In the acknowledgments in my novel I mention my late mother “who might have wanted to flee, but didn’t.” My pregnant mother driving eight hours down the Fraser Canyon. Baby me “in a cardboard box” in the front seat, my brothers, armed with pop guns, in the back. My dad, having finally found work, gone ahead alone. We didn’t tell this as a story of her courage and strength. It was considered funny. But after I became a mother, I had a clearer vision of the stress and poverty of my mother’s life. My novel, and the ones I’m recommending, show compassion for women as mothers, and for their children, who are sometimes left behind.
On a miserable November day in 1967, two women disappear from a working-class town on the west coast. The community is thrown into panic, with talk of drifters and murderous husbands, but no one can find a trace of Bette Parsons or Alice McFee. Ten-year-old Lulu Parsons discovers something though: a milk-stained note her mother left for her father on the kitchen table. Lulu tells no one and for forty years she uses solitude and detachment to live and cope with her mother loss. Finally, at fifty, Lulu learns she is not the only one who carries a secret.
Hopeful, lyrical, comedic, and intriguingly and lovingly told, the book explores the isolated landscapes and thorny attachments bred by childhood loss and buried secrets.
This wondrous saga about a crew of mostly working-class English folk starts in Italy at the end of WWII, then roves for another three decades between a pub in London and a pensionein Florence. I love Winman’s ability to make us love her characters—and this book is packed with them—no matter their crimes and misdemeanors. In this novel, she rouses only compassion for Peg, who, thinking herself incapable of raising her five-year-old daughter, sends her off to Italy to be brought up by two men. Everything about Winman’s writing says love and humanity and hope. And if you’re into audiobooks, she reads the book herself; it is a brilliant performance.
A captivating, bighearted, richly tapestried story of people brought together by love, war, art, flood, and the ghost of E. M. Forster, by the celebrated author of Tin Man.
Tuscany, 1944: As Allied troops advance and bombs fall around deserted villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. There, he has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian who has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and recall long-forgotten memories of her…
The Faraway Nearbyis a poetic journey. Solnit reminds us, throughout the book, of the impact and importance of storytelling in our lives. But what I found most compelling and moving on this intensely personal walk with the author was the way in which she wanders here and there to explore many topics but comes back, time and again, to her mother. Stricken with Alzheimer’s, her already difficult mother is initially even more obstreperous. When Solnit’s brother gives her a voluminous harvest of unripe apricots from a tree in their mother’s garden, their ripening presence on Solnit’s floor helps create the path to a place of understanding that takes her beyond the difficult history she has had with her mother.
From the author of Orwell's Roses, a personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy-a fitting companion to Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
In this exquisitely written book by the author of A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit explores the ways we make our lives out of stories, and how we are connected by empathy, by narrative, by imagination. In the course of unpacking some of her own stories-of her mother and her decline from memory loss, of a trip to Iceland, of an illness-Solnit revisits fairytales and entertains other…
I first read this brilliant coming-of-age book years ago and was unsurprised to hear it had won the Whitbread Award. Fiction, non-fiction, children’s books—Winterson is one of the cleverest, smartest, and (sometimes) funniest authors I’ve ever read. Even using her own name for the main character in Oranges, is inspired; in a recent introduction to the book she speaks of “self-invention” and using herself as a fictional character. Winterson employs fairy tale, legend, and the first eight books of the Bible to tell this story of a girl adopted by a hardline Pentecostal Christian whose aim is to prepare her daughter to be a missionary to the world. Jeanette’s intelligence and curiosity and her so-called “unnatural passions” send her down a very different path.
Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes and techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical and literary background Modern and historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary of literary terms
I was moved by the profound look into a young man’s grief and guilt and confusion that Canadian author Matt Cohen offered us in this, his last novel. Carl’s mother is dead, killed at the age of 51 in a car accident for which Carl is (mostly) responsible. After the funeral, Carl fled. Now, three years later, he’s back in his hometown, population 684, attempting to start over and reconnect with his seven-year-old daughter. It’s a long, hard fight for redemption in a town where the habitants—a grand cast of them—have long memories of who Carl was and what he did. Matt Cohen died a few weeks after the book won the Governor General’s Prize for English-Language Fiction.
A touching and resonant story of a man who returns to the small town of West Gull, Ontario, to mend his family's legacy of alcohol and violence, to reconnect with his young daughter, and to reconcile himself with the spirit of his beautiful mother, killed several years earlier in a tragic accident. Elizabeth and After masterfully wraps us up in the lives of Carl and his family, and the other 683 odd residents of this snowy Canadian hamlet.
In modern-day England, a teenager, George (Georgia), has lost her mother. In Renaissance Italy, Francesco del Cossa, a young and talented fresco painter, is motherless as well. Smith gives us a choice: Read George’s half of the book first, or read Francesco’s. Whichever we choose, the lives of these two young people are intricately interlaced. Their sadness and joy; their way of looking at the world around them. George has been to see a fresco in Italy created by Francesco. She is in a complex, post-death conversation with her mother, filled with longing. Francesco (or should that be Francesca?) tells his/her own life story and observes George in hers. I loved the challenging, poetic, playful, and tender nature of this book.
WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2015 WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2014 WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD
'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening Standard
How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s.
Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless,…
My book recommendations reflect an abiding passion for Japanese literature, which has unquestionably influenced my own writing. My latest literary interest involves Japanese poetry—I’ve recently started a project that combines haiku and prose narration to describe my experiences as a part-time resident in a 1300-year-old Japanese hot spring town that Bashō helped make famous in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. But as a writer, my main focus remains novels. In late 2023 the second in a planned series of novels set in Ishikawa prefecture will be published. I currently live in Kanazawa, but have also been lucky to call Sapporo, Akita, Tokyo, and Fukui home at different times.
Emmitt’s plans collapse when his wife, Mirai, suddenly backs out of purchasing their dream home. Disappointed, he’s surprised to discover her subtle pursuit of a life and career in Tokyo.
In his search for a meaningful life in Japan, and after quitting his job, he finds himself helping his mother-in-law translate Kanazawa’s most famous author, Izumi Kyoka, into English. He becomes drawn into the mysterious death of a friend of Mirai’s parents, leading him and his father-in-law to climb the mountain where the man died. There, he learns the somber truth and discovers what the future holds for him and his wife.
Packed with subtle literary allusion and closely observed nuance, Kanazawa reflects the mood of Japanese fiction in a fresh, modern incarnation.
In Kanazawa, the first literary novel in English to be set in this storied Japanese city, Emmitt's future plans collapse when his wife, Mirai, suddenly backs out of negotiations to purchase their dream home. Disappointed, he's surprised to discover Mirai's subtle pursuit of a life and career in Tokyo, a city he dislikes.
Harmony is further disrupted when Emmitt's search for a more meaningful life in Japan leads him to quit an unsatisfying job at a local university. In the fallout, he finds himself helping his mother-in-law translate Kanazawa's most famous author, Izumi Kyoka, into English.
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