NICK'S PICKS
the best new book of the month
2001-2007
(in alphabetical order)
ATONEMENT by Ian McEwan
Sometimes the rave reviews are right.
Overlapping points of view retrace the same events on a single, stifling hot summer day in 1935, when thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis plans to stage her first play to welcome home her adored brother. A broken vase is all it takes to change the lives forever of Robbie Turner, the cleaning lady’s son, and the girl he adores, Briony’s older sister. Accidents and misunderstandings transform a dinner party into a catastrophe in slow motion, as the random wheels of fate alter the lives and future happiness of the Tallis family.
The novella which forms the first half of the book is a masterpiece in itself. The ending is one of the most brilliant and touching in recent fiction.
BALZAC & THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS by Dai Sijie
Originally written in French, China-born author Sijie’s delightful first novel takes place on Phoenix of the Sky Mountain, where two young intellectuals from the city are being “re-educated” in a peasant village under the Maoist regime in 1972. Their assignment: to carry buckets of sewage down the mountainside on their backs. When they both fall in love with the tailor’s beautiful daughter and discover a hidden treasure of forbidden Western classics, their lives are changed forever.
A beautifully-written gem of a book. The story has a perfect ironic ending, and is a tribute to the role books play in our lives.
BLACK SWAN GREEN by David Mitchell
Here’s a whole little English village inside a book – over 150 characters, caught up in all the laughter and grief and cruelty of life, as witnessed and brilliantly chronicled by Jason Taylor, just trying to survive into his teens, wrestling daily with the invisible Hangman who makes him stutter. He’s thirteen, and he’ll do just about anything not to be the school stutterboy.
As war erupts in the Falklands, Jason bravely faces all the terrors of growing up, the village bullies, the popular students, the dreaded gypsies, the secret anger between his parents, and that first frightening kiss.
Author Mitchell is like a one-man Fourth of July, the verbal pyrotechnics are breathtaking, the plot turns dazzling and hilarious and heartbreaking. What a book.
THE BOOK OF JOE by Jonathan Tropper
When Joe Goffman left Bush Falls, he wrote a shocking bestseller exposing the town’s secrets plus a few he made up.
Now his father’s in a coma and Joe has to return to a town that hasn’t forgiven him, to stand by the gay friend who needs him, to face the cop and the coach who despise him, and to encounter again the girl he left behind.
This wildly funny emotional rollercoaster is a smart take on Capra and Spielberg country, studded with surprises and payoffs, packed with great scenes right up to the triple-topper, choke-up ending. A well-crafted, heartfelt piece of high-quality entertainment, so unstoppable it practically reads itself.
THE BOOKSELLER OF KABUL by Asne Seierstad
Asne Seierstad, a courageous Norwegian journalist in her twenties, actually lived with an Afghan family to create this real-life documentary, a kind of non-fiction novel. She tells the story of the Khan family with objectivity and compassion, caught up in the realities of their daily lives in a country bombed by the U.S., tormented by the Taliban, bullet-ridden by civil wars.
Enter the hidden lives of the women in the bookseller’s household – never trusted alone, married off without consent, traveling through life inside their burkas.
With journalistic immediacy Seierstad opens up your heart to the real people of Afghanistan in all their complexity and humanity.
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH CHE GUEVARA by Ben Fountain
You think you don’t like short stories. Read the first story. Go ahead, just start it.
Blair is an idealistic grad student who’ll risk anything in revolution-torn Colombia to save a colony of near-extinct Crimson-capped parrots.
Jill in Sierra Leone will risk her life smuggling diamonds for the sake of the one-armed seamstresses in her sewing co-op for survivors.
In Haiti, where the corrupt police are all driving new cars, Syto knows where a cocaine shipment has washed up on the beach.
Here are eight brilliantly-written international stories of people making moral choices in political hells, soul-rattling tales of flawed people trying to make the right decisions in the face of violent injustice. Out of these terrifying glimpses into the modern world come eight literary gems – a rare and wonderful reading experience.
CAPTAIN OF THE SLEEPERS by Mayra Montero
Why, after all these years, does the man Andres swore to kill want to tell him the truth?
Secret adult passions are ripping apart the little world of eleven-year-old Andres at his father’s hotel on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. And the problem seems to revolve around Andres’ mother and the Captain of the Sleepers, J. T. Bunker, a pilot-for-hire who transports the dead and more dangerous shipments between the islands.
