British author Jennie Rooney, who studied history at Cambridge, was first inspired to write this story of spies within Britain’s top secret atomic research labs when she read a newspaper article in 1999 about Melita Norwood, age eighty-seven, who was revealed to have been the “most important and longest-serving Soviet spy of the Cold War era.” After her unmasking, Ms. Norwood’s interview with the press and her appearance on television, in which she was “rather economical with the truth, and not hugely remorseful,” according to Rooney, energized Rooney to investigate further. At the same time she began to imagine the circumstances under which a seemingly innocuous worker for several British labs doing atomic research could have willingly passed documents and research notes to Russia for use in their own frantic race to develop nuclear weapons – all this without coming to the attention of MI5, the British Security Service until fifty years later. Just as importantly, Rooney also wanted to understand why and how Norwood – or anyone else, for that matter – could betray her own country and be able to live with herself, quietly and comfortably, in the very country whose secrets she had so treacherously revealed.
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Norwegian author Linn Ullmann’s novel The Cold Song defies easy categories. It is not really a mystery, since the opening line announces that “Milla, or what was left of her, was found by Simen and two of his friends when they were digging for buried treasure in the woods.” We also know from the first page that a “boy known as K.B.” was later arrested and charged with her death. Still, this dark novel, filled with foreboding throughout, creates an atmosphere which mystery lovers will find intriguing, if not gripping, as the lives of the main characters move back and forth in time, creating their own suspense as each character reveals personal secrets and emotional limitations. Siri Brodal, the owner of two well-established restaurants; her husband, Jon, the author of two best-selling novels; their strange, sometimes irrational eleven-year-old daughter Alma; and Siri’s mother Jenny, a feisty, no-nonsense woman who is about to have her seventy-fifth birthday, form the crux of the novel and control the emotional climate throughout. Haunting all the action, however, is nineteen-year-old Milla, who disappeared two years ago, shortly after she was hired to care for Alma and her much younger sister Liv during the family’s summer vacation on the Norwegian coast. The discovery of Milla’s mangled remains, as the novel opens two years after her disappearance, preoccupies all the characters and looms over the action throughout.
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Although lovers of international fiction can find a number of novels from Japan, China, and other Asian countries available in English, the number of novels from Korea is remarkably small. Though I actively look for novels from as many countries as possible, I have, in fact, reviewed only one other Korean novel on this website to date – Three Generations, by Yom Sang-Soep, a classic written in 1931. Kyung-sook Shin’s new novel, I’ll Be Right There, translated by Sora Kim-Russell, has therefore introduced me to a new, contemporary literary world, and I hope that other readers interested in unusual and rewarding fiction from an author who is almost unknown in the English-speaking world will feel as enriched by her work as I do. I’ll Be Right There takes place during the turbulent 1980s, a time in which Korean students demonstrated against the military dictatorship which had seized their country in a coup in 1979. It was partly because of these demonstrations, leading to the well-publicized torture death of a student, that the country’s leadership finally announced in 1987 that a direct election of the President would finally take place.
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A novel so rich it is difficult to describe in anything less than superlatives, Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Sound of Things Falling mesmerizes with its ideas and captivating literary style, while also keeping a reader on the edge of the chair with its unusual plot, fully developed characters, dark themes, and repeating images. Set in Colombia, the novel opens in Bogota in 2009, with Antonio Yamarra, a law professor in his late twenties, reading a newspaper story about a male hippopotamus which had escaped from the untended zoo belonging to former drug lord Pablo Escobar, who was shot and killed in 1993. The hippo, living free on the huge Escobar property for many years, had eventually wreaked havoc in the surrounding countryside until it was shot and killed by a marksman. The newspaper’s image of the slaughtered hippo brings back traumatic memories for Yamarra – real memories involving a former acquaintance, Ricardo Laverde, whom he had known for a few months in 1996, until Laverde’s death later that year, and more subtle images of a family destroyed and some possible connections to Colombia’s on-going war against drugs. Throughout the thirty-year time span of the novel, author Vasquez keeps the novel moving forward. Virtually every image in the novel connects with similar images in other times, and as time passes, the reader comes to accept that “The great thing about Colombia [is] that nobody’s ever alone with their fate.”
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In this classic novel from 1977, Scottish author/poet William McIlvanney pulls out all the literary stops, creating a novel so filled with ideas, unique descriptions, and unusual characters that labeling it as one of the great crime novels does it a disservice. It is also a literary novel of stunning originality, so unusual for its time that it is now labeled as the first of the “Tartan noir” novels, with McIlvanney himself described as the “Scottish Camus.”* Two sequels – The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983), a Silver Dagger Award winner, and Strange Loyalties (1991), a winner of the Scottish Art Council Award – complete the story of Laidlaw. Despite his success and his prizes, however, McIlvanney’s “Tartan noir career” ended after these three novels, with the author concentrating instead on his poetry, literary fiction, screenplays, journalism, and essays – and winning prizes for his work in all of these genres. Inexplicably, considering the author’s successes and his prizes, all three of the Laidlaw novels have been long out of print – until this year – when Europa Editions in the US and Canongate Books in the UK decided to republish Laidlaw. The other two books in the Laidlaw series are scheduled for release this fall. This one is a true classic for anyone who wonders just how good a crime novel can be as Laidlaw holds to his own truths and refuses to succumb to the easy black and white view of the world so common to this genre.
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