MY WORLD OF TRUTH

Wednesday 30 August 2017

TEN BOOKS TO READ IN SEPTEMBER

Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

JoJo, 13, is at a crossroads – his growing awareness of mortality and injustice are mixed with love for his grandparents Pop and Mam and his three-year-old sister Kayla. Pop teaches JoJo to live with dignity, and shares haunted memories of Parchman, the notorious Mississippi prison farm. JoJo’s mother Leonie prepares for JoJo’s white father Michael to get out of Parchman after three years. She takes time off from her job in a backwoods bar and, with her friend Misty, packs up the kids and takes off on a bizarre road trip to pick him up. And the ghost of a boy named Richie who died at Parchman 60 years before tells his tale. Ward unearths layers of history in gorgeous textured language, ending with an unearthly chord. (Credit: Scribner)

John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

George Smiley is back, but it’s his MI6 assistant, Peter Guillam, who is the key figure in this internal investigation launched by the British Secret Service in the 21st Century. Guillam is retired, living on a remote farm in Brittany, when the letter from the Circus summons him back to London. Bunny, a self-described “lethal lawyer”, begins his interrogation by making it clear his job is to protect the Service, not Guillam. At issue: the deaths of agent Alec Leamus, killed at the Berlin Wall, as was his friend Elizabeth Gold, during Operation Windfall, conducted against the East German intelligence service, the Stasi, in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. Their heirs are now suing. Le Carré’s welcome new novel unspools two air-tight narratives half-a-century apart while capturing contemporary attitudes toward Cold War tradecraft. (Credit: Viking)

Gaute Heivoll, Across the China Sea

When a couple trained as caregivers marry, they build a house in the rural south of Norway large enough to encompass a group of patients. As he is clearing out the house in 1994, their son, tells the story of their unconventional household – his sister Tone, who died young, plus three adult men (including his Uncle Josef) and a group of five mentally disabled siblings who were removed from their home when their parents were declared unfit. These “almost siblings” live together for 28 years, from the German occupation of Norway during World War Two until after the moon landing in 1969. Heivoll moves seamlessly through scenes and memories, creating a powerful sense of the compassion and routine that made this community feel like family. An elegiac, heartbreaking novel. (Credit: Graywolf Press)

Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone

A newly retired, widowed, Berlin classics professor begins to track a group of African refugees who are sitting in protest in Alexanderplatz. As he comes to know a group of the men, he learns how they have been shattered by civil war, slavery, forced evacuation, and arbitrary colonial borders. Most have witnessed the murder of fathers, mothers, wives, and/or children. And still they connect, and strive to find work in a Europe with laws that make their lives a living hell. Throughout, he recalls moments after the Berlin Wall went up, making him an exile in his own city, and how disorientated he was when it came down. This transformative novel, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky and winner of Italy’s Premio Strega Europeo, explores the human side of the crisis asylum seekers face. (Credit: New Directions)

Lily Tuck, Sisters

National Book Award winning novelist Lily Tuck takes a sly slant on divorce in this marvelous elliptical novel about a weird sort of sibling rivalry, between wife number one and wife number two. The narrator, who married her husband in her 40s, feels the steady presence of her shadow, who married him in her 20s. She reconstructs their relationship through photos of the first wife pushing a baby carriage in Paris, anecdotes (she was a promising concert pianist when she married), through interactions with her teenage son and daughter. She catches uncomfortable glimpses of her predecessor at the daughter’s marriage (the husband dances with the first wife, but not the second, who feels abandoned) and the son’s graduation. An obsessive question – “Who do you love best? Me or her?” – may be her downfall. (Credit: Atlantic Monthly Press)

James McBride, Five-Carat Soul

This first story collection from National Book Award winning novelist McBride is filled with fine-tuned, rambunctious, sometimes unruly characters, including a lion in a zoo who fiercely protects his memories of freedom and lets us know that animals communicate in “thought speak” and humans “speak with their tongues going one way and their heart going another”. A coming-of-age story follows five youngsters in the Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bond Band and their friends. Two veterans of the 92nd Division, black soldiers who fought in World War Two, share precious memories with a graduate student over meals at Sylvia’s in Harlem. A young orphan who believes his father is Abe Lincoln changes the path of a sergeant in a black regiment in the Union Army by asking, “When freedom comes. How’ll you know it?” (Credit: Riverhead)

Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey

In January 2011, Mendelsohn’s 81-year-old father, a retired research scientist, sits in on his son’s class at Bard College on The Odyssey, “an epic about long journeys and long marriages and what it means to yearn for home”. From the start, Jay Mendelsohn argues that Odysseus is not a “real hero”: “he’s a liar and he cheated on his wife.” Still, Mendelsohn and class learn from his father’s interpretations “that small things between people can be the foundation of the most profound intimacy.” In June, father and son share secrets during a 10-day “retracing the Odyssey” cruise from Troy to Ithaki. Mendelsohn, a National Book Critics Circle award winner, writes eloquently of his family, of Odysseus, “the poet of his own life,” and of the lasting pull of mystery between father and son. (Credit: Knopf)

Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

The Richardsons of suburban Shaker Heights, Ohio, seem to be an ideal family. Dad is a defence attorney, mom works for the local paper, and three of the four high-school-age children seem content to follow the rules. Izzy, the youngest, is the only rebel among them. Then Mia, an accomplished but itinerant artist whose past is mysterious even to her teenage daughter Pearl, rents a house Mrs Richardson owns, and disrupts the equilibrium. Pearl heads to the Richardsons’ after school, growing ever more intimate with Lexie and her brothers, Moody and Trip. Izzy starts hanging around Mia’s house, to her mother’s dismay. And so begins the build-up to the devastating conclusion – “little fires everywhere.” Ng’s uncanny ability to embody multiple viewpoints makes for a powerful, revelatory novel. (Credit: Penguin Press)

Tales of Two Americas (John Freeman, editor)

In his introduction, Freeman sets the theme for this fresh and provocative collection of 36 stories, essays, and poems by award-winning writers like Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Anthony Doerr, Roxane Gay, Juan Felipe Herrera, Joyce Carol Oates, and Ann Patchett. These are tales of a US blighted by “overloaded schools, police forces on edge, clusters and sometimes whole tent cities of homeless people.” Rebecca Solnit describes how a 28-year-old Mexican-American security guard is gunned down by four policemen while eating a burrito in the hilltop park in the neighbourhood where he grew up, targeted by newcomers who saw him as a menacing intruder. Karen Russell discovers the emergency state of homelessness in Portland, Oregon, and the value of “the homespun web of neighbours helping neighbours.” Illuminating glimpses of a ‘broken’ America. (Credit: Penguin)

Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

Nero Golden and his three sons leave Mumbai after his wife is killed in a terrorist bombing. They settle in The Gardens, a Macdougal Street compound in Manhattan. Petya, his eldest, stays mostly in his room, playing video games. Apu becomes an artist and Occupy Wall Street activist. D explores complex gender issues. Vasilisa, a Russian opportunist, swiftly becomes the new Mrs Golden. Roiling beneath the surface is a corruption scandal back in India. Rene, the narrator, sees the Golden family as key characters in a film he’s making about the Gardens. As Rushdie’s profound and timely new novel moves from the Obama inauguration to the election of a green-haired clown named the Joker, he strikes innumerable tragic chords, echoing “all the discontent of a furiously divided country.” (Credit: Random House)

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