May Tinkers by Paul Harding

An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure. A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost 7 decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring. Tinkers is about the legacy of consciousness and the porousness of identity from one generation the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature. This is the Pulitzer Prize winner for 2010.

About the author: Paul Harding has an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (2000) and was a 2000–2001 Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, in Provincetown, MA. He has published short stories in Shakepainter and The Harvard Review. Paul currently teaches creative writing at Harvard. Tinkers is his first novel.

April The lonely passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is an unflinching and deeply sympathetic portrait of a woman destroyed by self and circumstance. First published in 1955, it marked Brian Moore as a major figure in English literature (he would go on to be short-listed three times for the Booker Prize) and established him as an astute chronicler of the human soul.
Judith Hearne is an unmarried woman of a certain age who has come down in society. She has few skills and is full of the prejudices and pieties of her genteel Belfast upbringing. But Judith has a secret life. And she is just one heartbreak away from revealing it to the world.

The book was made into a film in 1987 starring Bob Hoskins and Maggie Smith. Maggie Smith won a BAFTA for her performance in 1989.

About this author
Brian Moore (1921–1999) was born into a large, devoutly Catholic family in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His father was a surgeon and lecturer, and his mother had been a nurse. Moore left Ireland during World War II and in 1948 moved to Canada, where he worked for the Montreal Gazette, married his first wife, and began to write potboilers under various pen names, as he would continue to do throughout the 1950s. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955, now available as an NYRB Classic), said to have been rejected by a dozen publishers, was the first book Moore published under his own name, and it was followed by nineteen subsequent novels written in a broad range of modes and styles, from the realistic to the historical to the quasi-fantastical, including The Luck of Ginger Coffey, An Answer from Limbo, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, I Am Mary Dunne, Catholics, Black Robe, and The Statement. Three novels—Lies of Silence, Color of Blood, and The Magician’s Wife—were short-listed for the Booker Prize, and The Great Victorian Collection won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. After adapting The Luck of Ginger Coffey for film in 1964, Moore moved to California to work on the script for Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain. He remained in Malibu for the rest of his life, remarrying there and teaching at UCLA for some fifteen years. Shortly before his death, Moore wrote, “There are those stateless wanderers who, finding the larger world into which they have stumbled vast, varied and exciting, become confused in their loyalties and lose their sense of home. I am one of those wanderers.”

March The land of spices by Kate O’Brien

Behind the high, closed walls of a convent in the Irish countryside, the lives of its inhabitants are gently marked by the daily rituals of spiritual life. Watching over Anna, her sensitive and poetic young charge, the Mother Superior revisits her childhood relationship with her father. As Anna develops from a six-year-old to a scholarship candidate, Helen comes to understand her own heart and makes peace with her past.

Kate O’Brien (3 December 1897 – 13 August 1974), was an Irish novelist and playwright. After the success of her play, Distinguished Villa in 1926, she took to full-time writing and was awarded the 1931 James Tait Black Prize for her novel Without My Cloak. She is best known for her 1934 novel The Ante-Room, her 1941 novel The Land of Spices and the 1946 novel That Lady. Many of her books dealt with issues of female sexuality — with several exploring gay/lesbian themes — and both Mary Lavelle and The Land of Spices were banned in Ireland. She also wrote travel books, or rather accounts of places and experiences, on both Ireland and Spain, a country she loved, and which features in a number of her novels. She lived much of her later life in England and died in Canterbury in 1974; she is buried in Faversham Cemetery.

The Glucksman Library at the University of Limerick currently holds a large collection of O’Brien’s personal writings [1]. In August 2005, Penguin reissued her final novel, As Music and Splendour (1958), which had been out of print for decades. The Kate O’Brien weekend, which takes place in Limerick, attracts a large number of people, both academic and non-academic.

February The Other Hand by Chris Cleave

The Other Hand is an ambitious and fearless gallop from the jungles of Africa via a shocking encounter on a Nigerian beach to the media offices of London and domesticity in leafy suburbia. Part-thriller, part-multicultural Aga saga, the book enmeshes its characters in the issues of immigration, globalisation, political violence and personal accountability. Lists of themes are often review-speak for “worthy but dull”, but not in this case. Cleave immerses the reader in the worlds of his characters with an unshakable confidence that we will find them as gripping and vital as he does. Mostly, that confidence is justified.

The book begins in an immigration detention centre where Little Bee, a 16-year-old Ibo girl from Nigeria, has spent the last two years honing skills that point back to horrific past events and forward to a hoped-for future. Making herself look unattractive to men is the first of several mysterious threads that Cleave slowly winds in. Learning the Queen’s English (from the quality broadsheets only, she specifies) has a more obvious relevance. “Excuse me for learning your language properly. I am here to tell you a real story. I did not come here to talk to you about the bright African colours.”

The colours, when they come – on a beach in Nigeria – are certainly not bright. The route back to them begins with Little Bee’s inadvertent escape from the centre with three women, variously cheerful, bewildered and suicidal, and a phone call to a columnist and journalist, Andrew O’Rourke. Little Bee encountered Andrew and his wife Sarah in Nigeria. Now he is dismayed to hear from her.

