Tag Archives: highly recommended

Auto Buy Authors: Helen Dunmore

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British novelist, poet, and essayist Helen Dunmore (who sadly died in 2017) has been part of my reading diet for many years. What I like about her writing is its lyrical quality and also there is often a thread of unease running through her narratives, at least in my favourite books.

Of the thirteen adult novels she wrote before her death (she also wrote many books for children), I have read six plus her collection of short stories, Ice Cream. Thankfully, I have four more of her books on my tbr shelf.

The first book I read by Dunmore, With Your Crooked Heart, predates this blog.

Every day for a month now the sun has shone, and every morning you’ve brought the same things out into the garden.

The Times Literary Supplement said the book is “unites strong characterization and a rip-roaring plot with an archetypal quality somewhere between a fairy story and a Greek tragedy.

Thus began my love affair with Dunmore.

Your Blue-Eyed Boy

This is what I said: This is a novel about reconciling who you are now with who you were when. It’s easy enough to pretend that each section of your life is complete and separate, but this is a novel that asks us to question our past choices, our past loves and our place in the here and now.

A Spell of Winter

This is what I said: A Spell of Winter has many of the gothic hallmarks: the gloomy dwelling, a sense of mystery, a distressed heroine. As long as Cathy and Rob are isolated, they manage to sustain their relationship. But like winter, it can’t last. Eventually, the real world seeps in in ways both expected and unexpected.

The Greatcoat

This is what I said: The Greatcoat was published under the Hammer banner (horror aficionados will recognize Hammer as the British production company behind  films like The Woman in Black and Let Me In.  They’ve entered the world of publishing in partnership with Arrow, a subsidiary of Random House. It’s nice to read a “horror” story that is less about blood and guts and more about the kind of chills which prickle your skin and send a shiver up your back. There are no monsters here, but The Greatcoat is deliciously creepy nonetheless.

Talking to the Dead

This is what I said: …like all of the Dunmore novels I’ve read – as literary as they are – this one has an element of psychological suspense. The pace isn’t fast though; information is revealed slowly, like veils pulled back one at a time.

Zennor in Darkness

This was Dunmore’s first novel. This is what I said: Zennor in Darkness has a thread of the gothic and the forbidden running though it and this book is particularly melancholy because of the setting. Modern readers will have had no experience with the horrors of WW1 and what it did to communities and individuals, and although this book doesn’t take place in the trenches the book captures so much of that horrible period in history.

I had a lovely chat with Shawn Breathes Books about Zennor in Darkness a couple summers ago. You can watch that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDu_cUSDY44

My segment starts at about the 7:22 mark

If you have never heard of Helen Dunmore, I can highly recommend her. My favourite book is A Spell of Winter.

The Things We Never Say – Elizabeth Strout

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Like Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout’s newest novel The Things We Never Say is a character study more than it’s a story driven by plot.

Artie Dam is a high school history teacher in Revere, Massachusetts. He’s been married to Evie for over thirty years and they share a son, Rob, who is in his late 20s.

Lately, Artie has been thinking a lot about dying.

For more than two months, he had been thinking about how to kill himself without his wife or son (or students) knowing that he had done so. It was a great deal more complicated than he had originally thought. And this frightened him, to think it could not be done swiftly.

Artie is feeling isolated. He is a beloved and respected teacher, has a solid relationship with his son and wife, and has good friends but he doesn’t know how to talk to them, to share his unsettling feelings of hopelessness (the novel is set very much in the here and now, so Artie is especially concerned about the state of the world and his own country under its current administration). He also has no real understanding of how he is viewed by the people closest to him because

All of us live with a huge blind spot before our eyes, meaning that no matter what we think we know we can never fully understand how we appear to others. This was true for Artie Dam.

To Evie, Artie “appeared the most considerate man she had ever known, though irritating in his way.” The fact that he wears white socks, for example, drives her nuts. Although one senses that Artie and Evie have had a good marriage, and love each other, there is also a sense that they don’t really talk to each other any more and when Artie gets a shocking piece of news he does not share the knowledge with his wife.

