Fiction Newsletter September
Welcome to the Fiction newsletter. We have selected some terrific fiction, brilliant reading from all genres for your enjoyment. With the Rugby World Cup nearing the final few games, hopefully some relaxed reading time will soon be avaliable. Remember you can reserve these titles and even suggest titles you would like us to buy.
Library News
Contemporary fiction
Four of the best writers, all worth reading this month.
The sense of an ending / Julian Barnes.
“Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life. Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.” (adapted from Amazon.co.uk)
Black Jesus / Simone Felice.
”A young marine returns from Iraq, blinded and scarred by a roadside bomb and harbouring a terrible secret. Called Black Jesus by his fellow soldiers on account of his name being Lionel White and his birthday being Christmas Day, he has returned to his decaying home town to sit in the back of his mother’s junkshop, pop Oxycontin and try to forget what he knows. Into his life one day rides Gloria, a young dancer with mysterious past and shocking injuries of her own, who is fleeing darkness and violence of a different kind.” (adapted from Syndetics summary)
Last man in tower / Aravind Adiga.
“Every building tells a story, but in the jungles of Mumbai, one building, and one man, stand on the borderline between India’s past and its future. Ask any Bombaywallah about Vishram Society, Tower A of the Vishram Co-operative Housing Society, and you will be told that it has been pucca for some fifty years despite its location under the flight path and border of slums. But Bombay has changed in half a century, not least its name, and the world in which Tower A was first built is giving way to a new city.”(adapted from Syndedtics summary)
The Sisters brothers / Patrick deWitt.
” When a frontier baron known as the Commodore orders Charlie and Eli Sisters, his hired gunslingers, to track down and kill a prospector named Herman Kermit Warm, the brothers journey from Oregon to San Francisco, and eventually to Warm’s claim in the Sierra foothills, running into a witch, a bear, a dead Indian, a parlor of drunken floozies, and a gang of murderous fur trappers. Charlie and Eli explore the human implications of many of the clichés of the old west and come off looking less and less like killers and more like traumatized young men.” (adapted from Syndetics summary)
Graphic novels
A selection from the wonderful world of graphic novels.
Phoenix without ashes / created and written by Harlan Ellison ; illustrated by Alan Robinson.
“Harlan Ellison, one of the Grand Masters of science fiction and a multiple Hugo, Nebula, and Edgar Award-winner, returns to his roots with the graphic novel, Phoenix Without Ashes. The year is 2785, and Devon, a farmer banished for challenging his community’s Elders, discovers a secret that changes everything he knew about the world, leading him on a quest to solve a mystery beyond his understanding before his entire world is destroyed in a cataclysm.” (adapted from Syndetics summary)
The hot rock / Lax ; [based on the novel by] Donald Westlake ; [translated by Nora Mahony].
“June 1969, New York. John Dortmunder is approached to carry out a heist by one of his former accomplices, Kelp, an expert in stealing cars. The plan is to take advantage of an African art exhibition to steal its star attraction, an emerald worth half a million dollars,for an obscure African state where the invaluable stone has special importance. Though reluctant to do it and ill-at-ease when meeting the silent partner behind the operation, Dortmunder lets himself be convinced and starts to recruit the crack team that will steal the emerald.” (adapted from Amazon.co.uk)
A single match / Oji Suzuki.
” This graphic novel is composed of 11 surreal, dreamy vignettes featuring heavy themes such as rape, molestation, alcoholism, unemployment, and gambling debt. Many of the pieces are told in flashback, mostly from the perspective of an adult looking back on his or her troubled childhood. Each story slowly and poetically drifts into the others, leaving readers with a vague sense of the characters’ loneliness, neediness, betrayal, sadness, or shame.” (adapted from Syndetics summary)
Mysteries
This selection of new mystery novels includes the new ‘Prey’ novel from John Sandford and Walter Mosley’s latest entry in his Leonid McGill series.
Buried prey / John Sandford.
“When he was a young patrolman, Lucas Davenport insinuated himself into the case of two missing girls. He worked hard, and the result was the death of a troubled street person, which provided the case’s official closure, despite the girls’ bodies never being found. Davenport’s contributions accelerated his career, but he was never quite satisfied that the street person was the killer. Twenty-five years later, the bodies are discovered, and Davenport, now heading Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, gets a second chance. He reviews the original case, reinterviews some original witnesses, and confirms his nagging suspicion that the real killer was never caught…” (Adapted from Syndetics summary)
When the thrill is gone / Walter Mosley.
