It towers over the other shortlisted novels, entertainment on a grand scale, hugely ambitious, brilliantly written in slang-laced language that’s a pleasure to savor aloud, and teeming with unforgettable characters. (Can you remember even one character from The Gathering?) There’s Animal himself, a nineteen-year-old with a spinal deformity who runs on all fours and is narrating the story into a tape recorder, Elli, the bold, no-nonsense American woman doctor who has come to open her own free health clinic, Zafar, the beloved leader of the poor who would starve for his cause of justice, Ma Franci, the crazy French nun awaiting the Apocalypse, and Somraj, internationally famous Hindu singer with a damaged throat who now hears music in all the sounds around him. And that’s just a few of them.

The novel takes place nineteen years after a nightmarish industrial gas leak in the American factory that dominates the town. This backstory is clearly inspired by the very real industrial disaster at Bhopal, India, on December 3, 1984 when a Union Carbide pesticide plant had a chemical gas leak resulting in over three thousand deaths, deformed births, contaminated food, and polluted water.

As a stylist author Sinha falls somewhere between Rohinton Mistry and Yann Martel, but his classic passion for social justice links him more with Victor Hugo and Emile Zola, and his host of characters verges on Dickensian in numbers, memorability, and sheer delight. Sinha clearly loves these characters passionately (Take a look at the incredible lifesize statue by Eleanor Stride which the author commissioned of the novel’s central character, Animal) and tortures the reader with worries over their various fates, as a hunger strike in the deadly hot season and a huge protest movement by the poor veer angrily out of control and erupt into city-wide violence.

Here’s a hefty slice of the human comedy, served up with generous portions of every pleasure fiction can offer: language, character, plot, suspense, surprise, and wisdom. Go ahead, start with the first sentence. “I used to be human once.”

Paul Tarrant is doomed to a life of working in the ironworks, but comes to London on his grandmother’s legacy to pursue his real dream: painting. Kit Neville is the son of a successful war correspondent, and already becoming famous for his aggressive, noisy modern canvases. He’s desperately in love with Elinor Brooke, from the landed world of privilege, who has won a scholarship to the Slade, the legendary art school in London where they all meet. There Paul falls in love with Teresa, an art school model with a violent stalker of a husband. And Elinor begins to fall in love with Paul. Each remains true to their own talent in their own way, as they’re pulled apart and flung together by the war that engulfs them all.

Intermingled with the fictional characters are the real-life womanizing painter Augustus John, the eccentric Lady Ottoline Morrell, the greatest aristocratic hostess of her time, and Dr Henry Tonks, the Victorian surgeon who became an artist and helped pioneer techniques of plastic surgery on the disfigured young soldiers returning from the horrors of the trenches.

In her usual clear, clean, effortless prose, Pat Barker tells a compelling story that never lets up momentum, avoids sentimentality and predictability, and concludes in an extremely satisfying manner, while asking powerful questions about the role of war in art, unanswered questions with plenty of ammo for all sides. She creates characters with passions and values you believe in, talented young people you care about in a world where art and war and love converge.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

The most thoughtful and entertaining novel to come out of Europe in a decade is Night Train to Lisbon, written by Swiss philosopher Peter Bieri under the pseudonym of Pascal Mercier. It’s a smart, heartfelt, thoroughly enjoyable novel written for thinking adults, and the most recent incarnation, from Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf right down to Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, of that potent, ever-popular myth, the book that changes your life.

That’s exactly what 57-year-old Raimund Gregorius finds in a secondhand bookshop. That little book, along with a young Portuguese woman about to jump off a bridge, cause this set-in-his-ways professor of dead languages to walk out of the school where he has taught for thirty years, out of his rigid life of habits in Bern, and get on a train to Lisbon to find out everything he can about the little book’s Portuguese author, Amadeu de Prado.

The novel expertly tells two stories at the same time with two very different, very endearing heroes. One is Gregorius, the old academic suffering from dizzy spells, who boldly decides to live the part of his life he’s never dared. From being a stuffy old stickler the faculty call Papyrus, he is slowly humanized and changed in Lisbon by piecing together the troubled saga of the little book’s author.

