A hauntingly earnest books that stays with you long after the final chapter
595370
Winter Heart is one of those hauntingly earnest books that stays with you long after you've read the final chapter. Every place has a spirit  that's what I believe   and B.G. Bradley perfectly captures the spirit of the book's setting, the "U.P.", the upper peninsula of Michigan. I've never been to the U.P.! But I know with certainty what like is like there now.

The main character, Ben, is intensely real and nuanced. We're treated to his progress through a middle age transformation with bits of poetry interspersed throughout the prose, and flashes of brilliance interspersed throughout the poetry. "The King" is my favorite.
1508606
This book is both haunting and beautiful... it hung around and is staying with me far longer than most books do when I've finished them.  I first read Elidor when I was 14 years old, and that book made such an impression that I still remember it 35 years later.  I probably won't be around in another 35 years, but Strandloper will stay with me until then.  This book is a treasure.

As other reviewers have stated, this book requires, nay, demands your full attention, but once you have passed through the first pages and get caught in the rhythm, you will find this book very difficult to put down.
4774000
Coetzee has quietly established himself as one of a small handful of writers whose names get tossed about under the label of "greatest living authors."  His work combines all the elements necessary to deserve that honor.  He is an artist, a craftsman, and a thinker.  His novels are carefully written and deeply meaningful.  His prose is elegant, his characters are genuine, his stories are engaging.  And his writing is full of purpose.

One of the things I like best about this book, and Coetzee's writing in general, is that he is not afraid to show the ugly side of human nature.  He is confident enough in his writing that he can create a hero who is nowhere near perfect.  In some cases, in fact, the hero is downright pathetic.  Such is the case with Paul Rayment, our protagonist here.  At his core we see him as a good person, yet profoundly flawed at the same time.  He succumbs to serious lapses in judgment and falls deep into self-victimization, and yet we still admire him, or the very least we sympathize with him.  For in many ways, he is just like all of us.

This book deals magnificently with the most basic of human needs - the need to love and be loved, and the need to leave a legacy.  As our main character faces the onset of old age, and as a tragic accident leaves him without a leg and forces him to contemplate his own mortality, he begins to regret the wasted opportunities of his life.  He realizes, too late, that there will be little to remember him by once he is gone.  He carefully preserves his collection of rare photographs which he plans to donate to the state library when he dies, but even he himself recognizes the little value this collection has if his whole life's worth is to be judged by it.  With no children, no family, and no close friends, he has failed to leave a legacy in the one and only way that matters - by touching the lives of others.

So when he meets Marijana, his Croatian-born nurse, he tries to make up for lost time.  Partly motivated by selfishness, partly by desperation, and partly by an inchoate feeling of love, he attempts to woo her, all the while operating under a thin veil of altruism.  Here we are asked to explore difficult themes: Can an act be deemed bad if it is based entirely on love?  How do we reconcile the good and the evil that both live inside of us?  What will we consider most important when we look back on the life we have lived?  Coetzee does not make it easy on us, and for this most readers will be grateful.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this book is the mysterious appearance of Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist from Coetzee's earlier book.  How she appears on Rayment's doorstep is not clear, nor for what purpose.  Coetzee is clearly taking liberties here, forcing the reader to suspend disbelief, in order to create a neat construct in which he can portray the conscience and alter ego of his main character.  Some readers simply won't accept this technique.  Personally, it worked for me.  I gradually stopped caring that he left too many questions unanswered, and came to appreciate the added dimension that this construct allowed the novel to achieve.
2653324
It's just something about the characters that Innis creates - something that sticks with you so that even after you've closed the book, stepped outside and headed off, they are still there, trailing behind you - weird little ghosts. The stories are eloquent, at times funny, at times sad, and nearly always bizarre. It's MORE than worth the read. I look forward to getting my hands on whatever Innis puts out next.
3584356
I read everything I can get my hands on by Glen Hirshberg. Never enough. Occasionally, as with "Motherless Child," I have to hunt down and purchase a used, pristine library edition; pristine, because no one seemed to take it off the shelf and give it a try. Then I sit and devour the book in one sitting, as I did again with "Motherless Child," afraid to finish consuming it too quickly, unwilling to stop.

This book is close to perfect. It's creepy, literary, poetic, strong, allegorical, haunting. Every sentence glistens like a drawer full of polished silverware. And many of them cut like a knife. There are scenes (I want so badly to tell you about them, but I prefer you find them untainted by expectations) that had me holding my breath as I read them--so ominous, so beautiful, so original--that they stayed with me the next day, and the next, and still lingered several weeks later.

