.”

It’s an apt quote because indeed, actions have consequences in the case of his protagonist, Henry Cage. Henry is, indeed, a caged man – uptight, disconnected, and alienated. Throughout his life, he has amassed the trappings of success: a sterling career, a spirited and beautiful wife, a sensitive son, an elegant London townhome. Yet he has squandered his gifts, eventually losing his marriage, destroying his relationship with his son, and ending his partnership in his firm – not of his own accord.

And then, on the eve of the millennium, a random act of violence occurs. Henry inadvertently pushes into a stranger on the crowded Westminster Bridge during a New Year’s Eve encounter. The stranger, Colin, is an angry and vindictive working-class man who strikes back in a disproportionate way and then begins to stalk Henry. A sense of menace ensues, a little reminiscent of the atmosphere in Enduring Love by Ian McEwan.

Henry is a man on the edge, ready to “improve,” to re-engage with his family and the world around him. For the first time in years, he truly reaches out, flirting with the idea of a new romance, reconnecting with his ill ex-wife, striving to create a bond with his now-grown son and his grandson, Hal, whom he has only just met. Yet at the periphery of his life is the stalker who is threatening to destroy all that he is working to put together again.

The reader knows, from the first 10 pages, that the ending will be heartbreaking and that another random incident will occur that will turn him into a man torn apart by grief. As a result, this is a particularly voyeuristic “read;” we know that none of Henry’s well-meaning actions will save him from a wrenching fate that no parent or grandparent should ever have to endure. We, as readers, maintain full awareness of where life is going for Henry, something that is denied to the protagonist himself. Henry remains blinded; for example, when he views a barn owl with his grandson, he thinks, “It had seemed a gift. Like the sighting of a kingfisher, a singling hour, a portent of favor. How wrong could a man be?”

Throughout the arc of the book, we observe Henry from a distance. He is not a particularly introspective man, a trait that I often find unsatisfying. However, not here; David Abbott pulls it off, propelling us along on Henry’s journey. All the while, we know that Henry will be unable to sidestep his fate; despite his rediscovery of self, he will need to confront the loss and grief that is his destiny.

This is, after all, a cautionary tale, a tale about whether “upright” motives can create harmony in lives that are tossed around by life’s circumstances. It asks provocative questions: how much of life results from past choices and how much is totally random? The Upright Piano Player is written by a founding partner of the United Kingdom’s largest advertising agency, and this is his first novel. Hopefully, it is not his last.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Nan A. Talese (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Q Blog interview with David Abbott
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst

Bibliography:

• The Upright Piano Player (June 2011)

“Hold her tight, if you have her; hold her tight, I thought, that’s my advice to all the living. Breathe her in, put your nose in her hair, breathe her in deeply. Say her name. It will always be her name. Not even death can steal it. Same alive as dead, always Aura Estrada.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (APR 07, 2011)

Grief is, by and large, a private and intimate thing. We utter a few platitudes and then turn away in discomfort from who are laid bare by their grief. And emotionally, we begin to withdraw.

Francisco Goldman shatters those boundaries in his devastating book Say Her Name, forcing the reader to pay witness to the exquisite and blinding pain of a nearly unbearable loss. He positions the reader as a voyeur in a most intimate sadness, revealing the most basic nuances and details and the most complex ramifications of the loss of someone dear. And in the process, he captures our attention, rather like Samuel Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, until the reader is literally as fascinated and transfixed with Aura Estrada – Francisco Goldman’s young and doomed wife – as he himself is. It is a masterful achievement, hard to read, hard to pull oneself away from.

