December Contemporary Fiction Round-up – Best of 2009, Part Two
The second entry featuring the pick of 2009′s best contemporary fiction from Bookhugger’s publishers…
A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore
In her dazzling new novel – her first in over a decade – Lorrie Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America.
With her government quietly gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a ‘half-Jewish’ farmer’s daughter from the plains of the Midwest, has come to the university town of Troy – a girl escaping her provincial home to encounter the complex world of culture and politics.
When she takes a job as a part-time nanny to a couple who seem at once mysterious and glamorous, Tassie is drawn more deeply into the life of their newly adopted child and a household that steadily reveals its complications. With her past becoming increasingly alien to her – her parents seem older when she visits; her disillusioned brother ever more fixed on joining the military – Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she feels herself to be. As the year unfolds, love leads her to new and formative experiences, but it is then that the past and the future burst forth in dramatic and shocking ways.
Refracted through the eyes of this memorable narrator, A Gate at the Stairs is a lyrical, beguiling and wise novel of our times.
Walking in Pimlico, by Ann Featherstone
To ‘walk in Pimlico’ colloq. to be handsomely dressed
Murray’s Dictionary of Slang, Cant and Flash Words and Phrases (1857, 3rd ed.).
Stumbling across Bessie Spooner’s murdered body, comedian Corney Sage is caught in a tangle of deception and lies. He flees from his concert-room job in London’s Whitechapel to a comfortable spa town, and then to a circus and music hall. But try as he might, he cannot elude the killer. And in Corney’s world of theatricals, clowns and showmen, where appearances are surface deep and secrets are deadly, any one of them might be the murderer . . .
From the drawing rooms of polite society to dingy lodging houses, through shabby pump-room pavilions, fairgrounds and freak shows, Ann Featherstone brilliantly reconstructs nineteenth-century England in this gripping psychological thriller.
Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith
In Stalin’s Soviet Union, crime does not exist. But still millions live in fear. The mere suspicion of disloyalty to the State, the wrong word at the wrong time, can send an innocent person to his execution.
Officer Leo Demidov, an idealistic war hero, believes he’s building a perfect society. But after witnessing the interrogation of an innocent man, his loyalty begins to waver, and when ordered to investigate his own wife, Raisa, Leo is forced to choose where his heart truly lies.
Then the impossible happens. A murderer is on the loose, killing at will, and every belief Leo has ever held is shattered. Denounced by his enemies and exiled from home, with only Raisa by his side, he must risk everything to find a criminal that the State won’t admit even exists. On the run, Leo soon discovers the danger isn’t from the killer he is trying to catch, but from the country he is trying to protect.
The Bird Room, by Chris Killen
When a boy named Will meets Alice, he can’t believe his luck. She’s smart, sexy and, much to Will’s surprise, in love with him. Alice brings meaning to his urban existence and his McJob. But the course of modern love did never run smooth and soon devotion leads Will to something darker. Elsewhere in the city Helen is an actress. Or she will be one day. For now she finds work as a model. She used to be called Clair, but she wants to be something new and she can be anyone. She’s an actress, remember.
A love story with a twist, this explosive debut novel brings Will and Helen’s lives together in a tale as tight as rope and as black as tar. The Bird Room is a candid, funny, intimate portrait of a generation.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz
The long-awaited first novel from one of today’s most original and electrifying literary voices.
Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he’s sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukú – the ancient curse that has haunted his family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, violent accidents and, above all, ill-starred love.
With dazzling energy and insight Díaz immerses us in the tumultuous lives of Oscar, his runaway sister Lola, their beautiful mother Belicia, and in the family’s uproarious journey from the Dominican Republic to the US and back.
Rendered with uncommon warmth and humour, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao presents an astonishing vision of the endless human capacity to persevere – and to risk it all – in the name of love. A literary triumph, this novel confirms Junot Díaz as one of the funniest, warmest and most exciting writers of our time.
Chapel at the Edge of the World, by Kirsten McKenzie
Emilio and Rosa are childhood sweethearts, engaged to be married. But it is 1942 and the war has taken Emilio far from Italy, to a tiny Orkney island where he is a POW. Rosa must wait for him to return and help her mother run the family hotel on the shores of Lake Como, in Italy. Feeling increasingly frustrated with his situation, Emilio is inspired by the idea of building a chapel on the barren island.
