“The children are frozen, too frightened to move closer to one of the women. The sound they heard while still in the house has advanced, roaring its way above them. There is a crash against the storm door, and they all scream, ducking with their arms held over their heads. Ellis drops his candle and, in the weak light left from the candle Mae is still holding, she sees his terrified face. Ruby is crying. Lavinia has Little Homer’s face pressed into the front of her dress as if she can shield him by blocking his sight. Mae reaches out her arms and Ruby and Ellis come to her immediately. She blows out her candle and drops it so she can hold both children tight against her. In the darkness, Lavinia cries, “Dear Lord! Oh, dear Lord!” Then the roaring moves on, like a train careering over their heads. The sound recedes and, eventually, even the wind seems to subside. When there is no longer any sound except rain on the cellar doors, the children hold utterly still, waiting to see what will come next.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 5, 2014)

Falling to Earth is the kind of novel that makes me want to grab the very next person I see and urgently say, ”You MUST read this.” I read this rabidly with increasing awe and respect that Kate Southwood had the chops to create a debut novel with this degree of psychological insight, restrained power, and heartbreaking beauty.

The story centers on a tragedy of unimaginable proportions – a tornado hits the small Illinois town of March in 1925, causing devastation and grievous loss in the homes of every single resident of the town.

Except one.

That one is Paul Graves, a man of dignity and integrity, who lives with his wife Mae, his three young children and his mother, Lavinia. Incredibly, nothing in Paul’s life is touched – not his family, not his home, and not his thriving lumber business…which, in fact, is even more in demand as townsfolk order coffins for the burials of their loved ones.

As the townspeople are forced to bear up under nearly unbearable grief, their envy of Paul’s “unfair” providence reaches a fever pitch and they begin to turn on him – and against him – in droves. Paul, meanwhile, labors under extreme survivor’s guilt as Mae increasingly falls into a dark depression.

Kate Southwood writes,

“A tornado is a ravenous thing, untroubled by the distinction in tearing one man apart and gently setting another down a little distance away. It is resolute and makes its unheeding progress until, bloated and replete, it dissipates. A tornado is a dead thing and cannot acknowledge blame.. If a tornado smashes your house or takes your child, it does no good to blame it…Even after you’ve yanked up another house in the place the old one stood and planted flowers in the dirt where you laid your child, your fury remains as well your desire to lay blame.”

A parable of sorts, this magnificent novel strives to answer questions that have haunted humankind since early times: how do we comprehend the forces of nature and our own fates? How do we manage the extreme hostility and envy that result from nature’s unfairness? How do we break the cycles of revenge, vengeance, retribution and reprisal? These questions transcend this book and can easily be asked of modern tragedies – Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy, for example.

The themes are universal: love and loss, family, jealousy and suspicion, guilt and survival. I will not spoil the ending but I will say this – it is masterly and seamlessly brought together all the themes of the book and literally let me gasping.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 44 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (March 5, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Southwood
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another tornado-based story: Sing Them Home By Stephanie Kallos

Bibliography:

• Falling to Earth (March 2013)

“There is something I never told you, Laura, a thing about me that makes us more alike than you might imagine. While I have many regrets — in particular about the kind of mother I was to you, and the kind of mother I never managed to be — I have no greater regret than this: that I failed to tell you the darkest truth about me when you were present to hear it, that I failed to show you, when you needed it, how alike we were. This my true confession. To confess is all that I can do for you.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (NOV 30, 2013)

Patrick Flanery’s debut novel is a very interesting example of an overarching story that incorporates another “novel” or “memoir,” a journal and more embedded inside it.  Set in post-apartheid South Africa Absolution is a thought provoking book, and engaging; not necessarily, or least of all, in the sense one would initially expect. Much of the novel could be set in any other country that lived through two opposing government systems. While there are hints of the political realities of South Africa, such as the brief visit to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the central theme of the novel addresses deep moral questions of the human condition that are not time or place specific.

In the most broad sense Absolution is a deep reflection on guilt and seeking foregiveness, on what is truth and why we may not even admit aspects of the truth and our behaviour to ourselves, let alone to others. How many shades of truth are there?

Two central characters – Clare, a grand old dame of literature and Sam, her much younger biographer – enter over the course of the novel into a kind of intellectual and emotional “pas de deux,” whereby each reacts to or dances around the other’s questions and answers. Both reveal slowly and tentatively snippets of themselves and their lives… leaving us as readers to sift through the many shades of truths. As we follow each piece within the emerging puzzle we may at times think we are ahead of the two protagonists, but are we really?