The barebones of his story are these: Francisco Goldman married a much younger would-be writer named Aura, who gives every indication of literary greatness. They revel in their marriage for two short years, but right before their second anniversary, Aura breaks her neck while body surfing and dies the next day. Francisco is raw with grief, which is exacerbated by Aura’s passionately devoted and controlling mother Juanita, who blames him for the tragedy. Although he is completely innocent, he blames himself and spirals downward, visualizing himself as “…a hard hollow rectangle filled with tepid blank air. An empty rectangle with sides of slate or lead…”

Brick by brick, Francisco builds a literary altar to the vibrant and exuberant woman he married. And at the same time, he lays naked his own grief at her loss: “Little did I suspect…that I would ever learn what it was like to feel swallowed up by my own sobbing, grief sucking me like marrow from a bone.” And later: “Every day a ghostly train. Every day the ruin of the day that was supposed to have been. Every second on the clock clicking forward, anything I do or see or think, all of it made of ashes and charred shards, the ruins of the future.”

Hungry to keep Aura alive, Francisco takes us back to Aura’s past, to her complex relationship with her overbearing mother and her yearning for the father who left when she was only four years old (setting her on a course to look for a father replacement). He showcases various writings that Aura created in her advanced studies at Columbia and under the tutelage of two famous authors (revealed in bios to be Peter Carey and Colum McCann) for her MFA program. He paints a word picture of Aura as a young girl, a daughter, a wife, and a writer on the cusp of potential greatness.

And in order to keep himself sane, he channels his grief into his art, documenting their time together and Aura’s extraordinary life: “This is why we need beauty to illuminate even what has most broken…Not to help us transcend or transform it into something, but first and foremost to help us see it.”

At its core, Say Her Name is not “another grief book;” rather, it’s a love story, a tribute to Aura, a universal narrative of what happens when one loved one survives another. It is, I suspect, a novel that Francisco Goldman did not choose to write, but had to write. It is a wrenching and eloquent tale of remembrance, a refusal to give death its victory.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 28 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Francisco GoldmanWikipedia page on Francisco Goldman
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Legend of a Suicide by David Vann Widow: Stories by Michelle Latiolois

Bibliography:

• The Long Night of White Chickens (1992)
• The Ordinary Seaman (1997)
• The Divine Husband (2005)

Nonfiction:

• The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? (2007)
• Say Her Name (April 2011)

“She knows she is beginning to marmorealize into the character called “widow,” untouchable, dark, by definition unhappy, sexless. Her body is fighting for her, for her, for some existence it recognizes as oxygen, water, sustenance.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (APR 07, 2011)

There is a legend of the thorn bird; as it impales itself and dies, it rises above its own agony to outsing the nightingale and the whole world stills to listen. As humans face death – our own or our most beloved – the best writers have the ability to rise up and eloquently sing. I speak, of course, of Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, of Francisco Goldman in Say Her Name, of David Vann in Legend of a Suicide. And now, Michelle Latiolais takes her place in that very top tier of talented writers.

Ms. Latiolais masterly interweaves stories of life after her husband Paul’s death with other tales: the complex eroticism experienced by a woman visiting a male strip club with her lover, the trials of traveling to Africa with an anthropologist husband who is researching the unusual eating habits of aboriginals, young children who entice an ancient aunt to craft shapes out of moistened bread crumbs. In a few sparse words, she is able to capture a deep and complex emotion.

Take the eponymous title story. Ms. Latiolais writes, “Sometimes wandering is not better; it’s the horror of having no place she is going, no place he needs her to be, wants her to be, no one wanting her the way he wanted her. Then she sleeps, long blacked-out hours, her head beneath pillows, the quilt, and when she wakes, her pink pearls, sinuous on the vanity, comfort her…”

Or her story “Crazy,” when it dawns on a wife that her husband – a drama professor – is unfaithful: “Benson knew an audience at his back when he had one, and he never touched her, never even leaned down to kiss her on the cheek—blameless—but this was how she, his wife in the window, knew. All theater people hugged and kissed all the time. They were crazy for it.”

Tales of loss and betrayal – true and fictionalized – are interspersed with sensuous tales and images, of pink porcelain saucers with earthenware lips folded in and fluted out, spawning erotic fantasies…of exotic meals of lamb stew with garlic and baby lima beans, ladled over buttered couscous…of fine fabrics…of longing.

