Contemporary Fiction Recent Picks
October 2009
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The year of the flood, Margaret Atwood. (2009)
Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners, a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life, has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club, Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible. Have others survived? As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move as they can not stay locked away for ever. (Amazon)
The infinities, John Banville. (2009)
One long, languid midsummer's day, the Godleys gather at the family home of Arden to attend their father's bedside. Adam, the elder child, and Petra, only nineteen, find that relations with their mother, Ursula, and their dying father, old Adam, are as strained as ever. Adam's relationship with his wife, Helen, seems too on the brink of collapse and Petra, fragile and deeply troubled, finds deepest relief in her own pain. The gods, those mischievous spirits, watch silently, flitting through this dark ménage. Unable to resist intervening in the mortals' lives, they spy, tease and seduce, all the while looking upon the antics of their playthings with a mixture of mild bafflement and occasional envy. (Amazon)
Remarkable creatures, by Tracy Chevalier. (2009)
In the early nineteenth century, a windswept beach along the English coast brims with fossils for those with the eye. From the moment she's struck by lightning as a baby, it is clear Mary Anning is marked for greatness. When she uncovers unknown dinosaur fossils in the cliffs near her home, she sets the scientific world alight, challenging ideas about the world's creation and stimulating debate over our origins. In an arena dominated by men, however, Mary is soon reduced to a serving role, facing prejudice from the academic community, vicious gossip from neighbours, and the heartbreak of forbidden love. Luckily Mary finds an unlikely champion in prickly, intelligent Elizabeth Philpot, a middle-class spinster who is also fossil-obsessed. Despite their differences in age and background, Mary and Elizabeth discover that, in struggling for recognition, friendship is their strongest weapon. (Amazon)
Summertime : scenes from provincial life, J.M. Coetzee. (2009)
A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, was sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him, a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. (Amazon)
The quickening maze, Adam Foulds. (2009)
This novel is based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, and centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum, an institution run on reformist principles which would later become known as occupational therapy. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum's owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr Matthew Allen. For John Clare, a lover of the freedoms and exhilarations, a locked door is a kind of death; he deteriorates from hallucinatory episodes of insanity and dissolving identity, towards his final madness. (Amazon)
Gourmet rhapsody, Muriel Barbery ; translated from the French by Alison Anderson. (2009)
In the heart of Paris, Pierre Athens, the greatest food critic in the world, is dying. Revered by some and reviled by many, Monsieur Arthens has been ruling over the world's most esteemed chefs for years, passing judgment on their creations, deciding their fates with a stroke of his pen, destroying and building reputations on a whim. But now, during these his final hours, his mind has turned to simpler things. He is desperately searching for that singular flavour, that sublime something once sampled, never forgotten. Indeed, this flamboyant and self-absorbed man desires only one thing before he dies: one last taste. (Amazon)
The white woman on the green bicycle, Monique Roffey. (2009)
When George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad from England George instantly takes to their new life, but Sabine feels isolated, heat-fatigued, and ill at ease with the racial segregation and the imminent dawning of a new era. Her only solace is her growing fixation with Eric Williams, the charismatic leader of Trinidad's new national party, to whom she pours out all her hopes and fears for the future in letters that she never brings herself to send. As the years progress, George and Sabine's marriage endures for better or worse. When George discovers Sabine's cache of letters, he realises just how many secrets she's kept from him, and he from her, over the decades. He is seized by an urgent, desperate need to prove his love for her, with tragic consequences. (Amazon)
Wounds of honour (Empire), by Anthony Riches. (2009)
Marcus Valerius Aquila has scarcely landed in Britannia when he has to disappear as he has been condemned to dishonourable death by power-crazed emperor Commodus. He plans to take a new name, serve an obscure regiment on Hadrian's Wall and lie low until the time comes for justice. When a rebel army sweeps down from the wastes north of the Wall, Marcus has to prove he's hard enough to lead a Centurion army in the front line of a brutal, violent war. (Amazon)
Dead spy running, Jon Stock. (2009)
On the run from the CIA, suspended MI6 agent Marchant is determined to prove his father's innocence in a personal journey that takes him from Wiltshire, via Poland, to India. It was here that the former MI6 chief once met with one of the world's most wanted terrorists, and where the new President of America is shortly to visit. But was that meeting proof of a mole within MI6 or the best penetration of Al Qaeda the West has ever had? And was Marchant's father the keeper of another, darker secret? (Amazon)
The help, Kathryn Stockett. (2009)
Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Aibileen is a black maid: smart, regal, and raising her seventeenth white child. Yet something shifted inside Aibileen the day her own son died while his bosses looked the other way. Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is by some way the sassiest woman in Mississippi. But even her extraordinary cooking won't protect Minny from the consequences of her tongue. Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter returns home with a degree and a head full of hope, but her mother will not be happy until there's a ring on her finger. Seeking solace with Constantine, the beloved maid who raised her, Skeeter finds she has gone. But why will no one tell her where? Seemingly as different as can be, Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny's lives converge over a clandestine project that will not only put them all at risk but also change the town of Jackson for ever. (Amazon)
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