Nothing much happens in this novel but honestly I could have cared less because Artie was such a recognizable character. Maybe it’s because he’s a teacher and so am I; maybe it’s because he is of a similar vintage; maybe it’s because his concerns about what is happening in the world mirror my own. As he tries to make sense of his life, and as he encounters moments of decency and kindness, I found him to be wholly sympathetic and human.

Ultimately, Artie comes to the conclusion that real connection is extremely difficult and rare.

And now he knew why. Because to say anything real was to say things that nobody wanted to know. Or if they wanted to know, they would not care in the right way. Or even understand.

It was a private thing, to be alive. He understood this now.

Five stars. No Notes. Highly recommend.

Auto Buy Authors: Gabriel Tallent

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From his website: “Gabriel Tallent was born in New Mexico and raised on the Mendocino coast by two mothers. He studied English at Willamette University, with a focus on eighteenth-century cultural history. After graduation, he led trail crews, scrubbed toilets at Target, worked in the dining room at the Alta Lodge, and bussed tables at the Copper Onion. He now lives in Salt Lake City with his wife, Hattie, and their three rambunctious boys.”

I feel sort of like Gabriel Tallent is going to be the same sort of writer as Donna Tartt: everything he writes will be a masterpiece, but we’re going to have to wait a long-ass time between books.

Despite the fact that he only has two novels to his credit, this is how I know he’s an auto buy author for me. When Crux came out earlier this year, nine years after his debut My Absolute Darling, I bought and read it immediately. Such is the power of an auto buy author. Fingers crossed I don’t have to wait another decade for the next book.

I am not sure how My Absolute Darling ended up on my reading radar. It was named on The New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books list in 2017, but I didn’t discover it until 2019. I considered it for my book club pick, but said this in my review: “I highly recommend this book, although I understand that it won’t be palatable for many readers. It was on my short list as a potential selection for my book club, but I knew – even before I read it – that most of the women in my group would have a very difficult time with its subject matter. After reading it, I can say with certainty that I was right: they would have hated it. But I would argue that it’s compelling, intelligent and worthy of the copious praise it has received.”

I have often (selectively) recommended it, though, and virtually everyone who reads it agrees that it is amazing.

Crux was definitely an easier book to read subject-matter wise. It’s the story of teenage besties Dan and Tamma who spend their days rock climbing and dreaming of a different life. In my review I said “There is a lot of climbing jargon in this book and that might not be to everyone’s taste. I don’t know a dang thing about climbing, but by the end of it I was invested in their pursuit of “sending” each climb they attempted. I loved Crux. It’s my first five star read of 2026.”

Tallent is a talented writer. And he pulls no punches. And he has broken my heart twice now. So, obviously, he’s an auto buy author.

Auto Buy Authors: Lisa Reardon

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In my continuing series on the authors whose books I will always buy, this month’s featured auto buy author is Lisa Reardon. There is very little updated info about Reardon on the internet and that’s because she pretty much dropped off the face of the map in 2010 when she was incarcerated for the assault with the intent to commit murder of her father. Her sentence was four – seventeen years. There is very little information to be had about Reardon, but here is another account of the events surrounding this incident. I believe she only served a couple of years of that time and once she was released she sort of disappeared from the spotlight. As far as I know, she only wrote three novels and I have read all three. If by some miracle she wrote something else, I would hand over my money in a nanosecond.

I read Reardon’s novel Billy Dead at least 20 years ago and it is a book that has lodged itself in my heart for many years. My read of it predates this blog, but I reposted the NY Times review of it here.

“People lose people. I don’t know why we’re all so damned careless. Folks lose their kids, men lose their women, even friends get lost if you don’t keep an eye out.”

No question, Billy Dead is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I am a fan of gritty fiction and in Reardon’s capable hands, the story of siblings Ray, Jean, and Billy is a gut punch of a book. The dysfunction is a deep, dark well in this book and so is the abuse, but then so is the love. I think I really do need to read it again. I definitely became a fan of Reardon.

Next I read The Mercy Killers.

“It’s hard to think how different their lives would have been if it weren’t for the mess they got themselves into, if it weren’t for that war, if they hadn’t all been so young and stupid and scared.”

In my review of this book I said “Lisa Reardon writes about characters who live in a world vastly different from my own. They are broken-down people whose lives are messy – filled with violence and alcohol and drugs and hopelessness.”