“Starred Review. Mosley fills his third thriller featuring New York City PI Leonid McGill (after Known to Evil) with insights even deeper than the mysteries McGill is trying to solve. Chrystal Tyler, a potential new client, tells McGill that she’s afraid her billionaire husband is having an affair and may kill her. While McGill realizes the woman is lying, he needs the case and agrees to see what he can do to make her husband back off. Meanwhile, McGill’s wife of 24 years, Katrina, is having an affair; his favorite son, Twill, has a new scam working; and longtime boxing mentor Gordo Tallman is living in his apartment, fighting cancer… Readers will encounter the full panoply of complex Mosley characters, from deceitful women to ruthless killers, but it’s the often surprising bonds of love and family that lift this raw, unsentimental novel…” (Description from Publishers Weekly)
The silent girl / Tess Gerritsen.
“Homicide investigator Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles…have a tough case on their hands. It begins with a woman’s severed hand, which is soon accompanied by the rest of the corpse, which itself may be connected to a two-decades-old mystery involving a perpetrator for whom the word inhuman may be a more appropriate description than Rizzoli and Isles care to contemplate… Rizzoli and Isles are likable and industrious, as always, and Gerritsen seems more engaged this time out, her prose livelier, and her dialogue more memorable. Recent series entries have been solid, workmanlike thrillers, but this one has some real spark to it…(Adapted from syndetics sumamry)
Science fiction/fantasy
A selection from the new science fiction and fantasy novels received this month
Directive 51 / John Barnes.
“The first book in a new post-apocalyptic trilogy. When seemingly random events are actually part of a group’s plan to destroy modern civilization,a plan that will eliminate America’s top government personnel, the nation has no choice but to implement its emergency contingency program: Directive 51.” (adapted from Syndetics summary)
The omen Machine / by Terry Goodkind. “This is a new Kahlan and Richard fantasy novel. An accident leads to the discovery of a mysterious machine that has rested hidden deep underground for countless millennia. The machine awakens to begin issuing a series of increasingly alarming, if minor, omens. The omens turn out to be astonishingly accurate, and ever more ominous. As Zedd tries to figure out how to destroy the sinister device, the machine issues a cataclysmic omen involving Richard and Kahlan, foretelling an impending event beyond anyone’s ability to stop. As catastrophe approaches, the machine then reveals that it is within its power to withdraw the omen, in exchange for an impossible demand.” (adapted from Amazon.co.uk)
Hellhole / Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.
” Only the most desperate would ever dare to make a new home on Hellhole, a planet ravaged by natural disasters. Persistent volcanic eruptions, destructive storms and recent damage inflicted by asteroid impact make the planet a dumping ground for undesirables, misfits and charlatans. But its location out on the wild frontiers of the Constellation, among the Deep Zone worlds, makes it the final refuge for those fleeing from the rule of Diadem Michella Duchenet , a tyrant with a sweet face, but a dark and hardened heart. General Adolphus, the military leader exiled to the planet when he was defeated in the first revolution against the Diadem, is determined to transform Hellhole into a place of opportunity.” (adapted from Amazon.co.uk)
Other genres
Other Genre novels this month is humour/satire/black comedy. The selected novels are great examples of the variations that can be found in this genre.
Florida roadkill : a novel / Tim Dorsey.Florida Roadkill: A Novel
“Two guys on their way to a fishing trip in the Florida Keys have no idea that $5 million is stashed in the back of their Chrysler. But others do, including an unbalanced trivia buff, his brain-dead partner, and a cocaine-loving stripper.”(adapted Syndetics summary)
Paul is undead : the British zombie invasion / Alan Goldsher.
“In this hilarious chronicle of the zombified Liverpudlians’ rise to fame, “bloody” is no longer just a four-letter word. It’s a way of life for the undead moptops, whose arrival is heralded by the bloodcurdling screams of sanguine American girls who twitch, and writhe, and scratch their own eyes out in manic ecstasy. Using hidden messages in their songs, the Beatles mind-meld millions of delicious fans. That is, until a notorious zombie hunter named Mick arrives, the fierce wiggle of his lithesome hips and shoulders his only defence against a seemingly impenetrable glut of reanimated corpses.” (adapted from Amazon.co.uk)
The stray sod country / Patrick McCabe.
“Cullymore in 1958 is a backwater on the border between the north and south of Ireland. This complex literary novel focuses on the daily lives of its Catholic residents and their interactions with each other and Protestant fellow citizens. Central to the story is the outrageous Father Hand whose plans to bring Cullymore to national attention include resurrecting an ancient Easter rite while his parishioners act out the Crucifixion of Christ on Good Friday. The omniscient narrator is a malicious and contrary spirit who, as the story progresses, assumes a more active part by leading some characters to behave in ways they loathe or to believe in and act upon the unreal. “(adapted from Syndetics summary)
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