While the “pas de deux,” the discussions between author and biographer, are central to the novel, the backstories of the two protagonists, told in separate sections and in different tones, are as essential. There is Clare’s “letter” to her daughter Laura, which reflects on and responds to her daughter’s notebooks, written while she was on the run from authorities during the “old regime” some twenty years earlier. Clare is also writing a “novel,” Absolution, that reads more like a personal memoir and in another series of chapters we learn more about Sam’s life that was deeply shaken early on in his youth.

Flanery is very effective in pursuing these different narrative streams, interleafing them in a way that, taken together, make for an engaging and comprehensive whole. Your attention is required to keep the different versions of the truth apart. Personally, I couldn’t help comparing Clare with the real-life grand old dame of South African writing, Nadine Gordimer. Be assured, though, there are no parallels between the two, other than maybe the home invasion that both experienced and that weighs heavily on Clare’s mind. I was taken by surprise that, despite the important political undercurrent in the novel, so little was in fact expressed in terms of the complex South African realities then and now. Race or colour was hardly ever mentioned, if at all. On the other hand, I found some sections too detailed and a tightening of those would have increased my reading engagement. Yet, for a debut novel, this book is a great achievement and we can hopefully look forward to more by the author.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 28 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Trade (April 2, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Patrick Flanery
EXTRAS:	Publisher page
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Fallen Land More on guilt & forgiveness: Forgive Me by Amanda Eyre Ward

Bibliography:

• Absolution (2012)
• Fallen Land (August 2013)

“…Most skels, they moved. They came to eat you-not all of you, but a nice chomp here or there, enough to pass on the plague. Cut off their feet, chop off their legs, and they’d gnash the air as they heaved themselves forward by their splintered fingernails, looking for some ankle action…”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (OCT 18, 2011)

Zone One by Colson Whitehead plays on the archetype of apocalyptic zombie literature. The unnamed protagonist is known as Mark Spitz, because he is afraid to swim. He is a sweeper, someone assigned by the pseudo-government in Buffalo to destroy any zombie AKA skel or catatonic victim AKA straggler of the plague that has destroyed civilization. The zombies are virtually mindless with a lust for human flesh that can only be quenched by destroying their heads. A zombie’s bite is what spreads the infection. Stragglers just stay immobilized where they stopped. They do nothing, even in response to attack. Both are routinely exterminated by a lethal strike to the head via bullet, baseball bat, axe or what have you. The authorities in Buffalo are sponsored by the remnants of corporations and are in touch with similar enclaves around the world

Everyone suffers from PASD, or Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. Every survivor has killed, starved, and betrayed others in order to survive and has horrific flashbacks. Nobody is immune to PASD. The horrors of Last Night (when the plague started) and its sequelae have taken all joy out of life. This is dystopia maxima.

Pheenies, non military survivors, do the grunt work. Mark Spitz is a pheenie, but as a sweeper, he is more or less privileged, better off than many and somewhat valued. He has always wanted to live in Manhattan. Now he has been assigned as part of a team to mop up zone one, the first part of Manhattan to be cleared of skels and stragglers and made safe for a rebirth of civilization. Mark is “everyman.” He never stands out; neither brilliant nor dunce, leader nor blind follower. He ekes out survival and remembers horror upon horror like everyone else except the skels, the stragglers and the dead.

We have a brilliant exposition of survivor guilt; of the dehumanization that derives from inhuman behavior. The prose is poetic and compelling. It has the awful beauty full of grue that is required to represent a world gone mad. No one is a survivor in this world; they are all dead, brain dead or going to die. The dead and the dying are all ugly. Paranoia is the norm. What is delusional are hope and belief in a future. Is this a judgment like Sodom and Gomorra, a revolt by Gaia, or just an unlucky roll of the dice over and over and over again unto bleak horror and total despair? We never learn why skels do not eat stragglers or why they do not fall on each other in an orgy of eat and be eaten. How can any creature, no matter how torpid survive with absolutely no food? Who cares in a story about zombies; and one so well-written!