From this small mystery, the rest of Little Bee’s story begins to unfold. Something has happened that has not only left its mark on a teenage Ibo girl but has shaken the O’Rourke family to its foundations. Ensconced in Kingston-upon-Thames, Andrew suffers from depression. Sarah, who edits a women’s magazine called Nixie, pursues an unhappy affair. Their young son Charlie dresses and lives as Batman. Their story is narrated by Sarah – necessarily so, because in the time between Little Bee’s telephone call and her arrival in Kingston, Andrew commits suicide.

“It started on the day we first met Little Bee, on a lonely beach in Nigeria. The only souvenir I have of that first meeting is an absence where the middle finger of my left hand used to be. The amputation is quite clean. In place of my finger is a stump, a phantom digit that used to be responsible for the E, D and C keys on my laptop.”

The “it” is teasingly unspecified, and the term “amputation” is not quite honest, as it turns out, but Cleave’s unobtrusive skill in sentences like that allows the world of the machete to be glimpsed through the world of the laptop. Most of the action has already happened when Little Bee and Sarah reunite. Through their recollections, an African past surfaces slowly in an English present. Cleave doles out clues and hints. Then, within a perfectly paced flashback, he has Little Bee tell how she first met the O’Rourkes in Nigeria, and what happened on the beach.

A special place in hell is reserved for the taxi-drivers who shout the name of the murderer outside Les Misrables to under-tipping passengers. Right next door to them sit the reviewers who give away the surprises in books. Cleave showed in Incendiary that he was equal to the challenges of a large-scale violent setpiece scene. This one is more compressed, more intense and more chilling. I never thought I would read the phrase “rang like a bell” with anything but a yawn. But I shuddered.

The book’s kernel of violence throws up a stark choice and drives a wedge between Sarah and Andrew O’Rourke. The different choices each makes on the beach together drive the action and raise a larger question. Whose experience should we accept as authentic? Is The Other Hand a book about what happens in Africa (to Little Bee), or what people in Kingston-upon-Thames (such as Sarah) think about what happens in Africa?

Like the unnamed heroine of Incendiary, Sarah O’Rourke is a far from perfect heroine: a semi-neglectful mother and unfaithful wife (the trip to Nigeria was an ill-conceived marriage-saving exercise). Cleave has some fun at her expense. Here she recalls getting ready to go to work the last time she saw her husband alive. “I always dressed up for deadline days. Heels, skirt, smart green jacket. Magazine publishing has its rhythms, and if the editor won’t dance to them, she can’t expect her staff to. I don’t float feature ideas in Fendi heels, and I don’t close an issue in Pumas.”

Magazine publishing, middle-aged affairs, nurseries and funerals all come in for this kind of satirical close observation. But Cleave does not mock Sarah (and life in Kingston-upon-Thames) any more than he does Little Bee and her experiences in Nigeria. Life in England may appear superficial compared to a life-and-death struggle for existence in the tropical forests east of the Niger. Little Bee, however, has voted with her feet. One can have too much authenticity. Too much world.

Cleave makes no judgment on these two existences and, more interestingly, he eschews the postmodern back-pedal into irony. The Other Hand is emphatically not ironic. For all the characters’ faults, none of them is presented as inauthentic or standing for something that we are intended to disbelieve. There are no straw targets. Nothing in the novel is included only to be derided. As a consequence, the story of Little Bee, Sarah and Charlie/Batman becomes heated to the point of melodrama. A thoughtless act on Sarah’s part delivers Little Bee into the clutches of immigration officials. To right that wrong, she pursues a course of action that is not quite credible; but by this stage, the tremendous momentum of the story carries the reader through.

There are no nods or winks to the reader. Cleave follows his story to a powerful and emotive end. If The Other Hand flirts with melodrama, that is a fault Cleave shares with Dickens, and for the same reason. He means it.

Chris Cleave was born in London in 1973, brought up in Cameroon and Buckinghamshire, and educated at Balliol College, Oxford where he studied Psychology. He lives in the United Kingdom with his wife and three children.

His second novel, The Other Hand, was released in August 2008 and was described as “A powerful piece of art… shocking, exciting and deeply affecting… superb”[1] by The Independent. It has been shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Book Awards in the Novel category.[2] Cleave was inspired to write The Other Hand from his childhood in West Africa.

January Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stroud

Elizabeth Strouts new novel in stories brings to life a hardscrabble community on the coast of Maine, a quintessentially New England town where people serve baked beans and ketchup when company comes and speak in familiar Down East accents (ay-yuh). But Olive Kitteridge is provincial only in a literal sense.

One story takes place at the funeral reception of a man whose wife has just learned of his infidelity. Another features a hostage-taking in a hospital. Elsewhere, an old lover surprises a lounge pianist, sending her reeling back into painful memories. An overbearing mother visits her wary son and his boisterous, pregnant wife. Most stories turn on some kind of betrayal. A few document fragile, improbable romances. They encompass a wide range of experience.

