Contemporary Fiction Recent Picks
July 2009
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American adulterer, Jed Mercurio. (2009)
This novel explores the life of a habitual womaniser. The subject regards his high libido as physiologically normal; if he goes without a woman for three days, he suffers withdrawal symptoms. Yet this particular philanderer is in no position to live with bohemian abandon. He must be circumspect in his choice of partners and employ careful calculation in their seduction. He must go to extraordinary lengths to conceal his affairs from his wife and his political rivals, with good reason, since he is the 35th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. (Amazon)
Scottsboro : a novel, Ellen Feldman. (2008)
Based on a true story set in Alabama, 1931, a posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths, for fighting with white boys. When two white girls emerge from another freight car, the charges are changed to rape. One of the girls sticks to her story. The other changes her tune, again and again. A young journalist, whose only connection to the incident is her overheated social conscience, fights to save the nine youths from the electric chair, redeem the girl who repents her lie, and make amends for her own past. (Amazon)
The solitude of prime numbers, Paolo Giordano ; translated by Shaun Whitside. (2009)
Alice and Mattia move on their own axes, alone with their personal tragedies. As a child Alice's overbearing father drove her first to a terrible skiing accident, and then to anorexia. When she meets Mattia she recognises a kindred spirit, and Mattia reveals to Alice his terrible secret: that as a boy he abandoned his mentally-disabled twin sister in a park to go to a party, and when he returned, she was nowhere to be found. These two irreversible episodes mark Alice and Mattia's lives for ever, and as they grow into adulthood their destinies seem irrevocably intertwined. But then a chance sighting of a woman who could be Mattia's sister forces a lifetime of secret emotion to the surface. (Amazon)
The great perhaps : a novel, Joe Meno. (c2009)
The Caspers, are a family of cowards: for Jonathan, a palaeontologist, searching in vain for a prehistoric giant squid; for his wife, Madeline, an animal behaviourist with a failing experiment; for their daughter, Amelia, a disappointed teenage revolutionary; for her younger sister, Thisbe, on a frustrated search for God; and for grandfather Henry, who wants to disappear, limiting himself to eleven words a day. Each fears uncertainty and the possibilities that accompany it. When Jonathan and Madeline suddenly decide to separate, this nuclear family is split, each member forced to confront his or her own cowardice. (Amazon)
Chowringhee, Samkara ; translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha. (2009)
Set in 1950s Calcutta, this is a sprawling saga of the intimate lives of managers, employees and guests at one of Calcutta's largest hotels, the Shahjahan. Shankar, the newest recruit, recounts the stories of several people whose lives come together in the suites, restaurants, bars and back rooms of the hotel. As both observer and participant in the events, he reveals the unfulfilled desires, broken dreams, callous manipulations and unbidden tragedies of those who work and live there. (Amazon)
The scarecrow, Michael Connelly. (c2009).
Jack McEvoy is at the end of the line as a crime reporter. Forced to take a buy-out from the LA Times, he's got 30 days left on the job. But Jack has other plans for his exit. He is going to go out with a bang, a final story that will win the newspaper journalism's highest honour, a Pulitzer Prize. Jack focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old drug dealer from the projects who has confessed to police that he brutally raped and strangled one of his crack clients. Jack convinces Alonzo's mother to co-operate with his investigation into the possibility of her son's innocence. But Jack's real intention is to use his access to report and write a story that explains how societal dysfunction and neglect created a 16-year-old killer. But as Jack delves into the story he soon realises that Alonzo's so-called confession is bogus, and Jack is soon off and running on the biggest story he's had. (Amazon)
Good to a fault, Marina Endicott. (2008)
Absorbed in her own failings, Clara Purdy crashes her life into a sharp left turn, taking the young family in the other car along with her. When bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer, Clara against all habit and comfort moves the three children and their terrible grandmother into her own house. Attempting to be good Clara also has to cope with the consequences: exhaustion, fury, hilarity, and unexpected love. But she must question her own motives. Is she acting out of true goodness, or out of guilt? Most shamefully, has she taken over simply because she wants the baby for her own? (Amazon)
Shanghai girls : a novel, by Lisa See. (c2009)
Beginning in Shanghai in 1937, this is the story of two sisters. Pearl and May. Though their personalities are very different they are inseparable best friends. Both are beautiful, modern and living a carefree life until the day their father tells them that he has gambled away the family's wealth and that in order to repay his debts he must sell the girls as wives to two 'Gold Mountain' men: Americans. As Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, the two sisters set out on the journey of a lifetime, one that will take them through the villages of southern China, in and out of the clutches of brutal soldiers, and even across the ocean, through the humiliation of an anti-Chinese detention centre to a new, married life in Los Angeles's Chinatown. Here they begin a fresh chapter, despite the racial discrimination and anti-Communist paranoia, because now they have something to strive for: a young, American-born daughter, Joy. (Amazon)
Brooklyn, Colm Toibin. (2009)
In a small town in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. So when a job is offered in America, it is clear that she must go. Leaving her family and home, Eilis sets off to forge a new life for herself in Brooklyn. Young, homesick and alone, she gradually buries the pain of parting beneath the rhythms of a new life, days at the till in a large department store, night classes in Brooklyn College and Friday evenings on the dance floor of the parish hall, until she realizes that she has found a sort of happiness. But when tragic news summons her back to Ireland, and the constrictions of her old life unexpectedly give way to new possibilities, she finds herself facing a terrible choice. (Amazon)
The little stranger, by Sarah Waters. (2009)
In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his. (Amazon)
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