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 342 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (October 18, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Colson Whitehead
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Sag Harbor And more dystopian problem futures: The Passage by Justin Cronin The Good and the Ghastly by James Boice

Bibliography:

• The Intuitionist (1998)
• John Henry Days (2001)
• Apex Hides the Hurt (2006)
• Sag Harbor (2009)
• Zone One (2011)

Other:

• The Colossus of  New York (2004)
• The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death (2004)

“How quickly it can change, the life we think has been marked out for us. We start the journey with good intentions, the gift our parents bequeathed us. And then, someone snaps their fingers and we find ourselves sidetracked; we end up in a foreign country.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky AUG 10, 2011)

Karin Fossum’s Bad Intentions is about three friends, now in their twenties, who have known each other since they were six. On the surface, Axel Frimann is by far the most successful. He is well-spoken, good-looking, nicely dressed, and drives a Mercedes; his job at an advertising agency pays well. Philip Reilly, on the other hand, is disheveled, has long, stringy hair (“he looked like a troll from a fairy tale”), and spends a portion of his small salary as a hospital porter getting high. The third member of the trio is Jon Moreno.

As the story opens, Jon is with his two buddies at a cabin near a lake ominously called “Dead Water.” Reilly and Frimann have taken Jon out of the hospital ward where he is being treated for depression and anxiety; the doctors hope that the change of scenery will speed Jon’s recovery.

The three men share a dark secret, one that would land them in deep trouble if it came to light. Their transgression preys on Reilly and Moreno, while Frimann’s chief concern is how to keep his pals from blabbing and ruining his life. The dynamics of control—self-control and the control of others—drives the story. Some men are leaders and others are followers. For certain individuals, it is easier to let someone else make the decisions than it is to take a stand. Fossum is keenly aware that any of us, in certain circumstances, can do something that we will forever regret. Certain people rationalize their actions and blithely carry on as if nothing has happened, while those who possess a sense of morality may become mired in guilt. They can escape only when they unburden themselves and try to atone.

Inspector Konrad Sejer and Jakob Skarre are called in when one of the men goes missing. Sejer interviews the victim’s family and acquaintances, but although he has his suspicions, he has little hard evidence to go on. The inspector thinks, “I’ve developed a profound skepticism and it follows me everywhere. I don’t trust anyone.” When another body turns up, Sejer’s suspicions deepen, and soon matters come to a head in an unexpected manner.

Karin Fossum demonstrates that justice comes in many forms and is often meted out in unlikely ways. In addition, she poignantly touches on how two grieving mothers find a measure of consolation after they lose their beloved children. Bad Intentions, translated capably from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund, is a subtle and heartbreaking tale of psychological suspense in which Fossum explores not only the nature of good and evil, but also the power of guilt to insidiously destroy a person from within.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 36 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Karin Fossum
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Indian Bride When the Devil Holds the Candle Who Fears the Wolf Don’t Look Back

Bibliography:

The Inspector Sejer & Inspector Jakob Skarre Series:

• Eve’s Eye (1995)
• Don’t Look Back (1996; 2004 in US)
• He Who Fears the Wolf (1997; 2005 in US)
• When the Devil Holds the Candle (1998; 2006 in US)
• The Indian Bride (2000; July 2007 in US)
• Black Seconds (2008)
• The Water’s Edge (2009)
• Bad Intentions (August 2011)

Other:

• The House of the Insane (1999)
• The Nightmare of November 4th (2004)
• Broken (2006; August 2010 in US)
• The House of Fools (2008)

“Murder me with bombs you poor lonely sod I will only build myself again and stronger. I am too stupid to know better. I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 12, 2011)

Imagine that you’re a working class Cockney mother with a husband who detonates bombs and a young son who is four years and three months old. You stave off your anxieties about the uncertainty of your life through mindless sex encounters. Eventually, you meet a neighbor – a journalist named Jasper – and, while your husband and son are at a soccer game, you invite him to your flat. At the exact same time you are in the throes of sexual abandon, there’s a massive terrorist bomb attack at the London soccer stadium, vaporizing over one thousand people – your husband and son among them. How do you go on? How do you live with the remorse?

Chris Cleave explores that question in an epistolary structure; the nameless woman writes a letter to Osama bin Laden in the aftermath of the attack. The epistolary form is used with caution as a framing device (Nicole Krauss’s The Great House and Moshid Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist come to mind), because it is not easy to pull off. The reader is a fly-on-the-wall and can choose to connect with the narrator – or not. And if truth be known, Mr. Cleave is not entirely successful in his narrative control as the conceit of writing to Osama begins to wear thin.

What he is successful with is developing a fragile persona – an obsessive woman who is gradually unraveling as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder and who is quickly spiraling downward. The anonymity of the character makes her everywoman, trying to survive in a post-terrorist world. The woman writes, “Before you bombed my boy Osama I always through an explosion was such a quick thing but now I know better. The flash is over very fast but the fire catches hold inside you and the noise never stops…I live in an inferno where you could shiver with cold Osama. This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop.”