As the nationalists secretly prepare to strike, a brainy little brat decides to interfere in a situation he doesn’t understand. Cuban author Montero’s thrilling study of two men at a moral crossroads has an ending that will leave you gasping.
THE CAVE by Jose Saramago
No quotation marks. No paragraphs. Very few periods. We’re talking basically an endless stream of run-on sentences, a river of commas and words.
Take a chance on it. Throw out your fussy preconceptions and read a novel that flames into life on its own terms. Out of the simplest plot elements Saramago weaves a tender, heartwarming story filled with his dry, subtle observations on the human comedy.
Old Cipriano Algor, an aging potter, and his pregnant daughter, Marta, are in a race against time to save the family business and their way of life, assisted by a lost dog, Found, one of the most lovingly described dogs in current fiction.
Go ahead. Just start it. You’ll soon see why he won the Nobel Prize.
CHICKEN WITH PLUMS by Marjane Satrapi
From the brilliant Iranian cartoonist comes another hilarious, heartbreaking tale. Marjane Satrapi’s new book is everything her fans could hope for -- a profoundly moving story by the author of Persepolis, which was chosen as Seattle Public Library’s 2006 book all Seattle should read.
It’s the beautiful, tragic story of her great uncle, Nasser Ali, a famous musician who dies when his beloved musical instrument is broken. But his death is just the beginning. It takes eight days, and there’s a story behind every day.
Enjoy an old family tale filled with complex, many-sided characters – unhappy Nasser Ali, with his cherish tar, his angry, bitter wife, Nahid, and their cheerful, noisy, annoying son, Mozaffar.
Subtly plotted, irreverent and wise, told in Satrapi’s stark, deceptively-simple black-and-white pictures as well as words, it’s an emotional rollercoaster with an unforgettable ending.
CRABWALK by Gunter Grass
A ghost ship is roaming the Internet.
Ten thousand Germans are fleeing Poland in a ten-story-high Nazi pleasure ocean liner. Named after a Nazi martyr assassinated by a Jew, the ship Wilhelm Gustloff was torpedoed in 1945 in the worst maritime disaster of all time. Because the victims were fleeing Nazis – including 4000 children – the story has been kept quiet until now.
Nobel-winning Gunter Grass brings the tragic day to life – the Russian captain who launched the torpedoes, the exploding swimming pool, the falling lifeboat, the people caught in the propeller – in the construction recollections of a man who was born to one of the tragedy’s survivors as the ship was sinking. Fifty years later, he begins to suspect that a neo-Nazi Internet site has a webmaster he knows – his own seventeen-year-old son.
Harrowing, thickly political, intensely thought-provoking, Grass describes how hate lives on in modern Germany as the past continues to fester. Compelling, disturbing reading.
THE CRAZED by Ha Jin
While student demonstrators head for Tiananmen Square in 1989, in Shanning City old Professor Yang lies in his hospital room, in the delirium following a stroke. He raves, weeps, sings and confesses to his attending future son-in-law, the narrator, Jian Wan, a graduate student in poetry desperately cramming for his exams, now forced to spend every afternoon in the hospital, learning more than he ever wanted to know about his beloved teacher, making decisions that will change his life.
The National Book Award-winning Ha Jin writes English impeccably, and his subtle tale of academic backstabbing and political unrest culminates in a harrowing account of the fateful riots in Beijing that astounded the world.
CROW LAKE by Mary Lawson
This is why we read – to find novels as good as this one.
Up until now Katie Morrison has never taken her lover, Daniel, out to meet her brothers and sister at Crow Lake, the small farming community in northern Ontario where she grew up. As they drive there now from Toronto, she tries to tell him why.
This rich, exhilarating novel chronicles in particular the year Katie is seven, when her parents are both killed in a freakish car accident, when her teenage brother sacrifices his scholarship to keep the four kids together, and a neighborhood tragedy changes their lives forever.
Lawson’s unforgettable first novel contains writing so thoughtful and heartfelt that every page is a pleasure. Highest recommendation.
THE CRUELEST JOURNEY by Kira Salak
“Though we may think we choose our journeys, they choose us,” says 32-year-old author Kira Salak.
She’s about to set out in her inflatable red kayak to paddle solo for six hundred miles down the Niger River to Timbuktu. She’s following the journals of 23-year-old Mungo Park, the daring young Scottish explorer who first tried in 1795 to find the source of the Nile. He didn’t make it.
