Highlights:
Until August by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a posthumous novel by the great writer that probably shouldn’t have been published by his heirs. In a preface, we are told that the author was in bad shape mentally, but continued to write, but left instructions to destroy this manuscript. It wasn’t destroyed, but they did wait ten years before deciding to publish it. It’s about a happily married woman who travels some distance each year to visit her mother’s grave, and on one visit she meets a man and sleeps with him.
Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year, and I’m not sure why. The book is set during and after the Civil War in West Virginia and is told mostly from the point of view of a young girl, ConaLee. We also get a few other perspectives including that of her mother, an older neighbor woman, and her father. The most interesting aspect of the book is the institutionalization of the mother in an insane asylum in West Virginia, as her captor (called “Papa” by ConaLee, although he isn’t her father) apparently needs to get rid of her. Why isn’t clear, because he’s just taking off anyway, and has stolen anything of value she had. The plot turns on a significant coincidence, and that, in my opinion, ruins the book’s plausibility.
Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry is a beautiful, poignant book, though as dark as any I’ve read of late. Two Irishmen, who have trafficked in drugs their whole lives, are sitting in the port at Malaga waiting for the ferry to Tangier, hoping to find the daughter of one of the men. The girl fled her home several years before when her mother died, and couldn’t bear to stay with her father. Besides being heart-breaking, the book’s language is stunning and fresh.
Also:
The Lightness of Water by Rhonda Browning White is a collection of short stories, some linked, set in Appalachia.
Rainbow Man by David Berner is a short novel about a widower who meets a woman with a complicated past while on a trip to Spain.
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky is a very long book about the neurobiology of behavior.