The bombing and PSTD, though, is only the beginning. London is quickly transformed into a virtual occupied post apocalyptic territory as the woman fights her own inward battles. She is drawn into a psychological maelstrom with Jasper and his fiancée, Petra, an upper-class fashion journalist who happens to resemble her closely.

Indeed, Petra and the narrator may very well represent two parts of London, which is described as “a smiling liar his front teeth are very nice but you can smell his back teeth rotten and stinking.” Each cannot exist without the other. And so they enter a danse-a-deux of symbiosis and betrayal. Eventually, the novel veers toward a stunning denouement and an over-the-top ending.

It’s extraordinary ambitious for a first-time novelist (this book was written before Chris Cleave’s more well-known Little Bee) and sometimes the prose comes across as rather self-congratulatory or forced. Mr. Cleave’s intention, it seems, is to portray a decadent Western society that struggles to break free of its class distinctions – without success, setting itself up as something to tear down. Yet at the core of the novel, there is an emotional void. The characters are not quite satirical, yet not quite real. And as a result of the epistolary form, we, as readers, are held at arm’s length, not quite embracing them.

This often disturbing, sometimes macabre novel has its own intriguing history. The morning after its initial launch party, in July 0f 2005, three suicide bombers detonated their devices in the London Underground. The book tour was shelved and the novel was temporarily withdrawn from sale by many UK retailers. Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. And in Chris Cleave’s world, fiction is very strange indeed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 53 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster; Reissue edition (January 11, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Chris Cleave
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another epistolary structured novel: Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

Bibliography:

• Incendiary (2005; 2010 in US)
• The Other Hand (2008)
• Little Bee (2009)
• Gold (July 2012)

“Sometimes she sees her life as a series of set pieces rolling in and then out again, realistic enough to fool the camera but unable to withstand closer examination. Any inspection would reveal the flatness of everything, the false walls and painted-on doorknobs, the paper and paste in which everything is rendered. She would like to see it as the camera would see it. And so she keeps her distance. ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (DEC 14, 2010)

For the longest time, growing up in rural Virginia, Birdie Baker is convinced she is destined to follow the path set forth by her devout Christian parents. Like them, as a Jehovah’s Witness, she will spread the word of the Lord, marry, settle down and wrap it up. But the sense of unease that plagues her even after she is married to a church-going man named Judah, is worsened when she runs into her high school drama teacher at the grocery store. “What are you still doing here?” he asks, “I figured the next time I saw you it would be in a movie.” Eventually, leave Virgina she does. Birdie pools all her savings toward a one-way bus ticket to Los Angeles.

When the story first finds Birdie in LA, she is nearly 30 (although she is told to set her age as 26) and struggling to make it big. She does mainly “appendage work, a glorified crash test dummy” where parts of her body fill in for more famous actresses’. Her biggest break—if you can call it that—has been in a commercial for fabric softeners.

The wheels of success might be moving too slowly for Birdie’s satisfaction, but her devoted agent Redmond, promises her bigger and better things are just around the corner. “These things progress organically,” he points out. “Organically?” she says, “Are we farming? Do me a favor. Make it fast and artificial.”

Forever on the cusp of success, Birdie must schmooze at endless parties and try to make an impression. Word-of-mouth, after all, is big here in Hollywood. It is at one of these parties that she meets 21-year-old Lewis, another struggling actor who is even worse off than she is. Lewis works at one temp job after the other, hoping to land a job—any job in the movies.

Author Jenny Hollowell does a spectacular job here with her debut novel. Her prose is sparkling, crisp and edgy all the while moving the story relentlessly forward. There are heartbreaking moments in the novel—Lewis’ excitement at finding a job as an extra on a set and his subsequent letdown is a wonderful example.

In an interview at the end of the book, Hollowell explains that she sought to shine light on how as adults, we “struggle to navigate the disparity between our parents’ expectations of us and the life we imagine for ourselves.” She achieves this objective wonderfully. Birdie is endlessly racked with guilt at having left—at cutting loose the strings that once held her so strongly.

The city of Los Angeles too is a vibrant entity here. As she describes one Hollywood party, Hollowell writes: “The city lies supplicant beneath the party, its lights sparkling and winking as if it existed solely for the partygoers’ enchantment, just another lovely accessory that would be packed up along with the rented glassware and returned at the end of the night.” At the same time, not all is glitz and glamour in the city. She also wonderfully writes about the squalor of LA and sees how from a distance (the Hollywood Hills) even this chaos can be “transformed into something twinkling and lovely and benign.”