That's Amadeu de Prado, the other hero, a brilliant bad boy whose fiery graduation address scandalizes the Church, an honest young man who falls in love with the woman adored by his best friend. Amadeu is an obedient son who takes up medicine to please his pain-ridden, hunchbacked father. He becomes a saintly doctor who saves the life of the dictator’s cruelest henchman and becomes hated by the Resistance fighters he loves. Both tales are studded with dozens of great scenes and emotional payoffs.

It’s a story about putting together the pieces of a story. The characters are learned about in their tragic, romantic youth as legendary figures, then actually encountered as old people, when the drama is long over. The present-day action of the novel is built upon geriatric interviews with the survivors. You’ve never read a novel with this many eighty-year-old characters!

To top it off, hefty servings of Amadeu’s translated writings pepper the tale in meaty philosophical chunks. Go ahead and buy this one – believe me, you’ll want to read it more than once.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

Both Miura’s unnamed narrator and Miura himself suffer from terror of their own genetic make-up. Miura and his narrator are both writers desperately trying to work out their demons, telling the same story over and over, the story of Miura’s real-life family. One sister threw herself into the sea. One sister took poison. One brother disappeared. One brother ran off with the family funds. And then there’s Miura. With the history of his brothers and sisters, he can only wonder in fear what will he do to shame his family. Does he not have the same blood?

There’s a startling moment when you start the second story and realize you’ve already covered this ground, that the tale of the narrator’s shattered family and his love for Shino is being told again, but differently this time. Each of the five tales takes a different moment in the same narrative. What is told in one sentence in the third story becomes the subject of the fourth story. As exasperated as the reader gets with the narrator, who refuses to work so that he can lock himself in his room and write stories that he can’t sell, the troubled little narratives that have resulted are his redemption and our joy. Slowly you learn more and more about Miura’s brave, tragic family, and the hair’s breadth difference between good luck and bad.

Fascinating minor characters abound – the idealistic bookseller who buys the narrator’s books, the cast-off girlfriend of a college buddy, kind neighbors and childhood friends, broom makers and house maids, the unnoticed, forgettable people of the world.

The last novella has nothing to do with the first five. Maybe this means Miura has worked out his demons, and can go on to tell another story beside his own. Its central image – a father swinging his daughter in a field, and becoming so exuberant he’s careless – captures Miura’s melancholy sense of the randomness of fate. Jaded readers will find that set-ups in Miura’s world seldom lead to the pay-offs we expect. What looks like a “dear John” letter can really be a proposal of marriage.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

The Bad Girl

Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian literary master (who also ran for President of Peru in 1990, and who slugged Garcia Marquez in the eye for getting way too friendly with Mrs Vargas Llosa) is at the height of his storytelling powers, unraveling a spellbinding love story laced with plenty of comic shocks and unexpected reversals, populated by dozens of colorful supporting characters (the fat cook revolutionary, the adopted Vietnamese boy who won’t speak, the old man who communes with the ocean), and featuring two ferociously mismatched, constantly battling, star-crossed lovers to die for.

From an almost folkloric beginning in Miraflores, Peru, when the narrator at the age of fifteen first falls for the pretty, heartless new Chilean girl with the fascinating (fake) accent, each chapter moves forward in time, shifting location, deepening the characters, revealing more and more as the bad girl goes from one deception and betrayal to another.

Ricardo Somocurcio is a “good boy,” a translator and interpreter for UNESCO, and he’s head-over-heels in love with her. She’s a tricky chameleon who never tells the truth, repeatedly deceives him, cheats him, and nearly destroys him, but she has a weakness for Ricardo’s passionate professions of love, his sentimental talk from the soap operas.

Just like the bad girl herself, the novel is an irresistible seduction, a sexy tease filled with provocative clues and postponed promises. Ambitious in scope, it stretches from Cuba to Japan, with major sequences in France, England, Peru and Spain in a story that spans over thirty years.

Vargas Llosa loves his characters, loves his readers, and delights in yanking the rug out from under them again and again in a crafty plot that never goes quite where you think it will. The casually-revealed surprise that opens the last chapter alone is a head-spinner. And talk about a perfect ending – they don’t get any better! This is why we read, for sheer storytelling joy and an intimate emotional connection to the human comedy.

