BOOKS
The Romantic
By Barbara Gowdy
This is a book about love in its most brutal incarnation — unrequited. It takes us back to the earlier Gowdy of Falling Angels — punchy, black-humored prose that had you in stitches while it pricked you in the heart. It's a masterful accomplishment to be able to convey the absence of something rather than its presence, as is the ability to explore heartache while skillfully avoiding melodrama. Gowdy accomplishes this through humour, but more profoundly by touching a nerve, the one that knows we've all been there, wanting, in one way or another.
Hey Nostradamus!
By Douglas Coupland
Given his fascination with yearning in all its achy-breaky guises, it's no wonder Douglas Coupland opens in a high-school cafeteria. Blandly likable Cheryl, one of the book's narrators, secretly married and pregnant, increasingly spiritual and decreasingly religious, dies on that cafeteria floor, killed à la Columbine by three Grade 11 "geeks lost in a stew of paranoia, role-playing games, military dreams and sexual rejection." Coupland is as morally engaged, every bit as critical of the compromises and concessions we make as we grow older as in the 1998 novel Girlfriend in a Coma.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
By Mark Haddon
If Sherlock Holmes were a 15-year-old autistic kid in Swindon, could he overcome his fear of strangers to investigate the death of a neighbourhood poodle? Could chaos theory and prime numbers help him do it? And if he uncovered a dangerous deception, how would he survive? In British writer Mark Haddon's debut novel, an unlikely hero takes us on a strange and provoking adventure, complete with murder, mystery and math. The narrator, Christopher, is always surprising, frequently hilarious, timely and inspiring.
The Good Doctor
By Damon Galgut
South African Damon Galgut's fifth novel was shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize. It is set in a recent past underlaid by the not-so-distant legacy of the old South African regime and the moral quicksand it left behind. Tragic and brilliant, an anti-bildungsroman and anti-romance with its failures of self-knowledge and human connection, The Good Doctor is informed by the alienation of Albert Camus, and deeply resonant with Thomas Mann's moral interrogations of politics and society.
The Romantic
By Barbara Gowdy
This is a book about love in its most brutal incarnation — unrequited. It takes us back to the earlier Gowdy of Falling Angels — punchy, black-humored prose that had you in stitches while it pricked you in the heart. It's a masterful accomplishment to be able to convey the absence of something rather than its presence, as is the ability to explore heartache while skillfully avoiding melodrama. Gowdy accomplishes this through humour, but more profoundly by touching a nerve, the one that knows we've all been there, wanting, in one way or another.
Hey Nostradamus!
By Douglas Coupland
Given his fascination with yearning in all its achy-breaky guises, it's no wonder Douglas Coupland opens in a high-school cafeteria. Blandly likable Cheryl, one of the book's narrators, secretly married and pregnant, increasingly spiritual and decreasingly religious, dies on that cafeteria floor, killed à la Columbine by three Grade 11 "geeks lost in a stew of paranoia, role-playing games, military dreams and sexual rejection." Coupland is as morally engaged, every bit as critical of the compromises and concessions we make as we grow older as in the 1998 novel Girlfriend in a Coma.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
By Mark Haddon
If Sherlock Holmes were a 15-year-old autistic kid in Swindon, could he overcome his fear of strangers to investigate the death of a neighbourhood poodle? Could chaos theory and prime numbers help him do it? And if he uncovered a dangerous deception, how would he survive? In British writer Mark Haddon's debut novel, an unlikely hero takes us on a strange and provoking adventure, complete with murder, mystery and math. The narrator, Christopher, is always surprising, frequently hilarious, timely and inspiring.
The Good Doctor
By Damon Galgut
South African Damon Galgut's fifth novel was shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize. It is set in a recent past underlaid by the not-so-distant legacy of the old South African regime and the moral quicksand it left behind. Tragic and brilliant, an anti-bildungsroman and anti-romance with its failures of self-knowledge and human connection, The Good Doctor is informed by the alienation of Albert Camus, and deeply resonant with Thomas Mann's moral interrogations of politics and society.
posted by D @ 9:32 AM
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