For all its despair and bleakness, Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe has its share of cutting humor. This is not a book that is all doom and gloom.

There are many cinematic scenes in here and Birdie even instructs Lewis to imagine that life is just a series of scenes—it makes the disappointment more bearable, she says. In a movie she watches, Birdie describes the end “as it always is, a road leading into the unseen distance, implying both hope and hopelessness.” The same ending applies to Hollowell’s wonderful novel.

Told in brief chapters with absolutely readable, edgy prose, Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe is a novel that deserves a wide audience. A character in the novel defines the word “lovely” as “beauty with a dimension of grace.” By that very definition, Jenny Hollowell’s novel is very, very lovely indeed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Holt Paperbacks; First Edition edition (June 8, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poormina Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jenny Hollowell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and Q&A
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another to try: Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas

Bibliography:

• Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe (June 2010)

“I felt the familiar, vertiginous tumble of emotions: relief at the presence in the absence (that something of my wife remained) and sorrow at the absence in the presence (that my daughters would always remind me their mother was gone). And the ugly sense that I held a bottomless debt of repentance: for even while I’d maintained my solitude, had never come close to marrying again in the thirty-two years since my wife’s death, still that solitude had been ample with pleasure.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (SEP 24, 2010)

I loved Three Junes by Julia Glass and her newest novel, The Widower’s Tale, has much the same wonderful flavor about it. This languid story of a family dealing with their relationships with one another and the instrusions of the outside world delights the senses. The central character is Percival Darling, widowed for the last thirty-two years, and a somewhat crusty, cynical and reclusive personality.

As the novel opens, Percy has just retired from the Widener Library at Harvard University where he worked as a librarian for several decades. He lives in Matlock, a suburb of Boston that has become quite upscale and yuppified. He and his wife Poppy purchased their home about forty years ago and, even then, it was a work in process. Now, it is a historic home in their town. It has a pond and a barn and its description seems idyllic.  The barn was once used as a dance studio by Poppy where she gave lessons to children. Percy is dealing with unrelenting guilt about Poppy’s death. Following a party, Poppy decided to go for a swim even though she had had quite a bit to drink. Percy wishes he had gone with her or told her not to go swimming but they had had an argument and Poppy needed to be by herself. She drowned that night and Percy has been dealing with his grief and guilt ever since.

Percy became widowed with two teenaged daughters, Trudy and Clover. Trudy felt that Percy was partly to blame for her mother’s death but Clover was never judgmental. Trudy was a straight arrow and serious student, now working as a chief oncologist in a prominent cancer facility. Clover led a life of poor choices and misguided meanderings. Most recently, she decided that motherhood didn’t suit her and she abandoned her husband and two children. She returned to Matlock and is involved in a preschool called Elves and Faeries that is housed in the barn on her father’s property. Getting her father to consent to the use of the barn was quite a challenge. Percy has a soft spot in his heart for Clover, partially because of her nonjudgmental attitude after Poppy died, and he goes out of his way to help her out.

Percy is very close to Trudy’s son, Robert. Robert is a Harvard student and intends to be a physician, most likely a psychiatrist. Until recently, like his mother, his life has been led according to the rules without much straying outside the lines. His roommate, Turo, is an activist and he gets Robert involved in his escapades. Turo’s advocacy is reminiscent of the 1960’s and groups like SDS or CORE. Currently, Turo is against wealthy corporations, affluent individuals who use too many resources, and his demonstrations and activities have brought him counter to the law. Richard is naïve and easily influenced, joining Turo without giving it much thought – even though he lacks real dedication to these causes and suspicion about the legitimacy of these actions has crossed his mind.

After thirty-six years of self-imposed detachment when it comes to women, Percy meets Sarah, a fifty-one year old single mother who he falls for almost instantly. At first, they are magically and romantically entwined. Their relationship becomes more complex as Sarah deals with serious personal issues as well as her relationship with an ex-lover named Gus who has re-entered her life.

There are several other important characters in this novel. One is Celestino, a Guatamalan immigrant who is in this country illegally. Once here on a student visa, he is now doing lawn work and winter maintenance for a company in Matlock. He is quite fluent in English but prefers to stay silent and let others assume that this is due to a language problem. He knows a lot about trees and flowers and is the most trusted employee of his firm. Another is Ira, a teacher at Elves and Faeries who is close friends with Clover. He is a gay man who lost his last job due to homophobia. He is now faced with the issue of how closeted he should be at his current job. He has been with his partner, Anthony, a long time and struggles with whether they should marry or not.

