Lisbon, 1940, provides a temporary safe haven and hope for emigrating citizens from every country in Europe as they try to secure visas for passage by ship – any ship – out of Europe and away from the Nazis. For Americans with valid passports, life is more secure. The U.S. government has commandeered the S. S. Manhattan to transport stranded Americans in Lisbon back to New York. For these people, the biggest challenge is to pass the time till the ship sails, and many of them do it in extravagant fashion. A few, however, including characters here, have more difficulty leaving Europe, physically and emotionally, than one might expect. As one character notes, in retrospect, “Now it seems churlish to speak of our plight, which was nothing compared with that of real refugees – the Europeans, the Jews, the European Jews. Yet at the time, we were too worried about what we were losing to care about those who were losing more.” Author David Leavitt, in describing life in Lisbon in these crucial weeks before war engulfs all of Europe, examines four characters – Americans awaiting the S. S. Manhattan – as they reveal their attitudes toward Europe, toward the United States, and ultimately toward each other. All in all, Leavitt creates an unusual treatment of a tension-filled time and place with characters whom he manipulates effectively to illustrate his themes. Ultimately, “there are occasions when none of the choices are good. You simply have to calculate which is the least bad.”
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Halloween and spooky novels in general come roaring to life in this Dickensian melodrama, set outside of Norfolk, England, in 1867. Eliza Caine, who has suffered a series of personal disasters which have left her an orphan, has made a sudden decision to leave the family “home” in London, in which she has spent her life, to accept the position of governess for a family she does not know in a city she has never seen. She is anxious for change, however. Just one week past, her father had ignored her pleas that he remain at home to nurse his cold and had, instead, attended a reading by Charles Dickens on a miserable, rainy night. He succumbed to fever shortly afterward. Almost immediately after her father’s death, Eliza is informed that the family home is not, in fact, owned by the family, and that she will have to vacate the house. Seeing an advertisement in the newspaper for a governess, signed by “H. Bennet,” she has chosen to leave her current teaching job at a girls’ school and move elsewhere. From the beginning of the novel, Irish author John Boyne draws parallels between Dickens’ work and his own, with some direct references to characters from Dickens’s novels. All the clichés of Victorian plot appear here, and the dramatic and inexplicable actions by ghosts create an atmosphere of doom which will keep a smile on the face of readers familiar with the novels of the period.
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In this magnificent novel of family relationships, which is also a love story and a story of betrayal on several levels, author Jhumpa Lahiri introduces four generations of one family whose history begins in their home in Tollygunge, outside of Calcutta, and then moves off in many different directions. Traveling back and forth in time, with points of view shifting among several different but interrelated characters, the novel creates an impressionistic picture of events which begin in 1967 with a political uprising, the family effects of which continue into the present. Two brothers, only fifteen months apart in age, become linchpins of the novel. Subhash, the older, more cautious brother, is far more apt to watch any action, even as a child, than his brother Udayan, the more adventuresome brother, who is always participating in the action and testing limits. As the novel expands over four generations, it revolves around the idea that “you can’t go home again,” physically or emotionally, at the same time that it also considers the ideas that we are who we are. Accepting the latter, however, is not good enough, unless we are also prepared to accept the consequences to others of our decisions to “be ourselves.” In this novel the interactions, responsibilities, and consequences are particularly fraught as the novel moves through nearly fifty years of personal and social change within one family through several generations.
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“Everything is falling apart…The parents are demanding to pick up their children. The barricade is crowded with people who intend to help them free the children… They don’t understand what they are risking if the infection gets out and there isn’t any medicine.” This dramatic quotation instantly establishes the intensity of STRANGE BIRD, a novel from Sweden by Anna Jansson, candidate for the Glass Key Award for Best Scandinavian Novel in 2012. Its story concerns a pandemic of bird flu on an island off the Swedish coast. A new name to American readers, Anna Jansson has had a dual career as both a nurse and a writer, and has already sold over two million copies of her Nordic crime novels throughout ten countries in Europe. Now available to an English-speaking audience, Strange Bird will undoubtedly captivate new readers, sweeping them up with the provocative opening chapters, as the action begins on Gotland, a sparsely inhabited island in the Baltic, sixty miles off the coast of Sweden.
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Though he has been celebrated by Roberto Bolano and many other Latin American authors, Guatemalan author Rodrigo Rey Rosa, has been a well-kept secret to most English-speaking readers. Of his almost two dozen works published to acclaim in Latin America, only four have been published in English, and three of those are translations into English by famed American expatriate author Paul Bowles, who was Rey Rosa’s literary mentor. Living in Morocco while he translated several of Paul Bowles’s novels into Spanish, Rey Rosa came to know the country well, finding life on the African shore of the Mediterranean markedly different from that of the European shore represented by France and Spain, both of which had claimed Morocco as a protectorate until after the mid-1950s. Rey Rosa reflects upon these changes as he presents three interrelated scenarios, in which three separate characters express their own points of view and live independent lives which sometimes overlap with other lives within the book. Rey Rosa composes these separate scenarios so carefully that each could stand alone as a short story or novella, and they are often so poetic and filled with lyrical details that critics have described them as “prose poems.” Elegantly written, The African Shore conveys much information about cultures, past and present, along with the people who straddle the worlds of Europe and Africa. The animism of the rural farmers, which infuses their lives with magical explanations; the Muslim culture, which provides comfort and identity to large numbers of people from all levels of society; and the criminality which seems to be filling a vacuum in the wake of the country’s independence from Spain and France, all play a role in the imagery and symbolism which connects the many facets of this marvelous work.
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