Although I wouldn’t have thought that I would like The Mercy Killers based on its synopsis, I did like it.

Then I read Blameless.

I said: “Blameless is a quiet novel where nothing much happens. Mary is often her own worst enemy, but as her story is pulled back layer by layer and you come to understand all the ways life has kicked her in the teeth, you just want something, anything, good to happen for her. Reardon has a particular gift when it comes to writing broken characters and I really enjoyed my time with Mary, even though, like her previous novels, the story is pretty grim.”

“Oh my God,” she cried. “Oh my God,” with heaving, gasping, snot-filled sobs.

“It’s all right, Sharon.” I pulled my visor down low over my face. People up and down the beach were looking at us. “It has a happy ending.”

Across the board, Reardon’s novels are compelling, dark, potentially triggering and definitely ‘go there’ in ways that might make many readers uncomfortable. But they are also really well-written, heart-wrenching, and compelling. Therefore, although I suspect I will never have the opportunity to buy another book by her, Lisa Reardon is an auto buy author.

What the Birds See – Sonya Hartnett

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Sonya Hartnett’s novel What the Birds See begins with a nod to a real-life mystery. In 1966, siblings Jane, Arnna and Grant Beaumont went to the beach and disappeared without a trace. In Hartnett’s novel, the Metford siblings are heading to the shop for some ice cream. “The route they’d take to the shop would bend around four corners: two right turns, two left.” They never make it to their destination.

In the background of this disappearance, nine-year-old Adrian lives with his grandmother, Beattie, and his uncle Rory. His is a lonely existence. He has ended up here because his mother Sookie can no longer care for him and his father wanted to be free. Beattie is annoyed by her grandson and loves him, although she doesn’t know how to demonstrate that love. Rory, 25, barely comes out of his bedroom. Two years ago, Rory had been in a car accident that had caused much harm and he “had given up much of his vitality […]He has no desire, now, to truly live–none to participate, none to appreciate.”

Adrian is anxious. He “worries about all sorts of things.” The disappearance of the Metfords just gets added to his list of worries: quicksand, his closest door ajar, spontaneous combustion, tidal waves, sea monsters, being locked inside a shopping center, that his grandmother will forget to collect him from school at the end of the day.

Hartnett’s book is about lost children. The Metfords literally disappear; Adrian is lost in a world of adults who pay little attention to him. When siblings move into the house across the road, they are lost children too. Coincidentally, these newcomers are two girls and one boy, similar ages to the Metfords. Their sudden appearance serves as a reminder of the missing children.

All Adrian wants is “a calm and rosy world; he is prepared to accept anything, if anything is what keeps the peace.” The road to adulthood is tricky, littered with landmines and in this version of childhood almost impossible to navigate successfully.

Heartbreaking and highly recommended.

Our Fathers – Rebecca Wait

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I knew from the opening line that I was going to love Rebecca Wait’s novel Our Fathers.

If she had survived, Katrina would have said what people always say: that it had been a day like any other.

Set on the remote Scottish island, Litta, Our Fathers tells the story of Tommy, who has returned home after 20 years to confront the trauma of his past. He arrives on his uncle’s doorstep and the two men settle into an uneasy routine. What happened on the island all those years ago belongs to Malcolm, too.

One day, seemingly out of the blue, Tom’s father, John –this is not a spoiler as it’s mentioned in the blurb–shot his mother, older brother, Nicky, baby sister, Beth and then himself. Tommy hid and was spared. John was Malcolm’s brother. Tommy was eight. Obviously, this horrific crime sent a shock wave through the small close-knit community and Tommy arriving back as an adult stirs things up again.

Both Tom and Malcolm have a difficult time talking. That was always Malcolm’s wife Heather’s domain, but she died six years ago. Now in his early sixties, Malcolm has grown used to his solitary life on the island. With Tom’s unexpected arrival, Malcolm is “so shocked that for a few moments he couldn’t even speak.”

Why has Tommy returned now?

By all accounts, John was a loving husband and a good father, but there is no way around what he did that fateful day. For all these years after, Malcolm has tried to grapple with his brother’s crime but

he knew as well as anyone what a strange darkness the past was, how we plucked pieces from it and refitted them to our own purposes. The past was a story we told ourselves.

