AWAY, by Amy Bloom

Away is an interesting immigrant story set in the 1920s, about a Ukrainian Jewish woman, Lillian Leyb, who emigrates to NYC to escape the latest pogrom and by sheer determination situates herself as a mistress to some well-connected theatre people. The first half of the book explores her adaptation process and strange success. The story shifts significantly when a relative arriving in NY tells her that her daughter, whom she assumed was dead, had in fact been rescued by a villager and taken to Siberia. Lillian decides to break off the mistress role and travel across the US to Alaska to then make her way to Siberia. The journey, fraught with difficulty, pushes the plot forward, to an interesting ending. The book is quite successfully told, with lots of atmosphere and even pathos.

For a review of the book from NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/books/review/Thomas-t.html?_r=0

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler

We Are Completely Beside Ourselves is a surprising and moving growing-up narrative with a twist. Karen Fowler's novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014. Although it is rather straightforward in the retrospective telling of the childhood of the protagonist, Rosemary Cooke who is now a university student, the unusual aspect of the story (can't mention it if I want to avoid spoiling the plot) adds interest. It is movingly told and has a tragic aspect as well. Worth the read.

For a review of the book from The Telegraph, click here:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11160844/We-Are-All-Completely-Beside-Ourselves-Karen-Joy-Fowler-Man-Booker-2014.html

2666 by Roberto Bolano

I discovered the Chilean writer Roberto Bolano recently, courtesy of my South American colleague, who introduced him to me. A longtime fan of the previous generation of Latin American writers (Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Manuel Puig, etc.), I jumped at the chance to familiarize myself with the latest superstar of L.Am. fiction. Bolano is certainly not writing classic magical realism, but the gritty and at the same time transcendent prose he writes is another kind of realism of great power. 2666 is an exhausting 900-page journey in which the reader is frequently lost or at least drawn down baffling but beautiful or horrible alleys. The journey doesn't have an obvious ending but is ripe with potential endings. The book was discovered and published posthumously in 2008 and consists of five parts, which could stand alone very well as shorter books and are tenuously related. At the center of the book is the mysterious German writer Benno von Archimboldi, who is tracked by his academic fans (maybe) to the squalor of "Santa Teresa",  thinly-disguised border town of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Central to this location is a series of unsolved rape/murders of hundreds of women. The book is intense and horrifying but contains moments of tremendous beauty. I highly recommend reading the review of the book by Jonathan Lethem below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Lethem-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

FREEDOM, by Jonathan Franzen

Freedom is a deep, exhausting and impressive book centered on a dysfunctional American family, Patty & Walter Berglund, their parents, and children. By means of the interesting technique of a third-person autobiographical narrative written presumably as therapy for Patty's depression, the reader learns about the roots of her personality and about events hidden in the main narrative. The story complexly shifts among narratives of Patty, Walter, Richard Katz ( Walter's best friend who is a rock musician playing out a curious blend of loyalty & betrayal to Walter), Joey (W & P's son, who is the apple of Patty's eye) and his wife Connie (daughter of the Berglund's redneck neighbors in St. Paul, MN). A love triangle predominates the story - between Patty, Walter & Richard. There are two other love triangles in the plot. The story, set in the 1990s and very early 21st Century, is told with a great deal of heart yet avoids sentimentalism. It's an impressive novel indeed.

For a review of the book from NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/books/review/Tanenhaus-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

SO MUCH FOR THAT, by Lionel Shriver

So Much for That takes us on a powerful and devastatingly emotional ride. Published in 2010, The story is about a man, Shep Knacker, who is fed up with pursuing the American Dream and has a dream of his own: to escape to a fantasy "afterlife" of ease in an exotic paradise. His elaborate but un-acted-upon plans are thwarted by the reality of a diagnosis in his wife, Glynis, of a very rare and deadly form of cancer. The story shows the playing out of this rather depressing reality, but there are interesting and moving twists and much uncertainty about the details of how it will all end. Embedded in the main narrative is the story of another disaffected American family, that of Shep's co-worker and long-time friend who has a disabled daughter and serious self-esteem problems. The novel is full of rage and focuses on how terminal illness can affect a relationship. It's also about hope, despair, pride, love, etc. All-in-all, it's a strong narrative about a profound topic: what does it mean to live and die with dignity?


for a review of the novel from the Guardian, click here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/mar/28/lionel-shriver-so-much-for-that

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE, by Jonathan Lethem

A must-read for any hard-core Lethem fan (like me), I found this collection (basically a hodgepodge of individual critical works, ruminations and short fictional pieces) fascinating and enjoyable in the extreme. Having attended a lecture by Lethem in Singapore in November 2014 at which he spoke on  incorporating popular culture into his novels, reading Ecstasy was like a long footnote to his comments on that day. To say that his book's content was wide-ranging would be an absurd understatement yet it all somehow fits together as a statement of Lethem's aesthetic and political orientation. Much of it is very personal, and indeed, his statements about cultural artifacts (e.g., James Brown, Norman Mailer, Philip K. Dick, Bob Dylan, superheros, abstract expressionist painting, etc.) construct a mental universe that is fascinating and enlightening. Highly recommended reading.

For a review of the book by the NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/books/jonathan-lethems-ecstasy-of-influence-review.html?_r=0

MAP OF TULSA, by Benjamin Lytel

Map of Tulsa is the first novel by American writer Benjamin Lytal. It's a story of a young man who escaped a bored adolescence in Tulsa, Oklahoma for an intellectually vibrant student life in NYC and later returns to have a relationship with the unattainable girl he admired as a youth. He also comes to terms with his love/hate relationship with his hometown. The plot plays out both expectantly and surprisingly, and it's a strong, vivid story that is, while not absolutely routine, uses routine elements (girl, hometown, coming of age) well.

For a review of the book from NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/books/review/a-map-of-tulsa-by-benjamin-lytal.html