Norwegian author Jo Nesbo never writes the same book twice, even within his best-selling series of ten Harry Hole thrillers. From The Redbreast, an historical novel which examines Norway’s Nazi era past and its neo-Nazi present, to The Snowman, a horror novel which out-horrors Stephen King, and The Leopard, with action which moves from Norway to Hong Kong and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nesbo always keeps the narrative moving at a ferocious pace, and the excitement at fever pitch. Though the reader does come to know Harry Hole and those who share his life to some extent during these ten novels, the emphasis has always been on action and thrills. Harry, an alcoholic loner at heart, has never been complex. Nesbo’s focus changes with The Son, a standalone novel. Though the plot here is every bit as fast-paced as those of Nesbo’s Harry Hole novels, the scope is smaller and more intimate, and for the first time, Nesbo seems to be allowing the reader inside his characters, making his characters and themes more complex and fully-developed. I loved it.
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Moments of tenderness alternate with dramatic moments of violence in this semi-autobiographical novel of World War II by Tatamkhulu Afrika, a name assumed by the author late in life and meaning “Grandfather Africa.” As the novel begins, an elderly man is opening two letters which accompany a package. Telling the story from his own point of view, the old man learns in the first letter, from a law firm, that someone the speaker refers to only as “he,” someone he knew more than fifty years ago, has died after a long illness and that the speaker has received a legacy. The second letter is from “him,” a man who has been “lost” to the speaker for virtually all of his post-war life. The legacy and the letter clearly upset the speaker as he wonders “Am I permitting a phantom a power that belongs to me alone? What relevance do they still have – a war that time has tamed into the damp squib of every other war, [and] a love whose strangeness is best left buried where it lies?” Though he knows he should leave the past buried, he is unable to resist. What follows is the story of the four years the speaker survived when, during the long siege of Tobruk, he suddenly found himself a prisoner of war. This is an honest and controlled novel which focuses brilliantly on some of the well-known but less publicized aspects of prison camp life.
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This can’t-put-it-downer of novel about the interconnected lives of a disturbed family excites and unnerves the reader at the same time that it puzzles and sometimes terrifies with its eerie atmosphere and constant sense of imminent doom. A coming-of-age novel with a twist, it reveals the trials of a young boy, age six when the novel opens, constantly moving through dark locales in and around Copenhagen with his father, who is obviously hiding a terrible secret, not only from the boy, who is never named, but also from everyone else. The boy and his father clearly love each other and want to help each other, but they are constantly moving, and their lives are always changing with the father’s succession of oddball, low-paying jobs. Filled with surprises, the action in this novel is non-stop, and many readers will be unable to put down the book, once they get into it. The sense of menace throughout contrasts with the intrinsic “niceness” of the boy allowing the reader to wish fervently for his success while fearing the worst. The author releases information and paces his dramatic moments effectively so that there are no “dead spots” in the novel. Past and present overlap, often converging unexpectedly and then veering in new directions to provide new information. The author is so good at controling his tone and the sense of atmosphere, that it may not be until the conclusion that readers will begin to wonder about some of the “reality” here and whether it actually makes sense. Outstanding novel which defies genre.
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Told by Aaliya Saleh, a woman who “long ago abandoned [herself] to a blind lust for the written word,” this remarkable literary novel by Lebanese author Rabih Alameddine allows readers to follow the speaker into worlds which often feel familiar because of the emphasis on books the reader knows, but also into other worlds, previously unknown, based on her life in Beirut. From the opening pages, Aaliya, in her seventies, is totally honest with the reader. Within a few pages of the book’s opening, we learn that Aaliya is now a divorced, single woman who translates one novel every year from English or French to Arabic. Gradually, Aaliya fills in further details of her life, eventually bringing the chronology to the present, but it is a wayward journey, one the literature and music lover will thrill to take with her, reading slowly to savor her observations and the way she connects her life to observations by dozens of novelists and philosophers from all periods and from all over the world, often to the accompaniment of musical references to provide additional mood. Despite its lack of strong plot, there is nothing bland about this fascinating and absorbing novel, and booklovers will smile at the ironies involved in the conclusion.
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Strange and twisted characters, the vivid but often sinister lives they inhabit in their imaginations, and their almost universal preoccupation with death make this collection of short stories compelling, even mesmerizing, despite the sense of menace lurking within each story. The characters all appear on the surface to be “just like us,” ordinary people with similar sensibilities and familiar goals for the future, but as they develop during the fifteen unusually short stories in this collection, Danish author Dorthe Nors slowly and subtly reveals how off-kilter they really are. Virtually all these characters are lonely and unloved, craving companionship, if not a lover, and they depend on their imaginations to provide the excitement which is missing from their real lives. Most them, however, do not recognize that there is a fine line between their harmless daydreams and the nightmarish visions which sometimes threaten their equilibrium and control their actions. Dorthe Nors writes in a compressed style in which each story becomes the equivalent of an outline in a children’s coloring book for which the reader sometimes has to color “outside the lines” before the story takes full shape. Some of the stories are dramatic, some are extremely sad, some are mystifying, and some genuinely touch the heartstrings. All, however, are filled with ironies (and occasionally humor) based on the ways that the reader fills in the blanks to draw his/her own conclusions.
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