We spend a lot of time with uncle and nephew as they tiptoe around their shared history, but it is not the only perspective we get. There is also a section where we meet Katrina, Tommy’s mother, before she ever meets John. It’s interesting to get this view of her, to see how her own upbringing (raised by a narcissistic mother) shaped her. Part of Tommy’s return to Litta, I think, has to do with learning a little about her. We also learn about how she met John and their relationship; we can see what people on Litta never did.

There is also a cast of interesting characters on Litta most especially Fiona, who reluctantly hosts a dinner party for Tommy. It is here that some of the cracks start to appear and, later, when we see that Fiona and Katrina had once been friends. Fiona has her own part to play in Tommy’s story. She muses

What do any of us do in the end except what we believe is right at the time, without having all of the information, without knowing how things will turn out? We leap into the darkness with our only protection our idea of what is right, and who can ask more of us than that? We do our best, Fiona thought. I have always done my best.

I loved this book. It is beautifully written – the landscape is wild and rugged. Tommy and Malcolm are taciturn and unable to say what they desperately need to say. Both men are incredibly sympathetic. There is an element of suspense, although that’s not necessarily what drives the plot. It’s a masterful look at memory, guilt, love and family.

Highly recommended.

The Correspondent – Virginia Evans

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I have been a letter writer my whole life. Perhaps part of it had to do with how much we moved around (and, no, my father was not in the military), but I always wrote letters. For a while in my early teens I had a whole load of pen pals, people you’d meet via ads in teen magazines or through school. One of my oldest pen pals I have known for 52 years. We don’t write letters anymore, which I miss. (Now it’s just the odd message via the internet, which is a poor substitute.) I do not have every letter I have ever received –sadly too many moves– but I do have a handful of special letters. Recently I met an old boyfriend at his father’s funeral and he told me he had saved some of my letters to him…from almost 40 years ago and when I asked if I could have them, he obliged and sent them my way. Talk about an embarrassing blast from the past

So, you see, I was predisposed to love Virginia Evans’s debut The Correspondent and I did.

Sybil Van Antwerp “is a mother and grandmother, divorced from a distinguished career in law” but it is “the correspondence that is her manner of living.”

This is the only exposition we get in the novel, the rest is Sybil’s correspondence with a variety of people including authors (Joan Didion and Ann Patchett); her adult children (Fiona and Bruce); her best friend, Rosalie; her beloved brother, Felix, and Harry, the young son of a former colleague. There is also one letter, never sent, to someone called Colt.

Some of the letters in the novel are from Sybil to the recipient and some letters are to Sybil, but we are able to piece together a variety of different “plots” based on these letters. For example, we know that Sybil has a fraught relationship with her daughter and a close relationship with Felix. Both Sybil and Felix were adopted. At least one of her correspondents seems to hold a grudge:

I imagine you reading my notes standing at the mailbox, heat growing on your neck and the sick feeling in your stomach. […] I hope you have to look twice, and that little fear keeps you from enjoying the life you have left, in the same way that you impeded me.

It is through Sybil’s correspondence that we learn about a tragedy in her past, her disintegrating marriage (30 years prior, because Sybil is now in her 70s), her stubbornness, her kindness, and her desire to make things right when she can. She is a fully realized character without ever saying a word. As Sybil says in one letter: “my letters have been far more meaningful to me than anything I did with the law. The letters are the mainstay of my life”.

er correspondence (both sent and received) is funny, nostalgic, heartbreaking, and mundane, and it accurately captures the minutia of daily life. Just when Sybil thinks there can be no surprises left for her, she discovers that’s not quite true.

I loved every single thing about this book. An easy five stars, no notes, highly recommended.

Things Don’t Break on Their Own – Sarah Easter Collins

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Although Things Don’t Break on Their Own is touted as a “miraculous literary thriller”, I think that’s doing Sarah Easter Collins’ debut a disservice. While the book is definitely literary and it’s definitely a page turner, I don’t think I would call it a “thriller”. But maybe that’s nitpicking and it really doesn’t matter.