Think of how you felt when your favorite award-winning television series aired its final episode and the music and themes and acting all filled you with a sense of wonder and marvel and satisfaction. If you want that feeling again, go track down "Motherless Child," chase away all electronic and social distractions, and sit in a well-lit favorite reading chair and enter Hirshberg's world.

Really. He's that good.
1296534
This is Highsmith's collection of 11 short stories, written from 1945 to 1970, and a phenomenal read. Writing with an economical, non-showy style, she pulls you into the characters, their emotions, and the underlying threat of every story so effortlessly that you mistrust her literary intentions from the first -- and are cursing her name by the end of the story for making your heart pound outside your chest until it's ready to burst. "The Birds Poised to Fly" is a creepy, obsessive little ditty about the nature of infatuation, while "The Heroine" still manages to shock despite the obvious direction of the story. My other favorites were "The Terrapin" about the fate of a turtle and the family who cooks him, and "Another Bridge to Cross" a wonderfully somber and affecting story about loss, disillusionment and the need to go on.
3047482
The Last Battle (1956) is a children's fantasy novel, the seventh and final in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. It won the 1956 Carnegie Medal. Almost single-handedly, Tirian, the last king of Narnia, must deal with the rise of a false Aslan and a surprise Calormene invasion.

The Last Battle is a grim and bleak tale unlike any other in the series, as things start badly and get progressively worse in a hurry. Lewis handles this well, particularly by capturing the feelings of his characters, particularly their despair, and as a result, the book is suspenseful and gripping. The book's finale, both as part of this story and the series as a whole, is nothing short of magnificent: it is an emotionally and spiritually powerful finish. The book's final paragraph, which captures the heart of the true hope of Christianity, may bring tears to the eyes.

Lewis's prominent theme here is the danger of false religion, and he deals with it from the points of view of the unbelieving perpetrators as well as the unwitting victims. The biblical imagery is strong here (for those who have a deep familiarity with the contents of the Bible, it may be the strongest in the series). The false Aslan's politics and dealings evoke any number of biblical images, ranging from Old Testament prophets to Revelation imagery. Certainly The Last Battle is the most philosophically and theologically interesting book in the series (which is why it's also the most controversial).

The book is not without a couple of small problems. Lewis's involved narrator sometimes feels out of place given the direness of the story. Lewis also skips over a little more of the story's behind-the-scenes developments than he might have - we do go from a lone crafty ape to a full-blown Calormene invasion rather quickly. But these are minor issues that do not detract from the story significantly.

Some readers have complained that in The Last Battle, Lewis "undoes" all his previous stories. This could not be more wrong (do you "undo" a game when you finish it and put the pieces back in the box?). Rather, Lewis brings them all full circle: The Last Battle culminates with the fulfillment and consummation of Narnia and all its stories.

As with The Horse and His Boy, some readers have also alleged racism here. While the dark-skinned, "Arab" Calormen are the villains of the piece, they are never portrayed as inherently evil (as in The Horse and His Boy, some are good and some are bad). Similarly, Lewis has been accused of being anti-Islam in his writing, for no other reason that I can see except that Islam is the religion of many Arabs. Certainly the Calormene religion bears no resemblance to Islam to the very limited extent to which Lewis goes into it; with its bloody god Tash and its human sacrifice, it's far more reminiscent of the ancient worship of Chemosh or Molech. Anyone seriously maintaining these accusations is inferring quite a bit more than Lewis has put into the text.

The Last Battle is a triumph, a phenomenal story and a beautiful conclusion to the series.
1102968
Some books can be so perfect as to leave you speechless. True simplicity may be so deep as not to be simple at all. You could sum up this little novella as little more than an old Irish priest fishing fruitlessly for salmon in a midge-infested drizzle, while meditating on the funeral he conducted the day before, and the unfinished deathbed confession completed by the dead man's wife, an 80-page story set in a 60-page frame. But that would not be the all of it at all. Reading this book involves a continual reassessment of what we expect from a story, and what constitutes the moral meaning of a life well-lived.

Kevin and Enda Dennehy have been living in their small coastal village in the West of Ireland for nearly half a century, the perfect picture of a married couple living a life of contented frugality. But Kevin tells Father Declan that he and Enda are not man and wife, then dies before he can explain the details. It is left to Enda to tell the priest "the all of it."

