From the time of Irish “independence,” recognized by treaty between Ireland and Britain in 1922, to the Good Friday Accords of 1998, the island has suffered from sectarian violence. Even in recent years, after the “Peace” agreement, many Republicans, nearly all of them Catholic, and including the IRA and Sinn Fein, continue to want a united Ireland and the return of the six northern counties which have been ruled by Britain for eight-five years. Ardent Loyalists, mostly Protestants who support British rule and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, want to protect their minority interests by remaining in control in their limited area of the island. Set in Belfast in November and December of 1979, this novel by Louise Dean focuses on the violence which reached its irrational peak at that time, and she holds back nothing in describing the brutality and tit-for-tat horrors in which both sides engaged.
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Living in the jungle of Brazil, a group of American researchers, working for a pharmaceutical company, is trying to complete their long research project on a dramatic rainforest discovery. The leader of the project is Dr. Annick Swenson, a tough and disciplined seventy-three-year-old woman who has not left Brazil for over a decade. Though the pharmaceutical company is paying all the expenses, no one can find out the status of the project–the last person sent to check on it, Anders Eckman, died shortly after his arrival at the camp. When word of Eckman’s death reaches the company, the president decides that someone must return to find out what is happening at the lab. Marina Singh, a single woman in her forties, has shared an office with Anders Eckman and knows Dr, Swenson, and she is the person to make a follow-up trip to the jungle. Patchett raises many questions about what drives those who give up virtually everything for pure science, questioning how much is done from idealism, how much from naivete, and how much for personal gain. The action speeds along on the strength of a fast-paced narrative full of suspense. Expected to be one of the big, popular sellers of summer, 2011.
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It is Christmas, and Nick Goodyew has not seen his father, Ken, in fifteen years, or Pearl, his mother, in twenty. His parents’ acrimonious life together, and their divorce, have come to typify the family’s way of dealing with issues—escape, a way of life for virtually all of them. His father, however, now believes he is going to die, and, despite the on-going rancor, typified by the Christmas phone call, he still wants to get the family together to make peace with the past. The ensuing novel is a witty and touching examination of all the members of the family as they finally examine their lives, their memories, and their relationships. Author Louise Dean, with her dark sense of humor and her breath-taking ability to suggest attitudes and psychological states through description, arouses sympathy for her characters as they search for ways to communicate and, perhaps in time, forgive each other for the past. On my list of Favorites for 2011.
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In this challenging and important philosophical novel, South African author Ingrid Winterbach explores the particulars of one woman’s life to provide insight into the universal, as, of course, do many other good authors, but she goes way beyond the one or two significant new insights one has grown to expect. Here, her main character, Helen Verbloem, a writer and lexicographer of the Afrikaans language, wants to understand the very essence of life itself, what it means to be alive (if life can be said to have “meaning” at all, rather than simply existing as a fact), and how the Big Bang began a chain of events which has led ultimately to sentient human beings, often imperfect, such as Helen herself. She wants to know how man developed a consciousness and a conscience, and how—and even if—individuals, such as herself, have any unique place in the grand scheme of life. Why am I here, she wonders, and does my life matter? The resulting novel is astonishing—so grand in concept, so challenging, as the author leads the reader step-by-step through many discussions of the evolutionary cycle, and so exhilarating in its bold creativity, that I found myself constantly amazed at the unique ways in which the author employs all this information to create a whole new understanding of Helen, even as Helen herself is evolving with new understandings of her world.
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Where else but Dublin might you find a James Joyce scholar dead, and Det. Supt. Peter McGarr and the Murder Squad of the Garda Siochana reading Ulysses, and occasionally Samuel Beckett, in an effort to understand what led to his death? This is, no doubt, the only murder mystery ever written which takes so seriously the conflict between James Joyce, who was committed to writing “novels of competence,” and Samuel Beckett, who believed totally in “the novel of incompetence,” a conflict which also involved the literature scholars and critics at Trinity College who were as partisan as the two novelists. As esoteric as this sounds, author Bartholomew Gill has a field day here, creating characters who do more than just live and breathe—they live riotously, get roaring drunk, have wild and sometimes hilarious love affairs, wear their hearts and emotions on their sleeves, love their country and its history to the depths of their being, and, though they take their jobs seriously, they see them as just one part of real life. Gill includes lively and wonderfully droll conversations throughout–the teasing and byplay one expects of close and caring relationships–both at the Garda station among his repeating characters and at home. And when Det. Hugh Ward and Det. Ruthie Bresnahan finally “discover” each other, one of the highlights of this novel, their love scenes are as hilarious as they are steamy. My favorite of this series.
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