Robyn and her wife, Cat, have invited some friends and family round for dinner. There’s Robyn’s older brother, Michael, and his girlfriend, Liv. There’s Nate, Cat’s brother, and his new girlfriend, Claudette, and then there’s Willa and her boyfriend, Jamie. Robyn and Willa have history; when they were 17 and in boarding school together they were roommates and then lovers, but it ended badly. That was years ago, now, though and the two women are friends. It wasn’t a particularly happy time for Willa. Her younger sister, Laika, disappeared when she was just 13 and nearly 22 years later, the family still doesn’t know what happened to her.

The story changes perspectives and doesn’t follow a straight line. As Robyn anticipates Willa’s arrival, she remembers the summer she took her back to Tea Mountain, the remote place she calls home. It is a transformative experience for Willa, whose own family is a dysfunctional mess. Robyn’s father is a potter, and as he repairs a broken bowl using the Japanese method of kintsugi, he assures Willa (without even knowing her all that well) that “You can fix anything, given the right tools.”

There is no fixing Willa’s fractured family though. Her father, Bryce, has a successful business, so money is not an issue, but he is a horrible and abusive bully, especially to Willa’s mother and Laika. In fact, Bryce never touched Willa, and perhaps some of her guilt stems from that. About Laika, Robyn says

I tried to keep her safe. I really did. I told her, keep your head down, don’t bring unnecessary attention to yourself, just do what you’re told, all the things that just came naturally to me. But I was so busy keeping her safe from herself that I forgot to warn her about the outside world. I should have told her that there were people out there, men, women even, who could harm her.

So much was my fault.

Robyn and Cat’s dinner party proves to be revelatory, but by the time you get to the “twist” (maybe that’s why they call this book a thriller), you’ll be so invested in these characters that –well, I don’t want to say it hardly matters, but it was honestly the least interesting part of the book.

I really enjoyed Things Don’t Break on Their Own. The writing was great, the characters were compelling, and the mystery surrounding Laika’s disappearance was intriguing. It’s a solid debut and I highly recommend it.

Crux – Gabriel Tallent

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According to Merriam-Webster, crux is “a puzzling or difficult problem: an unsolved question; an essential point requiring resolution or resolving an outcome; a main or central feature”.

Gabriel Tallent’s novel, Crux, comes nine years after his debut, the much lauded My Absolute Darling. Crux landed on the top of my must read pile based on my love for his debut and now that I have read it, it cements Tallent’s place in my auto buy list. (I hope I won’t have to wait another nine years for is next book!)

For Tamma and Dan, seventeen-year-old besties, a crux is a metaphor for the difficulties and decisions they face in their everyday lives, but also the very real problems they encounter every time they head out into the Mojave to climb boulders.

These kids live next door to each other in the middle of nowhere. Their mothers, Alexandra and Kendra, used to be best friends until they had a falling out and now no longer speak. Alexandra wrote a best-selling novel when she was eighteen. She married Lawrence, a construction worker, and had Dan. Kendra is a diner waitress and, besides Tamma, is mother to Sierra (who has three kids of her own) and Colin. She lives with a dirtbag drug dealer ten years younger than her in a ratchety trailer. Neither Dan nor Tamma’s home lives are particular stellar. Dan and his father don’t really have much to say to each other; Alexandra barely comes out of her room. She had heart valve replacement surgery years ago, and the valve is now deteriorating. Although she did write a second novel, she’s been blocked ever since. Kendra is deplorable. Whether it’s the circumstances of her own life or she’s just an awful person, she is not kind to Tamma. On the rare occasions Tamma would be in Dan’s house, Dan would “catch Tamma eating orange peels. Chewing steak bones from the night before. She’d nab butter off the stick. […] “Dude,” he’d whisper, meaning, That bread is moldy, and “Dude,” she’d say back, meaning, Don’t worry, I scraped the mold off.”

Tamma and Dan spend as much time out in the desert as they can. They don’t have the right gear, but they climb anyway, spotting each other and egging each other on and challenging each other to climb more difficult rocks. “On the ground, Tamma was the clumsiest person he had ever met, but on the wall, she was breathtaking. […] Everyone he knew seemed to think Tamma was trash, but he thought she was some kind of genius.”

The teens have a dream, and that is to graduate from high school (although it is highly unlikely Tamma will graduate, Dan is a whipsmart scholar) and head to Indian Creek, “the last place on earth you can still dirtbag, the way the old-school climbers did.” The friends dream about perhaps going pro, making a living doing the thing that they love the best of all.