In the country of Mali, where women only cook and bear children and never, ever paddle canoes, Salak dares to brave storms, rapids, hippos, enraged villagers, river outlaws and sickness, while consulting native sorcerers and witches along the way to appease the treacherous genies of the Niger.
Nothing is going to stop her. She’s never let fear stand in her way before. She’s not about to start now.
DANCING ARABS by Sayed Kashua
When a young Arab-Israeli troublemaker dives off the roof and cracks open his head, he changes into a good student.
The first day he sees a live Jew up close, he wets his pants.
He’s the unnamed young hero of Dancing Arabs, a slice-of-life human comedy by Arab-Israeli author Sayed Kashua, and his hero spends the rest of his life struggling to be mistaken for a successful Jew.
With the menace of war, the helicopters and gunfire always present, these poignant anecdotes, sometimes wildly funny, always heartbreakingly honest, string together into a young man’s very human life-long struggle to come to terms with his father and his people.
DARK BRIDE by Laura Restrepo
The best novel out of Latin America in decades, The Dark Bride is an investigation into the life of Sayonara, a nameless Indian girl with almond eyes who becomes the legendary Japanese goddess of the colored-light district in the little Colombian town of Tora, where the 400 workers of Camp 26 of the Tropical Oil Company flock to squander their paychecks on the illusion of happiness.
Restrepo’s delightful technique is to interview her own characters in old age as they reconstruct the roles they played in the mysterious legend of Sayonara, the girl with no past, adored from childhood by Sacramento the cart man, but hopelessly in love with Sacramento’s best friend.
This life-filled, good-natured epic is wise and beautiful, funny and true. You’ll laugh and cry and gasp with amazement.
THE DARLING by Russell Banks
Hannah Musgrave was a radical 60’s activist. Now she’s trying to hide from her past in Liberia, living under an assumed name, married to a corrupt government official, the mother of three sons. She’s passionately committed to the love of her life: a sanctuary for chimpanzees.
But the Americo-Liberian elite are about to be overthrown. Her world is about to go up in flames, destroyed by betrayals and riots and children with assault rifles.
This is the confession of a fiercely idealistic, independent woman, her loves and her choices. It’s a study of the differences between men and women, black and white, human and chimpanzee, about the implacable nature of violence, where it comes from, how it spreads, and about the danger of losing who you really are.
A DEATH IN BRAZIL by Peter Robb
A compulsively readable, elegantly-written love song to a land of outrageous contradictions and violence, this genre-defying book is part memoir, part travel adventure, part slice of history all rolled into an hypnotic exercise in serpentine storytelling. Structured around a true-crime account of brother-against-brother in the presidential elections, the stories-within-stories are melodramatic enough to be Brazilian telenovelas, all interwoven with the food and literature and African culture of northeastern Brazil, with particular accounts of the two cities of runaway slaves that defied the national government. Personal and panoramic, harrowing and heartbreaking, this is a passionate, one-of-a-kind book.
THE FALL OF BAGHDAD by Jon Lee Anderson
Jon Lee Anderson joined news correspondents from all over the world in a Baghdad controlled by Saddam Hussein. As the war began, however, Anderson and a handful of other journalists lingered too long until leaving was no longer an option.
You are there, in the middle of the Shock and Awe bombing, on the receiving end of the military operations, side-by-side with the civilians in the doomed city. You witness heartbreaking losses that put a human face on statistics.
Opening with the riot of the released prisoners in Abu Greib, The Fall of Baghdad is journalism at its best, objective and agenda-free, letting the evidence speak for itself in thoughtful, compelling prose. Never melodramatic, never manipulative, this is an historic recreation of Pulitzer Prize quality.
A FALSE SENSE OF WELL BEING by Jeanne Braselton
Jessie Maddox is a social worker in a mental health clinic, married to Turner Maddox, a banker and genuinely good man. So why does Jessie keep fantasizing about Turner coming to an untimely end in a grisly fatal accident?
Her best friend, Donna, is having a torrid, risky affair with young shirt salesman. Her patient, Wanda McNabb, has just shot her husband. Her sister, Ellen, is picking up excitement in the local tavern. Jessie, however, is headed for a fateful reunion with the first love of her life -- a four-foot-tall, beheaded Green Duck.
Thought-provoking, hilarious, bristling with satire but never without compassion, this outrageous Southern novel is the most enjoyable read of the season, a first novel that is unpredictable, honest, and downright fun.