As she does, in a touching story of growing up in an isolated cottage with little education, abject poverty, and a drunken widowed father. The few surprises come early, though, and soon the tale is at an end: "That's the all of it, Father... The rest you know." But we are only on page 68 of a book more than twice that length. Father Declan urges Enda to go on and she does. It is a story of two people discovering a world beyond their narrow valley: "You know how mist shifts the land about, how what's there one minute isn't there the next and the way a valley'll be lost to you at the same time a mountain-top'll show itself and it not attached to the earth." A world in which a man can still make a living as a farrier and motor cars are a rarity. A world where the first view of the sea from a cliff-top is a revelation: "The homing seabirds letting out those cries that fill you so with the feel of your own privacy." But there are no more surprises. Instead, something happens in Father Declan, as he feels torn between his roles as a confessor and a friend. The story seems to have ended again. Enda gets up and lights the candles around the bed. "In the brighter light, Kevin's face shone whiter, moon-like, yondered truly."

Yondered. A perfect word, an Irish word. And Father Declan feels yondered too as he lays cast after cast upon the rainswept river. We begin to see that what had seemed just a convenient narrative frame may be more than that, and that the priest may be as deserving of our sympathy as the widow. And we give it, we give it. Poet Laureate Mark Strand called this "the only book I know in which innocence follows experience. A truly amazing thing." Indeed.
1220698
It's the sign of an extraordinary writer when we find ourselves as readers so affected by the characters that we want to yell at them, slap or shake them, or cry with frustration--and Gregory is an extraordinary writer, as she demonstrates in all three of the Wideacre books. It took me two tries to finish this story; Julia's emotional journey is truly heart-breaking. This is after all the tragic second act, when things are left in a state that seems beyond repair. But her devastated world is held together by the heroic strength of Ralph, the winning charm of James Fortescue, the courage of John and Celia, and the beautiful descriptions of the setting: of plant life, city life, landscape, and the spunky, endearing residents of Acre whose fates touch us as deeply as if they were our friends. I had to finish the story simply to discover how Gregory manages to make everything seem so real. There's an emotional power to these books that seems to be missing in the later Boleyn books, but the evocative description is Gregory's trademark, and is in great evidence here.
2086558
MADAME ZERO, a collection of nine short stories, is the latest from Man Booker Prize-nominated author Sarah Hall. The slenderness of the physical book belies its emotional heft and the vastly compelling world it contains. Hall masterfully controls the emotions of her characters in these stories, verging on surreal. The book is framed by two tales of transformation and filled with stories of realization and tribulation.

Mrs. Fox opens MADAME ZERO. Sophia, a previously unremarkable wife, inexplicably turns into a vixen and raises a litter of kits in the forest near where she lived with her husband. A similarly unremarkable wife is the subject of the final story, Evie. Evie transforms into a fiercely sexual woman with a sweet tooth and a habit of poetic yet nonsensical phrases. Her husband, Alex, risks his relationship with her and their best friend, Richard, to satiate her desires, only to find that the root cause of her drastic change is medical. Perhaps the more successful stories, though, have more subtle character development.

Becca, at the center of Wilderness, has come to her boyfriends native South Africa to find musical inspiration. Just a few days into the trip, she faces her greatest fear and takes a terrifying journey across Kaaimans, a dilapidated bridge over a viaduct. Following her boyfriend, Joe, and his childhood friend, Zach, from the home Zach shares with his enigmatic and religiously zealous wife, Becca approaches Kaaimans with a curiosity that turns to dread as the trio moves across the landscape and through a darkly inhabited tunnel. Hall beautifully describes the bridge and its body, and from Beccas point of view its danger. The iron girders were gory with rust; rust was bleeding profusely out of the bolted panels and leaking down the concrete legs into the river. Beccas anthropomorphic rendering of the bridge begins to make more sense as Hall reveals the source of her fright --- a barely remembered yet defining event in her childhood. Her panic about falling as she moves across the bridge and recalls an earlier tragedy is viscerally described and psychologically wrought.

Eleven-year-old Jem in Goodnight, Nobody also faces what frightens and fascinates her when she brings her mother a left-behind meal at the mortuary where her mother works the night shift. She both hopes and hopes not to see her mother at work preparing the body of an infant who was killed by a dog close to her house. Hall wisely never lets the reader know the conclusion of her young protagonists quest. But we still learn a lot about the girl, and her keen and distant observations of her family and her world, as she confronts both the mundane and the horrifically extraordinary.