But life seems to have other plans for them.

Dan’s mother has a life-threatening medical issue. Tamma’s baby nephew, River, has a traumatic brain injury. Suddenly the pair find themselves having to reassess their lives and priorities. Their choices will have a profound impact on their lives.

Tamma couldn’t say that she’d never despair. All she could do was think, Not today. All her hope felt terribly insecure. And she could get to where she had this feeling of rage. I don’t want to be strong. I don’t want to have to try and find joy when it all feels so scary. And then she’d think: You can do this. You are a rad climber and people like you. You can show up every day and be an indomitable force for joy and hope and you can let everyone else fall apart without falling apart yourself.

Dan has his own struggles, but he knows that his parents “believed that it was possible for [him] to go out into the world and succeed. That belief was built into [his] worldview. No one had ever believed that about Tamma.”

Boulders aren’t the only things Tamma and Dan have to climb; life is going to shoot the motherlode of obstacles their way. How they ultimately handle these trials is what makes these characters people you want to root for. Their friendship is genuine and refreshing; their conversations often laugh-out-loud funny; their love and admiration for each other is real and beautiful.

There is a lot of climbing jargon in this book and that might not be to everyone’s taste. I don’t know a dang thing about climbing, but by the end of it I was invested in their pursuit of “sending” each climb they attempted. I loved Crux. It’s my first five star read of 2026.

Highly recommended.

Stoner – John Williams

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John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner probably would not have been on my reading radar without booktube. It seemed as though many young readers (people in their 20s and 30s – and yes, those are young people to me now) were reading it and talking about it and so I added it to my physical tbr pile, figuring that I would get to it eventually.

Back in November when my friend (and former student) Luke and his wife, Lauren, were making their plans to come home for a visit over the holidays, they suggested a book club of three. Whenever we see each other, we always spend a lot of time talking about books and so this seemed like a good idea. I perused my shelves and suggested five titles, Stoner among them, and so that is where we landed.

Stoner is the story of William Stoner, son of impoverished Missouri farmers, who goes off to college ostensibly to take an agriculture degree, but who ends up taking a different path altogether. When the professor, Sloan, reads a sonnet and says “Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr. Stoner; do you hear him?”, Stoner falls in love. I also fell in love… with this book.

The novel follows Stoner through his undergraduate degree, his post graduate work, his early marriage to Edith, academic politics, the birth of his daughter, his affair. Williams doesn’t spend an inordinate amount of time at any of these road stops in Stoner’s life and yet somehow we come to know him very well.

Anybody who loves literature would find touchstones in this book and, indeed, in Stoner’s own life.

Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him an awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.

Luke, Lauren, and I could all relate to the feeling of anxiety at how little we will actually be able to read over the course of our lives, and Williams managed to capture that exact feeling. I think Luke and Lauren read far more deeply that I ever did at their age. (Luke is enrolled in a PhD of Philosophy and is currently reading Proust; Lauren is a research scientist at Harvard, about to start her own PhD. You might wonder what they are doing giving up precious family time to hang out with me; I wonder the same thing myself. :-)) Even if I have read upwards of 2000 books over the course of my life, lots of them were crap.

I also had another point of intersection with Stoner, and that was his feelings about teaching.

Always, from the time he had fumbled through his first classes of freshman English, he had been aware of the gulf that lay between what he felt for his subject and what he delivered in the classroom.

Sometimes Stoner feels like he is doing a great job and sometimes he feels like everything he does is crap and that is a feeling I have experienced over the course of my career. Of course, he is teaching at university and I am a high school teacher, so there’s that.

We had quite a lively discussion about Edith’s role in Stoner’s life, too. Lauren was a lot more sympathetic about her; Luke and I hated her. She never seemed like the right person for Stoner, and she did a lot of damage to his relationship with his daughter. It was hard to see anything positive about her at all. Did she redeem herself at all in the end? Not in my opinion.

Stoner is a book that gets you thinking about so many things, ‘what makes a life?’ chief among them. In the end, all three of us agreed that it was a fantastic book and a made for a great first book club of three discussion.

Highly recommended.