The presence of Olive Kitteridge, a seventh-grade math teacher and the wife of a pharmacist, links these 13 stories. A big woman, shes like a planetary body, exerting a strong gravitational pull. Several stories put Olive at the center, but in a few she makes only a fleeting appearance. Its no coincidence that the two weakest stories are the ones in which she is merely mentioned. Without her, the book goes adrift, as if it has lost its anchor.

She isnt a nice person. As one of the towns older women notes, Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology. Olives son puts it more bluntly. You can make people feel terrible, he tells her. She dismisses others with words like hellion and moron and flub-dub. After swapping discontents, she says to a friend, Always nice to hear other peoples problems.

But as the stories continue, a more complicated portrait of the woman emerges. Olive may hurl invectives at her son, but she also loves him, almost more than she can bear. Her husband is a kind man and she loves him too, although she has trouble expressing it. Shes prone to stormy moods, as well as sudden, deep laughter, and she harbors a sense of compassion, even for strangers.

In one story, Olive bursts into tears when she meets an anorexic young woman. I dont know who you are, she confesses, but young lady, youre breaking my heart. Im starving, too, Olive tells her. Why do you think I eat every doughnut in sight? Youre not starving, the girl replies, looking at this large woman, with her thick wrists and hands, her big lap. Sure I am, Olive says. We all are.

It takes extraordinary presumption to say this to a girl who is starving to death, but from Olive the remark seems well-earned. Because the main thing we learn about her is that she has a remarkable capacity for empathy, and its an empathy without sentimentality. She understands that life is lonely and unfair, that only the greatest luck will bring blessings like a long marriage and a quick death. She knows shes been rotten; she has regrets. She understands peoples failings  and, ultimately, their frail hopes.

Strouts previous novels, Abide With Me and Amy and Isabelle, were also set in New England and explored similar themes: family dynamics, small-town gossip, grief. Those books were good; this one is better. It manages to combine the sustained, messy investigation of the novel with the flashing insight of the short story. By its very structure, sliding in and out of different tales and different perspectives, it illuminates both what people understand about others and what they understand about themselves.

Just as Olives self-awareness and empathy develop over the course of the book, so does the readers. Strouts prose is quickened by her use of the free indirect style, in which a third-person narrator adopts the words or tone a particular character might use. The tulips bloomed in ridiculous splendor is a narrative statement  but ridiculous is very much Olive Kitteridges word. Similarly, in a description of a pianist, the clucking of communal disapproval creeps in: Her face revealed itself too clearly in a kind of simple expectancy no longer appropriate for a woman of her age. These moments animate Strouts prose in the same way that a forceful person alters the atmosphere in a room.

The pleasure in reading Olive Kitteridge comes from an intense identification with complicated, not always admirable, characters. And there are moments in which slipping into a characters viewpoint seems to involve the revelation of an emotion more powerful and interesting than simple fellow feeling  a complex, sometimes dark, sometimes life-sustaining dependency on others. Theres nothing mawkish or cheap here. Theres simply the honest recognition that we need to try to understand people, even if we cant stand them.

Elizabeth Strout’s most recent work, Olive Kitteridge, a novel in stories, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a New York Times Bestseller.  She is the author of two previous novels, Abide With Me,  a national bestseller, and Amy and Isabelle,  also a New York Times Bestseller.

December The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.

Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.

Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England on January 19, 1946. He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964 and at Magdalen College, Oxford, from which he graduated in modern languages (with honors) in 1968. After graduation, he worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement for three years. In 1977, Barnes began working as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesmen and the New Review. From 1979 to 1986 he worked as a television critic, first for the New Statesmen and then for the Observer.

Barnes has received several awards and honours for his writing, including the 2011 Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending.

November Things We did’nt See Coming by Steven Amsterdam

Michael Williams, in Melbourne’s The Age, wrote of this award-winning, dazzling debut collection, By turns horrific and beautiful . . . Humanity at its most fractured and desolate . . . Often moving, frequently surprising, even blackly funny . . . Things We Didn’t See Coming is terrific. This is just one of the many rave reviews that appeared on the Australian publication of these nine connected stories set in a not-too-distant dystopian future in a landscape at once utterly fantastic and disturbingly familiar.
Richly imagined, dark, and darkly comic, the stories follow the narrator over three decades as he tries to survive in a world that is becoming increasingly savage as cataclysmic events unfold one after another. In the first story, What We Know Now–set in the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognizable–we meet the then-nine-year-old narrator fleeing the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown. The remaining stories capture the strange–sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes funny–circumstances he encounters in the no-longer-simple act of survival; trying to protect squatters against floods in a place where the rain never stops, being harassed (and possibly infected) by a man sick with a virulent flu, enduring a job interview with an unstable assessor who has access to all his thoughts, taking the gravely ill on adventure tours. But we see in each story that, despite the violence and brutality of his days, the narrator retains a hold on his essential humanity–and humor.

Things We Didn’t See Coming is haunting, restrained, and beautifully crafted–a stunning debut.