In this Ned Kelly Award winner from 2007, Adrian Hyland begins his series about Emily Tempest, who is part white, part aborigine. As a child living with the aborigines at Moonlight Downs while her white father worked at the Moonlight cattle station, Emily was a happy member of the community until she violated a taboo and was then sent to school in the white world for the next ten years. Much has changed upon her return to the community. Adrian Hyland creates an atmospheric and dramatic first novel which moves at warp speed, filled with action and excitement. At the same time, he also invites contemplation of the natural world and the lives of the aborigines who identify with nature on a visceral, even mystical, level.
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This tiny book, closer to a short story than to a novella, was the last piece of fiction by author Joseph Roth (1894 – 1939), and was published posthumously in 1940. As such, it becomes a particularly poignant study of Roth’s last days as he waited for the death he knew was coming. The Leviathan his allegorical last story, features an observant but illiterate Jew living in Progrody in the Ukraine who has become the premier dealer of coral jewelry for the farmers’ wives in the community and surrounding area. Nissen Piczenik respects his customers, entertains them when they come to town to see his wares, and offers good corals at good prices. Nissen has never left Progrody and has always yearned to see the ocean where his corals live, and when a young sailor comes home on leave from Odessa, he persuades the sailor to take him with him when returns to port. At home, he learns that a new coral seller has set up shop in the next town, and when he meets this seller, he discovers why this merchant has been able to undercut him in prices and lead his former customers to believe that Nissen has been cheating them. Nissen’s world dramatically changes as he comes to know the new coral seller, and one day he makes a fateful decision which changes the world as he knows it. Allegorical, with clear parallels to the author’s own life.
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In this high-temperature fever dream of a novel, with images that boil and explode with emotional intensity, author Antonio Lobo Antunes describes the life of a newly graduated Lisbon physician who has been sent to Angola from 1971 – 1973, during Portugal’s war to preserve its colonies. As the novel begins, six years have passed since the speaker has returned to Lisbon from Angola, but the young physician still cannot come to grips with all he saw and felt there. Furious by the betrayal of the Portuguese government, consisting of the ultra-right wing Estado Novo led for many years by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, the speaker accuses that government of responsibility for all the African dead and all the Portuguese lost souls who had to fight that senseless war. After bedding a woman he has just met, he is suddenly impelled to talk about his experiences in Angola, and, once started, he cannot stop. The intensity of the feelings and images throughout this book belie the usual objectivity of a novelist. Like his speaker, the author, too, was a young physician when he was sent to perform military service in Angola from 1971 – 1973, and though this is considered a novel, it is obviously extremely autobiographical.
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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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When Lisa Napoli, a journalist who had worked for public radio and CNN, attends a cookbook party in New York City, her friend Harris introduces her to a singularly attractive man. The handsome friend, Sebastian, is about to accompany him to Bhutan to do research for an article for Gourmet magazine. Napoli soon discovers through conversations with the two men that Bhutan is “the happiest place on earth” a place that keeps a “Gross National Happiness Index.” In the midst of a midlife crisis, Napoli feels she has “been there, done that” for too long in the same job, adrift socially after the breakup of a long-term relationship. Now forty-three and childless, she reluctantly returns to her job at her home base in Los Angeles. Three weeks later, she receives an e-mail, asking her if she’d like to go to Bhutan to help with the start-up of a radio station, Kuzoo FM. With scarcely a second thought, she obtains a six-week leave of absence from her job and takes off for Bhutan, a Himalayan kingdom known as the Land of the Thunder Dragon.
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