Anna Quindlen’s “Miller’s Valley” is Mimi Miller’s reminiscence of the more than 10 year period in her life when the federal government was planning to move a dam and flood her home town of Miller’s Valley. The story relays the expected emotional opposition to loss of home and place, but along the way it touches
A Little Life – by Hanya Yanagihara
![51kuUoWRHNL._SX327_BO1,204,203,200_[1]](https://www.frombriefstobooks.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/883/2015/12/51kuUoWRHNL._SX327_BO1204203200_1-198x300.jpg)
“[H]e was worried because to be alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable… They all…sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, someone to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.” This is Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life”.
“A
Wind/Pinball – by Haruki Murakami
“Wind/Pinball” is the 2015 translation and American publication of Haruki Murakami’s first two novels, written in the late 1970s. Both novels are very short and the book is preceded by a wonderful author’s note about how he became a writer. If you are a Murakami fan, you will recognize the magical realism, existential, and spiritual
Best Boy – by Eli Gottlieb
Have you ever wondered how the mind of someone different from you works and what the person might be thinking and feeling? That is exactly the insight that Eli Gottlieb provides when he gives you a glimpse into the mind of an autistic man, Todd Aaron, in “Best Boy.”
We first meet Todd
Did You Ever Have A Family – by Bill Clegg
I just finished reading Bill Clegg’s “Did You Ever Have A Family”, a novel about loss, grief, regret and sorrow. It revolves around June Reid and the death of four people in a house explosion and the subsequent impact on the lives of their surviving families and the people they touched. It does not
Fates and Furies – by Laura Groff
In Laura Groff’s “Fates and Furies”, beginnings and endings combine in a character rich story about life, love and loss. Lancelot Satterwhite (Lotto), is born into a loving and wealthy family in sunny Florida, tied to his religiously zealous mother and his kind, mild mannered father. Lotto “would have been bright, ordinary if his
The Heart Goes Last – by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood’s latest, “The Heart Goes Last”, is so funny, and so scary at the same time that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I was done. At the start, we meet Stan and Charmaine, a recently married, once happy couple, now destitute, and living in their car. The backdrop is
My Name is Lucy Barton – by Elizabeth Strout
“My Name is Lucy Barton” is a deceptively simple book that on first blush might seem to be about a relationship between a daughter and mother. Lucy is telling her story looking back over a nine-week period she spent in the hospital recovering from complications after removal of her appendix. While she is recovering,
Thirteen Ways of Looking – by Colum McCann
I just finished Colum McCann’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking” and it is simply the antithesis of the last two books I reviewed (Purity and City on Fire). And that’s a good thing–in case you were wondering. None of the clutter or pretension. Simply beautiful writing, moving story telling and believable, recognizable
City On Fire – by Garth Risk Hallberg
I finished City on Fire a couple of weeks ago and just couldn’t decide whether I liked it and what I wanted to say about it. The book has its highs and its lows, but overall I have decided it is overly ambitious, tries too hard and is simply too long.
A first novel, City