All in all, this book works very well. We find ourselves caught up in the characters’ lives, caring very much for all of them. Glass has a great hand with characterization and demonstrates the fine points of every day life. She also is excellent at revealing the crises we all face in our daily living. Each character is distinct and provides nuances that make this novel come together. Not since Three Junes has Glass come back into her own as she has with The Widower’s Tale.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 124 readers
PUBLISHER:	Pantheon (September 7, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Julia Glass
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: And the Dark Sacred Night I See You Everywhere

Bibliography:

• Three Junes (2002)
• The Whole World Over (2006)
• I See You Everywhere (2008)
• The Widower’s Tale (2010)
• And the Dark Sacred Night (April 2014)

“The only real innocent among them all was me…As I said those words to myself, I suddenly heard how dangerous they sounded; to be innocent in the midst of guilty was, after all, the same as being guilty in the midst of innocent.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (AUG 9, 2010)

There are many reasons we read: for enlightenment, escape, education, and in some rare instances, to confront ourselves with truths and insights we never would have encountered otherwise.

Brodeck is one of those rare instances. It is, quite simply, one of the best contemporary books I have ever read. And I have read a lot.

The book – which reads like an allegory or dark adult fairy tale – transcends those genres by strongly tethering itself to recognizable events and images. Brodeck, by many indications, appears to be Jewish, yet he served as an acolyte to a priest in his youth, implying that he isn’t. The locale appears to be in France’s Alsace-Lorraine, yet many of the geographical features do not fit. And the Nazis have wrecked havoc in the region, yet they are never mentioned by name.

What we DO know is this: Brodeck has been taken prisoner of war and has scratched and scraped his way to survival, serving as “Broderick the Dog” to sadistic camp officials. Against all odds, he has returned to his insular village where he is greeted with less than 100% enthusiasm.

And now, an elusive no-named stranger referred to as the Anderer – the Other – has appeared in the village with his horse and donkey and sketch pads, serving as a mirror to the truth of the village’s betrayals…its cowardice dishonorable conduct, spinelessness and moral stain. Early on, we learn that the village participated in a mass murder of the Anderer and it falls upon Brodeck – a low-level bureaucrat who now makes his living cataloguing the area’s flora and fauna – to write a whitewashing report about the event.

Brodeck himself is “the other;” he is an orphan, with only the sketchiest recollections of where he comes from and how he got to where he is. He knows that “each of us was a nothing. A nothing handed over to death. Its slave. Its toy. Waiting and resigned.” His survival has not changed that fact: “The others the ones who came out of it alive, like me – all of us still carry a part of it, deep down inside, like a stain. We can never again meet the eyes of other people without wondering whether they harbor the desire to hunt us down, to torture us, to kill us.”

His quest to discover what really happened to the Anderer is also a personal quest; to find out his own back story. At the start, the reader knows little: we know he has a mute wife Amelie and a young baby daughter and that he is merely tolerated by the village. As the book progresses, the picture begins to fall more and more into focus.

As he interacts with the various members of the community, he at one point meets with the village priest. In one of the most harrowing passages, the priest says, “Men are strange. They commit the worst crimes without question, but later they can’t live anymore with the memory of what they’ve done. They have to get rid of it. And so they come to me, because they know I’m the only person who can give them relief, and they tell me everything. I’m the sewer, Brodeck. I’m not the priest; I’m the sewer man.”

This book achieves something I thought would be impossible in literature: it universalizes the Holocaust. It offers up Brodeck as “every man” and his tormenters as “every man” as well. It reveals mankind’s ability to perpetrate the worst deeds and to turn its collective eye elsewhere when heinous deeds are being perpetrated. It displays our fervent struggle to forget and to absolve ourselves in the worst of times.

The prose is luminous and masterful. For that, I must partially give credit to the incredible translator, John Cullen. In reading international books, I’ve learned that a good translator can make or break a work of literature, and Cullen does Philippe Claudel proud. As for Claudel, his insights are astounding and his words are transformational. Some of the scenes are exquisitely painful to read; I gasped and shed tears on some of the more horrific.