Another trek takes place in Later, His Ghost. Here a young man has survived four years in a wind-destroyed post-apocalyptic landscape and now finds himself caring for a despondent and pregnant former teacher. As Christmas approaches, he risks life and limb to find her a copy of Shakespeares THE TEMPEST.

Halls stories are dark and strange, sensual and finely worded, literary without being pretentious. MADAME ZERO is a quick read, but the images and characters will surely linger in the minds of readers long after the last page is turned.

Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman
3968500
Every now and then you find a book, you read it,
 and it truly changes you.  Such a book is Anthony
 Bukoski's collection of stories, Twelve Below
 Zero.  The strange characters living in its pages
 touch the reader and stick in the memory: Augie
 Benner, who smelled so bad the local townspeople
 made him wear a bell so they knew he was coming;
 Luanna, receiving the last sacraments and lament-
 ing her sins; Syl Magda lying in her bed in the
 cold, dying.  The settings of the stories also
 remain in your mind long afterward: the spit and
 herring scales on the floor of the End-of-the-Line
 Cafe; Harry's pulley and basket mail delivery in-
 vention at the Armitage Hotel; the incredible
 cold outside the House of the Blue Rondo near
 Lake Superior.
 Bukoski has an amazing gift for storytelling and
 his stories move, delight and disturb the reader.
 Some, such as "Great Sea Battles" and "The Kissing
 Booth," are howlingly humorous, whereas others,
 "Ice Days" and Twelve BElow Zero" come to mind,
 carry with them a sense of local, yet universal
 tragedy.  Many of the stories are set among the
 cold lonliness of northern Wisconsin's winter;
 Bukoski was born and raised and now teaches and
 writes there.  If you want an unusual treat,
 something which will remain with you long after
 you put the book down, something refreshing and
 unique and mysteriously wonderful, find a copy
 of Anthony Bukoski's Twelve Below Zero.
4219975
I pre-ordered Hurricane Child from Amazon (.co.uk, rather than .com) a little while ago and it finally arrived yesterday (things often take longer this side of the pond). I zoomed through the book and finished it today. Wow. I don't even typically read Middle Grade or YA but this is going onto the list of my favourite books. I wish to death I'd had something like this as a child. I would've felt so affirmed and validated. To know that ornery, sullen dark-skinned queer girls have a place in literature? What a gift.

The prose is beautiful, haunting, and evocative. I so wish I could find other books geared towards young readers with such stunning writing. The voice was strong, and by the end of the first chapter I understood the protagonist, Caroline, so well. I felt for her as an outsider, but also felt like I was her. I remember so many of her conflicts from my own childhood, and while there were many mature themes in here, I thought they were handled sensitively and in a way that young readers would not struggle with. I often wanted weightier material to read as a late elementary school and middle school student, and so I moved on to adult material. This book provides a perfect compromise. It presents harsh realities but there is also a sweetness to it you do not find in adult or even YA books.

Despite being very philosophical, it also has a snappy plot. There's a mystery at the heart of it that you're pulled through quickly. The language, the social dynamics, the details of the setting - all of this made for such a rich reading experience.

I love this book. I can't wait until my three-year-old is old enough for us to read it together.
3303269
If quality is to be measured in terms of interest and fascination  if literary merit reveals itself through invested emotion (tears in several cases) and a desire to go on reading a story forever  then I think STARFLOWER could truthfully be called best and most beautiful of Stengl's Tales of Goldstone Wood. I'd looked forward to reading it for some time, and Stengl did not disappoint. She provides plenty of familiar faces from the start, as well as some new ones, and after I passed the fifty-page mark or so, I flew through the story.

There are timeless messages here, woven dexterously through a fantasy setting in a way that only serves to enhance them. More than anything, this is a story about Eanrin, chief bard of Rudiobus, and the Hound of Heaven that he cannot elude. Though he rescues Maid Starflower from an enchanted sleep, it is the mortal girl of surprising strength who unconsciously prompts the poet-cat's transformation as he learns what it means to love. I really enjoyed having the opportunity to live in his head and see the story through his eyes, an experience unique to this book. (Not to mention that Eanrin's and Imraldera's slowly blooming relationship was one of my favorite parts of the story). STARFLOWER centers on the concept of freedom: the freedom to speak for oneself, the freedom of knowing a person's true name and purpose, and overarching all of this, the true freedom that can only come through bondage in Christ. It is a story of light and beauty in the midst of bleak desperation and so engaging that I didn't want to put it down or see it end. Read it: you will not regret it.