And throughout, Ms. Latiolais reveals a love affair with words, the aural and etymological echoes , the mouth-sounds, the ravishing beauty. This is a writer who reflects on her wording (and whose characters do as well) and who also understands the limitations of words when strong emotions render them useless.

The writing positively pulsates with pain and beauty, with heartbreak and reverence, with alienation and survival. In short, it is stunning writing, courageous writing; as Ms. Latiolais dances and weaves her way through her grief, it is only in the last story, “Damned Spot,” that we, her readers, learn the reality of Paul’s death. By then, we are invested enough so that our hearts shatter into little pieces.

Some of the pieces in this collection were written long before Paul died; others were written in response to his death. All provide compassionate insight and flinching detail and position Ms. Latiolais as a writer to be reckoned with.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bellevue Literary Press (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michelle Latiolais
EXTRAS:	Publisher page on WidowExcerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates Legend of a Suicide by David Vann The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Bibliography:

• Even Now (1992)
• A Proper Knowledge (2008)
• Widow: Stories (February 2011)

“The living are like spinning tops, powered by a need for atonement, or revenge, or by avoidance, guilt, shame, fear, anger, regret, insecurity, jealousy, whatever, it doesn’t matter because it all derives from the same pop-psyche alphabet soup and oh Lord here comes another best-selling book on the self-help shelf when really if they could just smash all the time-keeping devices excepting sundials, do a crossword puzzle, study the backs of their hands, notice their breath going in and out, drink their food and chew their water, RELAX, it would be a great step forward in the evolution of  the species and the dead would be so grateful.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAR 27, 2011)

This is a saga, a sweeping family story that lodges in your marrow, the kind of story that makes you smile, laugh, weep, snort, chortle, sing, spread your arms wide and lay your heart wide open.

With flavors tender, ribald, ironical, farcical, tragic, magical, and wondrous, Sing Them Home narrates an epic story of a family emotionally disrupted by the disappearance of their mother (and wife), Hope, in a Nebraska tornado of 1978. Hope was swept up, along with her Singer sewing machine and a Steinway piano, but she never came down. Due to the absence of her remains, all that stands in the graveyard is her cenotaph.

Twenty-five years later, the three grown-up children are still trying to cope with their grief. None ever married. Larkin, an art history professor (whose work is symbolic with her loss and grief) hides behind food and refuses to “leave the ground.” Gaelan is a weatherman (ah! the irony) who has only superficial, sexual relationships with women, and the youngest, Bonnie, is a virgin and garbologist. She roams after storms to look for “archival” remains of things that flew away in the tornado with their mother. And she talks to the dead at the cemetery.

There is also a beloved but inscrutable stepmother, Viney, (although she never legally married their dad); a large supporting cast of unforgettable characters; ancestral Welsh traditions; and the Nebraska weather and topography, a salient ingredient in pulling the story together.

The prose is beautiful and evocative as the story moves along non-linearly, but with grace. Past events are revealed gradually and build momentum as it catches up to the present. You will experience an intimate relationship with these radiant, unconventional characters and their extraordinary story.

There are some themes similar to The Lovely Bones–loss, unresolved grief, isolation, the meaning of memories and the idea of home. However, Kallos’ novel is richer, more sprawling and textured. John Irving comes to mind, with veins of Philip Roth, Margot Livesy, and Ann Tyler. She is an original, though–she leaves her own memorable imprint.

This is no garden-variety redemption story. It exhilarates with an elixir of spiritual, metaphysical and deeply human voices, of things said, unsaid, unuttered, and forever sung.

For a taste of the author’s wit, poise, sensibility, and charm, read her bio on her website.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 78 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press; 1ST edition (January 6, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Stephanie Kallos
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving Another book that involves a child found in a tree: The Invisible Mountain by Carolina de Robertis

Bibliography:

• Broken for You (2004)
• Sing Them Home (2009)