FAMILY MATTERS by Rohinton Mistry
When 79-year-old Nariman Vakeel becomes bed-bound, his step-daughter tires of caring for him and sends him to live with his favorite child, Roxana, in her over-crowded tiny apartment with her husband and two sons. As the old man catapults the family into a financial crisis, nine-year-old Jehangir will do anything to keep his parents from fighting over money, even what he knows is wrong.
These are multi-faceted characters to ache and worry over, to laugh with and mourn with in their heroic struggles to make ends meet and remain a family. Mistry has every skill of a master novelist, conjuring the whole cycle of human life in a single family. A brilliant cast of secondary characters round out the story. Hardly a page does not contain a literary marvel. The ending is simply brilliant.
Highest recommendation.
A FEW SHORT NOTES ON TROPICAL BUTTERFLIES by John Murray
A single, forty-year-old doctor who has spent her life specializing in enteric diseases discovers more than cholera in Bombay. A man afraid of the sea takes a last boat ride down the Gulf Stream with his runaway father. A butterfly collector lives with a tribe of cannibals in his search for the largest butterfly in the world. A boy’s lunatic, estranged father in India turns out to be a selfless medical volunteer. In an African jungle hospital engulfed by terrified refugees, surrounded by rebel soldiers, a wounded doctor learns a lesson from a 1778 English painting.
A superb collection of short stories involving medicine and biology, these tales by John Murray, who was trained as a doctor, ring with authenticity and are written with control and grace, global vision and humanitarian compassion.
THE FORCE OF THE PAST by Sandro Veronesi
How could the illegal taxi driver know that Gianni’s 8-year-old son had just learned to ride a bicycle? Gianni flings himself out of the taxi and runs for the police. He takes his wife and child into hiding. But there’s no hiding from the past he never knew existed until it reaches out and grabs him.
Here’s a philosophical thriller that’s wildly funny, a literary high-wire act packed with surprises and lies. Veronesi gleefully plays with your mind, repeatedly yanking the rug out from under you. Seldom has fiction captured so comically the uncertainty and ambiguity of real life, the uneasy guesses and gaps of not knowing that make up what we believe to be true. It’s an intellectual hoot, brimming with all the goofiness of modern living.
FOUR CORNERS by Kira Salak
Pure excitement. Superb writing. The harrowing solo journey of a gutsy, dauntless 24-year-old woman who feels her fear and faces it as she crosses the island of Papua New Guinea.
Battling droves of cockroaches, hungry swarms of mosquitoes, waterborne leeches, torrentials rains and sunstroke, not to mention island ghosts, she encounters rebel guerillas and Christian cannibals, warring tribes, drunken gangs of deadly rascals, a crocodile farmer and a playful chopper pilot, in her evolution into an authentic Bush Mary.
Highest recommendation.
FOURTH UNCLE IN THE MOUNTAIN by Quang Van Nguyen and Margorie Pivar
Get swept away by a true story of startling twists and surprises, as full of life and death as the Mekong River. It’s a tale of abandoned jungle temples and mind-stretching supernatural encounters, gangster monks on motorcycles, river pirates, and the casual terrors of war, with a plucky boy hero trained in acupuncture as well as martial arts.
Quang is a smart, curious young orphan with a weakness for playing pranks, adopted by a medicinal healer, educated by monks, taught by forbidden sorcerers, until at last he is confined for his enlightenment in the underground caves of the Fourth Uncle.
It’s an unputdownable tale, told in an intimate, oral style with an unassuming wisdom, a thrilling, Castaneda-like search for knowledge as well as a moving tribute to the most profound love between a father and son.
FUN HOME by Alison Bechtel
Alison tells her parents she’s gay. Her mother asks her father for a divorce. Her secretly-gay father steps in front of a truck.
It’s the violent turning-point of Alison Bechtel’s life. It’s the center of her brilliant little graphic memoir, the mystery around which the plot revolves again and again. In a matter of a couple weeks, the door slams on Alison’s childhood – but another door opens, the world of art, of cartoons, and the incredible pictures telling the very story you’re reading.
Leaping gleefully forwards and backwards in time, the story always returns to the unsolvable mystery of her father’s death.
Grim going? The opposite. It’s hilarious, smart-alecky, and dripping with literary references, a troubled tribute to her father that packs a real emotional wallop. Somehow, no matter how many faults she describes of her complex, exasperating father, it still comes out sounding like love. A unique and moving experience.