In the introduction to this re-publication of Crusoe’s Daughter (1986), author Jane Gardam admits that “This [is] by far the favourite of all my books.” Brought up in near isolation in rural northeast England like the main character of this novel, Gardam herself eventually escaped to college in London, but though she joined London’s academic world and had great success as a novelist, her mother remained in the rural north for her whole life. Gardam uses her mother’s life as the starting point of this novel, setting it at the turn of the twentieth century on the northeast coast of Northumberland. In her loneliness main character Polly Flint finds her greatest solace from the books in the library of the house, especially when she discovers Robinson Crusoe, whose own twenty-eight-year isolation on an island offers her a way of dealing with her own. Gardam creates real atmosphere here in both time and place, and rural northeast England becomes almost a character of its own. The novel’s realism keeps Polly’s story from becoming a romance, however much the reader may empathize with her, and the author’s honest feelings for her characters, many of them based, in part, on her own family members, endow the novel with a poignancy that one does not often find elsewhere in Gardam’s novels.
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In this seventh novel in the Harry Hole series to be translated into English, author Jo Nesbo, with over eleven million thrillers in print, continues to detail Harry’s fight against the symbolic “white whales” of injustice. Here, all Harry’s experience and knowledge as an Oslo policeman are readied for the biggest fight of his life, one to which he willingly makes a complete emotional commitment. Though he has lived in Hong Kong in self-imposed exile for three years, Harry has just learned that Oleg, the son of Rakel, the love of his life, is now jailed on remand in Oslo for the murder of a drug dealer and is, surprisingly, a drug addict himself. Harry himself has always had problems with alcohol, bureaucratic nonsense, and self-control, even during his career with the Oslo Police, and he has battle scars, both visible and invisible, which have made him a cynical man. He immediately returns to Oslo to review the case, hoping that he can save Oleg, who has always thought of him as “Dad.” Now “clean,” Harry sets to work to find out more about Oleg’s involvement in this case that he must win.
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Much admired by both Roberto Bolano and by Carlos Fuentes, Mexican author Daniel Sada has now been published in English for the first time by Graywolf Press. Almost Never, “a Rabelaisian tale of lust and longing,” provides a bawdy and mildly satiric look at the whole concept of machismo as it exists in the mid-1940s in Mexico. Sada’s main character, Demetrio Sordo, almost thirty when the novel opens in 1945, grew up in northern Mexico, but he has recently been living near Oaxaca in southern Mexico, working as an agronomist in charge of a large ranch. Bored by the usual nightly “entertainments,” he finally concludes that “Sex was the most obvious option.” Taking a taxi to a local brothel, he meets the beautiful brunette Mireya. His eye-opening relationship with her, graphically described, comes to a temporary stop, however, when he receives a letter from his mother in Parras, asking him to come home at Christmas to accompany her to a wedding in Sacramento, even farther away to the north. There he meet and falls in love with a strictly virginal local girl, Renata. The story with all its complications and bawdy language mocks the pretensions of its characters at the same time that it explains and even, in some cases, tries to justify them in terms of the social context of the period. A new Mexican author of great esteem, now translated into English for the first time.
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With the centennial of the Titanic disaster now approaching, Europa Editions has re-published Beryl Bainbridge’s 1996 novel Every Man for Himself, the Whitbread Award-winning novel of the ship’s doomed voyage, a concise and “awe-full” story of life and death, primarily among the first class passengers, most of them super-rich industrialists and their heirs. A nephew of J. P. Morgan, recently graduated from Harvard, tells the story, providing a new, first person vision of the ship’s lively social life from April 12 through the ship’s demise on April 15. Fictional characters who feel real mix with real characters whose presence on the ship is well documented, as Bainbridge recreates the giddy excesses and the sense of entitlement exhibited by the top deck passengers. Though some readers may be “Titanic-ed” to death by the number of books and articles written about this disaster for the centennial, along with new National Geographic photographs and the 1997 film being released in 3D on April 3, Bainbridge’s contribution is a worthy and beautifully written study – witty, insightful, and consummately ironic.
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In this imaginative and unconventional novel, Irish author Kevin Barry creates an almost feudal, imaginary city in the west of Ireland in the year 2053. The novel is in no way “futuristic,” as we have come to understand that term, however, seeming instead to be a throwback to simpler pagan times in which life is seen as the rule of the strong over the weak, with vengeance and its inevitable bloodshed a way of imposing control. Bohane, a tiny city on a peninsula, overlooks the water, its day-to-day life controlled by armed gangs and their bosses. Logan Hartnett, also called the Albino, the Long Fella, the ‘Bino, and H, is the “most ferocious power in the city,” ruling the Back Trace, “a most evil labyrinth.” His concern, however, is that the Cusacks, who live in the Northside Rises, have started to challenge his power. When a Feud is declared, to much fanfare and the showing of flags and colors, all hell breaks loose.
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