Some evocations to works such as Camus’ The Stranger and Ibsen’s Enemy of the People come to mind but make no mistake: this is a highly original work. In the end, I knew that I had read something fiercely important – a modern masterpiece.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor; 1 edition (July 13, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikidpedia page on Phillippe Claudel (French)
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and ExcerptBrodeck wins Independent Prize
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More fiction about genocide:A Sunday at the Pool at Kigali by Gil Courtemarche Gotz and Meyer by David Albahari

Translated Bibliography:

• Grey Souls (2003)
• By a Slow River (2006)
• Brodeck (2007; 2009 in US)
• Monsieur Linh and His Child (2008; 2011 on Kindle)

Movie (writer and director):

• I Loved You So Long (2003)

“I saw a therapist for years. I stopped when I realized there was no fixing the broken bits…. When your world falls apart and everything’s ruined, you lose part of yourself. Not all, inconveniently. One half, the best half, dies. The other half lives.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (JUN 4, 2010)

Sophie Hannah’s The Dead Lie Down is a multi-faceted psychological thriller about guilt, revenge, self-destruction, and redemption. All of the major characters have something to hide and they reveal their secrets reluctantly. Aiden Seed, who frames pictures for a living, has decided that he and the woman he loves, Ruth Bussey, should be open with one another before they become intimate. Ruth hesitantly admits that she did something shameful and was punished excessively for her actions. Aiden is sympathetic, saying, “The worst things stow away in the hold, follow you wherever you go.” It is then his turn to confess: “Years ago, I killed someone.” “Her name was Mary. Mary Trelease.”

When Aiden makes his startling admission, Ruth is appalled. She cannot say to Aiden that it doesn’t matter. Instead, she confides in someone she admires, Sergeant Charlotte Zailer, who is part of the community policing team for the town of Spilling. The catch is that the woman Aiden claims to have killed is not dead. Mary Trelease lives at 15 Megson Crescent on the Winstanley Estate, a rough neighborhood whose residents are steeped in squalor and hopelessness. Trelease is a painter who jealously guards her work from prying eyes. Aiden shows no obvious signs of mental illness, so why is he confessing to a murder that he did not commit?

Sophie Hannah goes back and forth in time, and shifts point of view frequently. In addition, the author teases us with bits of information that, by themselves, mean very little. Eventually, the puzzle pieces come together to form a ghastly and unutterably depressing whole.

Sophie Hannah is a fine descriptive writer with a strong eye for detail. Her depiction of a party during which Charlie and her fiancé, DC Simon Waterhouse, celebrate their engagement at “a dingy room in a pub,” along with family and friends, is excruciating, embarrassing, funny, yet also unutterably sad. Simon and Charlie are a wounded pair and people say cruel things about them behind their backs. What should have been a festive occasion turns into a cringe-worthy fiasco. Simon’s boss, DI Proust, known as the Snowman, is creepy, cold-blooded, sarcastic, and completely unreasonable. He and Simon loathe one another, and their interactions are painful to observe.

The problem with this book is not the characterizations, which are heartbreakingly authentic, but the plot, which is byzantine and as far over the top as one can get. If an author requires more than one or two pages of exposition to explain everything that has gone before, this is a clue that something may be amiss. The Dead Lie Down concludes with such a lengthy explanation, intended to clarify the muddy narrative, that a scorecard would have been welcome to keep track of who did what to whom. How much more satisfying this novel would have been had the story been less dense and more grounded in reality.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 39 readers
PUBLISHER:	Penguin (Non-Classics) (June 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sophie Hannah
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Orphan Choir Other unusual mysteries: Death of a Writer by Michael Collins Something Might Happen by Jule Myerson Yes, My Darling Daughter by Margaret Leroy

Bibliography:

• Gripless (1999)
• Cordial and Corrosive: an unfairy tale (2000)
• The Superpower of Love (2002)
• The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets : Stories (2008)
• The Orphan Choir (January 2014)

Zailer & Waterhouse Mysteries:

• Little Face (2006)
• The Wrong Mother (2008 UK; 2009 US) ( Published as The Point of Rescue) in the UK
• The Dead Lie Down (2009 UK; 2010 US) (Published as The Other Half Livesin the UK)
• The Truth Teller’s Lie (2010 UK; 2010 US) (Published as Hurting Distance in the UK)
• The Cradle in the Grave (2011) (Published as A Room Swept White in the UK)
• The Other Woman’s House (2012)  (Published as Lasting Damage in the UK)
• Kind of Cruel (2012 UK; 2013)
• The Carrier (2014 in UK)

Note: Sophie Hannah is also an accomplished poet, see her website for more information on her poetry books.