(and here's Gabriel Garcia Marquez with the black eye given to him by Mario Vargas Llosa)

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

The freighter Aldebaran is stranded in Marseilles and up for sale. The owner has disappeared. Abdul Aziz, the Lebanese captain, and Diamantes, the Greek first mate, realize that for ten years of working together as a perfect team they’ve never really trusted each other enough to reveal their private lives. But when a sailor opens up and confides in someone, he’s lost. These two lost sailors and their troubled attempt at friendship serve as the spine for this superbly-written waterfront noir, which plays out like a classic black-and-white French movie, moody and character-driven, romantic and doomed.

Diamantes is a sailor like his father before him, with a passionate love of maps and sealore, trying to forget the girl he left behind. Abdul Aziz, the tortured captain he serves, desperately needs someone to talk to – his marriage is crumbling, he’s losing the woman he adores, and all he can do is sternly cling to the rules of the ship that will be his last command. One other crew member hasn’t left the grounded ship, Nedim, the Turkish sailor boy looking for love who always stumbles into trouble. Along with trouble he also finds Amina, the beautiful girl with the mysterious scar under her eye, abandoned by a sailor long ago and jealously guarded by Ricardo, kingpin of the Marseilles underworld. Every character is sympathetic, every character has a past and a point of view, as they battle for what they love and what they think is right in a tragic, headlong collision that spans generations and sweeps innocent and guilty alike toward violence.

Jean-Claude Izzo, who passed away half a dozen years ago, is a master in the classic French tradition. With concise, confident prose, filled with silences and understatement, he creates a realistic world of shipyard toughs and bargirls, freighters and sailors that he seems to know intimately. Not only does he effortlessly create the rich, textured feel of a literary crime thriller, Izzo is a philosopher who never misses an opportunity to comment on the stark realities of the plot. “The real questions are the ones you only ask yourself later. When you’ve already screwed up your life.”

Throughout this rich, wonderful novel Marseilles is omnipresent, teeming with life, radiant and complex as a character, the city Izzo passionately loved, the city where he lived and died.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

Suite Francaise, with its historical setting and grand wartime scope, is Nemirovsky in a Tolstoy-like mood, documenting her time. Fire in the Blood couldn’t be more different. Without a hint of wartime horrors, it’s her timeless Chekhov piece, a tight little drama of country landowners and unfaithful wives in which some humdinger surprises go off like blazing pistols in the second half.

Old Sylvestre, nicknamed Silvio, impoverished uncle, down-on-his-luck failure in life, has decided to lay bare his soul and the souls of quite a few members of the wealthy farming community of a little village in Burgundy. He’s particularly interested in three fascinating women: his lovely, happily-married cousin Helene, her daughter Colette who is about to be married, and Brigitte Declos, a young woman married to a wealthy old skinflint.

Colette introduces her fiancé to her family. She announces that she hopes for a marriage as stable and enduring as her parents’. That’s how it begins. But no one knows the whole story in this swift little whiplash of a literary experience, as two beautiful young women with “fire in the blood” reach out for the man they love, unleashing the secrets and lies of everyone around them.

Gasping at the audacity of the last sentence, overwhelmed by a new understanding of the plot in retrospect, this reader went right back to the beginning of this cunning little puzzle of deceptions to read it again. Every word counts, every sentence is immaculate, every twist of the storyline is a delightful pleasure, in this wise, ironic look at passionate love and the collateral damage of “fire in the blood.”

As Sylvestre says, “The flesh is easy to satisfy. It’s the heart that is insatiable…”

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

Thirty-nine-year-old narrator Veronica Hegarty was always close to Liam, and wants to tell you about her brother’s death, and in particular about something that happened when she was eight and Liam was nine (or, at least, could have happened, or maybe didn’t happen at all), but to do so she has to go all the way back to 1925, and the meeting of Veronica’s grandmother, Ada, age nineteen, with the mysterious, enigmatic Lambert Nugent in the foyer of a Dublin hotel. It’s love at first sight. Does Ada marry Lambert? No. Instead she marries his best friend, Charlie Spillane, who drives up with a flashy car outside. Thus, according to Veronica, her brother’s fate is set in motion. What this has to do with Liam’s death is the mystery.