(Post script: I broke the mold in some respects by reading this fourth book in the series after reading books five and six. Knowing these later endings brought up a few spoilers, but somehow, it worked. I'd still recommend reading these novels in order for maximum understanding and enjoyment.)
1757007
Ambiguous endings where the reader is left wondering "what happens next?" usually bug the heck out of me, but for some reason, I'm okay with the fact that not a one of the dozen stories in this book has a cut-and-dried finish. They are so well written, so involving and unusual I just hated to see them end at all. Period.

Some of my favorites were the heartbreaking "Shirley Temple Three"  where a woman struggles to save a cloned Dwarf Mammoth, "The Real Alan Gass" which features a man obsessed with his love's "dream husband" and  "Felix Not Arriving" in which an acerbic comedian has an unpleasant visit with his young son.

Every couple of weeks, I pick a collection of short stories and read one tale each day. Sad to say, but often by the time I reach the end of the book, I've forgotten most of the stories. Not the case with this one. Perhaps it's something about all those loose ends, all that wondering about what happened or what could still happen, that keeps them churning around in my mind.
2258561
GHOST TOWN is part of Bloomsbury's Writer in the City series, in which a writer provides a story that captures the essence of a certain city. In this volume, Patrick McGrath takes on Manhattan and gives us three stories set at different times in the city's history, all of which concern a death. The way we die holds a mirror to how we live and each story provides a vivid picture of the age and the city.

"The Year of the Gibbet" takes place during a cholera epidemic. While waiting to succumb to the disease, Edmund reflects on the death of his mother and the role he played in it as a young boy. After the Battle of Long Island, in which the American forces narrowly escaped certain defeat under the cover of a providential storm, Edmund's mother gets involved in a plot to blow up the British ships holding New York harbor. Edmund's inability to lie spontaneously when he and his mother are questioned by British officers dooms her and she is hung as a traitor. Poor Edmund can never forgive himself for his guilelessness, even as his own time runs out.

"Julius" brings us to the Gilded Age. Julius is a puzzling disappointment to his father, a successful businessman. The boy's artistic personality inspires his sisters to rescue him by sending him to art school. The impressionable Julius is immediately smitten by his first nude model, a connection wholly inappropriate for a young man of his standing, and Julius's father seeks to put an end to it. The model disappears and Julius, devastated, loses his sanity. He is convinced that the model, Annie, has fallen victim to a sordid plot involving his art teacher and his father. When he lashes out in his own act of violence, he is confined in an asylum for decades. Upon his return to the house where he grew up, the world has passed him by but the truth of his experiences reverberates in the family legend: it is wrong to deny love.

Although the least gothic in tone, readers may find that "Ground Zero" is the most affecting of the stories as it deals with 9/11 and shows our own age's ghost stories in the making. Danny Silver has been seeing the same psychiatrist for years. He has intimacy issues, so his doctor is immediately suspicious when he claims to have fallen in love with a prostitute he hired a few days after the planes hit the World Trade Center. The prostitute has issues of her own, not the least being her claim that she is being haunted by a former client, a man who left her bed on 9/11 and went directly to work on the 104th floor. Everyone in this triangle is wounded in some way but the psychiatrist's plight is the most heart-rending. She's too close to Danny and expresses her concern in a way that inevitably drives him further into his troubled relationship.

The stories in GHOST TOWN are marked by a shared sense of loss and distance. Readers familiar with Patrick McGrath's earlier works will recognize his interest in violence and madness, as well as his formidable talent.
468584
This is a book that lingers and haunts you long after you finish reading it. It is so subtle yet powerful.
1829919
For a collection of stories with such a broad diversity of characters and subject matter, there's a cohesiveness in both theme and tone that works to make a lasting impression on the reader. While most of the stories have elements of crime fiction, none are really about the crime. Instead, they are about the events that lead to the commission of a crime or the fallout after a crime occurs. Two themes seemed to be on the mind of the author as I read the collection: family and regret. These stories are populated with husbands and wives, mothers and sons, grandfathers and granddaughters, aunts and nieces, and in the last story, brothers, all of whom have either made mistakes or will make mistakes that will haunt them for a long time. This sense of melancholia is what stayed with me after finishing book and is what elevates it to something more literary than what I was expecting. And while it's not an uplifting book, it is not hopeless, either. The characters are written with too much empathy and complexity for the reader to give up on any of them. A thoughtful book from a thoughtful author. Highly recommended.