“Every event, every memory, every conversation, however innocuous, demands examination, each word and detail culled, dissected in the harsh light of this new terrible knowledge – – that for the past four years her husband has been sleeping with another woman.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (OCT 8, 2009)

There are some books and authors that I’d like to have with me on a desert island. Mary McGarry Morris is one of those writers. I have always been drawn to her books, their dark and brooding nature with the sentience of doom and fatality omnipresent. I can almost smell the darkness when I read her novels, feel the desperation of the dissolute and the outsider. I have read all but two of her books and those two I’m saving for a very special time and place – – a desert island kind of moment. She’s THAT good a writer.

The Last Secret is powerful and unflinching.  It builds up slowly but the tension and angst keep coming. The characters are disgruntled, desperate, despairing, fragile, with huge currents roiling through their being as they try to keep their inner and outer storms at bay. Some characters are loathsome, despicable and pathetic. These are juxtaposed with others who try to stay strong, keep one foot in front of the other, and maintain independence at all costs. What Ms. Morris is so excellent at portraying is that while people try to fool themselves into believing that they have certain attributes better, worse, or more unique than others, most people are actually quite alike in that they harbor these components: the good, the bad and the evil.

When she was seventeen years old, Nora ran off with a troubled young man named Eddie Hawkins. During the week she was with him she drank a lot, got into situations that were outside her comfort range and behaved in ways that she thought were completely outside her moral compass. At one point Eddie asks her to come on to an older man and encourage him to follow her outside a bar so that Eddie can rob him. The older man follows her and something dreadful happens. Nora is never sure of the exact details but she has a recurrent nightmare that the man has his face bashed in by a tire iron and that she is the one who commits the crime. What she also remembers, is that after the “incident” she is covered with blood and that she hitches a ride with a semi driver who manages to get her away from the scene of the crime and encourages her to call her mother. She calls her mother and returns home, bringing with her a lifetime of guilt and nightmares.

Skip forward twenty-five years. Nora is now happily married (so she thinks) to a man named Ken and she has two teen-aged children, Drew and Chloe. She has married into old money and works on the family-owned newspaper in New England. From the outside, everyone is happy and the family looks perfect but, as Nora believes, “Happiness so often trails a long shadow.” She soon finds out that Ken has been having a “relationship” for the past four years with one of her best friends. Nora’s world is shattered. Her family is torn apart and in the process other, and often darker, secrets come to light. “Behind every truth lurks a darker truth. Behind the simplest reality, betrayal.”

Nora is philanthropic and she is deeply involved with the volunteer board for Sojourn House, a home for battered women. Sojourn House has received national attention and Nora is being photographed by Newsweek magazine for her work there. Eddie Hawkins, sociopathic and narcissistic, sees Nora’s picture in the magazine and recognizes her from their week together twenty-five years earlier. He travels across the country to Nora’s hometown and sets himself up there in a cheap hotel. He contacts Nora who does not know what he wants but she has a stomach-turning, gut-wrenching uneasiness about seeing him. Her gut reaction is that he has sought her out to blackmail her for the role she had in what she thinks may have been a murder twenty-five years previously. She is a victim of perceived blackmail. Eddie Hawkins arrives just as her marriage and life are falling apart. Though fragile, angry and unsure on the inside, Nora comes across as independent, strong and almost cold on the outside. This is a common theme in Ms. Morris’s books – – the outside harbors the seeds of the inside, and vice verse.

As Nora is dealing with one family secret and betrayal after another, the book proceeds to get darker and darker, with a deeply ingenious plot and wonderfully deep and crisp characterizations. I felt like I could reach out and touch the characters, they came so alive. Characterization is one of Ms. Morris’s greatest gifts (and she has many). She examines the inner and outer worlds of her protagonists and leaves no stone left unturned. That, along with a breath holding plot, make this one of the best books I’ve read this year. I finished the book in two days, hardly coming up for air. My only disappointment was that I didn’t want it to end. I wanted to continue to be a fly on the wall watching, and watching, and watching some more.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	Shaye Areheart Books; Stated First Edition edition (April 7, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Mary McGarry Morris
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of Light from a Distant Star Songs in Ordinary Time More authors to enjoy if you like this one: Joyce Carol Oates Anita Shreve Michelle Huneven

Bibliography:

• Vanished
• A Dangerous Woman (1993)
• Songs in Ordinary Time (1997)
• Fiona Range (2000)
• A Hole in the Universe (2004)
• The Lost Mother (2005)
• The Last Secret (2009)
• Light from a Distant Star (September 2011)

Movies made from books:

• Dangerous Woman (1993)
• Songs in Ordinary Time (200)