Don’t expect to find out what really happened in grandmother’s house. Memory in Enright’s hands is even more treacherous and unreliable than in Proust’s. Veronica gives you all kinds of variant possibilities, but that’s all they are, contradictory interpretations of the past, fallible guesswork.

Author Enright has a fine time entertaining you, with a spunky irony to the writing style, an exuberance in the language, a sly wisdom underlying the twists of the narrative. Her tale is pull-no-punches honest about the unfairness and disappointments of life, but playful enough to include a sex scene that didn’t really happen. It’s a thrillingly honest and unsentimental look at the human experience, with plenty of defiant Irish laughter in the face of mortality.

Dotted with deadpan gems, every page seasoned with Enright’s irrepressible spirit, The Gathering is a tribute to the family funerals of life, where grief is “somewhere between diarrhea and sex.”

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

The Four Kings are in charge, raiding and trading, deciding how much the dillos get to eat and drink each day, deciding who gets to stay below and who are left outside – the sick, the wounded, the unfaithful – to freeze to death in the snow.

Originally titled Los Pichiciegos (small Argentine armadillos, an endangered species) and first published in 1982 as one of the first literary accounts of the Falklands War, the novel has been newly translated as Malvinas Requiem (the Argentines don’t call the islands the Falklands, they call them the Malvinas).

It’s a punchy, startling, thrilling little book. In a spare, elliptical style, as though his lean prose has no time to waste and barely survived the hardships of the war, Rodolpho Fogwill sketches the daily terrors of that deadly June winter, the secret transactions with the Brits, the sheep blown up by landmines, the murderous swarms of helicopters, the spectral nuns haunting the mountainside at night.

Fogwill assumes you know that the Argentine generals were ruthless tyrants, the islands were populated almost exclusively by British shepherds with their flocks, and that these deserters are bartering with the Brits to betray their own Argie army.

Tortured and killed if caught by their own, subject to the whim of British mercy or brutality, Fogwill shows you battered Argentine soldiers with promise-filled leaflets in hand being napalmed as they stand in line to surrender.

Not until halfway through the third-person narrative does a mysterious “I” begin to appear, writing down notes, interrogating one of the dillos. Then a window is mentioned – an odd detail very much out of place in an underground burrow. Slowly out of these clues a narrator surfaces in his hotel room, recording the testimony of one angry survivor.

It’s a dazzling little tour de force that sounds like it was thrown together as fast as it reads, another brilliantly-written, heartbreaking human document of how we slaughter our children.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

For a reader who wants to understand Africa, the real, complex Africa, this book has it all. And that’s just one of its pluses – as a first novel, this is a terrifying joy.

The narrative technique is that same one Garcia Marquez employs in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. We know the ending. That’s the first sentence. Then we begin circling the horror that we know, and finding out more every chapter, but in reverse order, until we find out the beginning wasn’t what we thought.

The reader beginning the novel knows a mind-stretching atrocity has happened at Edenfields, the most glorious Dutch farm of them all, huge and prosperous and thriving, in a country that looks and feels a lot like Zimbabwe. In an early scene the reader knows the eight farm dogs are discovered mutilated and dead and dying. The dogs being put out of their misery is a wrenching scene. BUT a couple chapters later we have a scene in which those same frolicksome, delightful dogs get a good, soapy bath. This reader came unglued.

This is the story of Davey Baker, a good-looking, sixteen-year-old farmboy who alone survives an attack in which he loses his parents under hellish circumstances that deepen and darken the farther you wade into this unraveling, gasp-filled tale. Part One sets up what’s happened and what he’s done. It gets him into the care of Aunt Marsha, one of the book’s joys. Part Two is Davey’s solitary, brutal journey across country to reclaim his farm – a visionary road trip, and go ahead and hope, but you won’t be spared anything. Anything. This is Cormac McCarthy country, expect the worst, it’s just much better written than McCarthy with real women characters. Part Three is the local farmers’ night mission of revenge. It’s pure horror story as they go back to the creepy farm of death, the value of farming the one thing all four of these at-risk men have believed in all their lives.

Author Holding is a 29-year-old schoolteacher in Harare, Zimbabwe, and I would be fearful for my life if I’d written his brave, beautiful book. He’s a fire for us all.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)