The prisoners band together to create an extraordinary building out of little more than salvaged odds and ends and homemade paints. Whilst Emilio’s chapel will remain long after the POW camp has been left to the sheep, will his love for Rosa survive the hardships of war and separation? For Rosa is no longer the girl that he left behind. She is being drawn further into the Italian resistance movement and closer to danger, as friendships and allegiances are ever complicated by the war.
Human perseverance and resilience are at the heart of this strong debut and the small Italian chapel remains, as it does in reality, as a symbol of these qualities.
An Elegy For Easterly, by Petina Gappah
Winner of the Guardian First Book Award, 2009.
A woman in a township in Zimbabwe is surrounded by throngs of dusty children but longs for a baby of her own; an old man finds that his job making coffins at No Matter Funeral Parlour brings unexpected riches; a politician’s widow quietly stands by at her husband’s funeral watching his colleagues bury an empty coffin. Petina Gappah’s characters may have ordinary hopes and dreams, but they are living in a world where a loaf of bread costs half a million dollars; a country expected to have only four presidents in a hundred years; and a place where people know exactly what will be printed in the one and only daily newspaper because the news is always, always good.
In her spirited debut collection, Zimbabwean author Petina Gappah brings us the resilience and inventiveness of the people who struggle to live under Robert Mugabe’s regime. Despite their circumstances, the characters in An Elegy for Easterly are more than victims; they are all too human, with as much capacity to inflict pain as they have to endure it. They struggle with larger issues common to all people everywhere: failed promises, unfulfilled dreams and the yearning for something to anchor them to life.
- Listen to an interview with Petina Gappah here on Bookhugger
- Read an extract from An Elegy for Easterly
The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite, by Beatrice Colin
As the clock chimed the turn of the twentieth century, Lilly Nelly Aphrodite took her first breath. Born to a cabaret dancer and soon orphaned in a scandalous double murder, Lilly finds refuge at a Catholic orphanage, coming under the wing of the, at times, severe Sister August, the first in a string of lost loves.
There she meets Hanne Schmidt, a teen prostitute, and forms a bond that will last them through tumultuous love affairs, disastrous marriages, and destitution during the First World War and the subsequent economic collapse. As the century progresses, Lilly and Hanne move from the tawdry glamour of the tingle-tangle nightclubs to the shadow world of health films before Lilly finds success and stardom in the new medium of motion pictures and ultimately falls in love with a man whose fate could cost her everything she has worked for or help her discover her true self.
Gripping and darkly seductive, The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite showcases all the glitter and splendour of the brief heyday of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Hollywood to its golden age. As it foreshadows the horrors of the Second World War, the novel asks what price is paid when identity becomes unfixed and the social order is upended.
Still Alice, by Lisa Genova
Alice Howland is proud of the life she worked so hard to build. A Harvard professor, she has a successful husband and three grown children. When she begins to grow forgetful, she dismisses it for as long as she can, but when she gets lost in her own neighbourhood she knows that something has gone terribly wrong. She finds herself in the rapidly downward spiral of Alzheimer’s Disease. She is fifty years old. Suddenly she has no classes to teach, no new research to conduct, no invited lectures to give. Ever again. Unable to work, read and, increasingly, take care of herself, Alice struggles to find meaning and purpose in her everyday life as her concept of self gradually slips away. But Alice is a remarkable woman, and her family, yoked by history and DNA and love, discover more about her and about each other, in their quest to keep the Alice they know for as long as possible. Losing her yesterdays, her short-term memory hanging on by a couple of frayed threads, she is living in the moment, living for each day. But she is still Alice.
The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry
Roseanne McNulty, perhaps nearing her one-hundredth birthday – no one is quite sure – faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital where she’s spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene. This relationship, guarded but trusting after so many years, intensifies and complicates as Dr Grene mourns the death of his wife.
Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges – of Roseanne’s family in 1930s Sligo – is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne’s story becomes an alternative, secret, history of Ireland. Exquisitely written, it is the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.
