June contemporary fiction round-up
Enjoy our round-up of the best and the brightest new fiction from the Bookhugger publishers this last month – and then get yourself some stimulating holiday reading…
The Death of Bunny Munro, by Nick Cave
The world is a hard place to be good in … Struggling to keep a grip on reality after his wife’s death, Bunny Munro does the only thing he can think of: with his young son in tow, he hits the road. An epic chronicle of one man’s judgement, The Death of Bunny Munro is also an achingly tender portrait of the relationship between father and son.
Day After Night, by Anita Diamant
Atlit is a holding camp for “illegal” immigrants in Israel in 1945. There, about 270 men and women await their future and try to recover from their past. Diamant, with infinite compassion and understanding, tells the stories of the women gathered in this place.
Shayndel is a Polish Zionist who fought the Germans with a band of partisans. Leonie is a Parisian beauty. Tedi is Dutch, a strapping blond who wants only to forget. Zorah survived Auschwitz. Haunted by unspeakable memories and too many losses to bear, these young women, along with a stunning cast of supporting characters who work in or pass through Atlit, begin to find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience, as they confront the challenge of re-creating themselves and discovering a way to live again.
Reading group questions for Day After Night
Whatever You Love, by Louise Doughty
Two police officers knock on Laura’s door. They tell her that her nine-year old daughter Betty has been hit by a car and killed. When justice is slow, Laura decides to take her own revenge and begins to track down the man responsible.
Laura’s grief reopens old wounds and she is thrown back to the story of her passionate love affair with Betty’s father David, their marriage and his subsequent desertion of her for another woman.
Haunted by her past and driven by her need to discover the truth, Laura discovers just how far she is prepared to go for love, desire and retribution.
Whatever You Love is a heart-wrenching and compulsive story from an acclaimed novelist writing at the height of her powers.
My Last Confession, by Helen Fitzgerald
Tips for parole officers:
- Don’t smuggle heroin into prison.
- Don’t drink vodka to relieve stress.
- Don’t French-kiss a colleague to get your boyfriend jealous.
- Don’t snort speed.
- Don’t spend more time with murderers than with your son.
- Don’t invite crack-head clients to your party.
This is Krissie’s advice after being in the job for a month. She’s happy and in love, but her naivety and blind compassion plunge her into a shocking murder case that could jeopardise everything.
The case is that of Jeremy, who is on remand for the brutal murder of his mother-in-law. A tragic childhood accident combined with his lack of alibi seem to make it an open-and-shut case. But Krissie can’t help feeling there has been a miscarriage of justice and battles to secure his release.
A dark family secret is at the heart of the case, and Krissie is out of her depth. Because someone isn’t happy. Someone dangerous. Someone who will stop at nothing to get to her.
Deceptions, by Rebecca Frayn
Julian and Annie have only just announced their forthcoming marriage, when Annie’s twelve-year old son Dan mysteriously fails to come home from school. Despite an extensive police investigation, the days turn into weeks and it is as if he has vanished into thin air. Over the next three years, Annie refuses to give up hope that somewhere her son is alive and will one day return home. Julian, meanwhile, can’t help but yearn for Annie to put the past behind her and move on.
Then, out of the blue, a call from Glasgow brings shocking news of Dan’s fate. And far from being over, it seems the mystery of his disappearance is only just beginning…
Grace Williams Says It Loud, by Emma Henderson
This isn’t an ordinary love story. But then Grace isn’t an ordinary girl.
‘Disgusting,’ said the nurse.
And when no more could be done, they put her away, aged eleven.
On her first day at the Briar Mental Institute, Grace meets Daniel. He sees a different Grace: someone to share secrets and canoodle with, someone to fight for. Debonair Daniel, who can type with his feet, fills Grace’s head with tales from Paris and the world beyond.
This is Grace’s story: her life, its betrayals and triumphs, disappointment and loss, the taste of freedom; roses, music and tiny scraps of paper. Most of all, it is about the love of a lifetime.
The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver
Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2010
The Lacuna is the story of a man’s search for safety in the grinding jaws of two nations, at a moment when the entire world seemed bent on reinventing itself at any cost.
Born in the US, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salomé. From a coastal island jungle to the unpaved neighbourhoods of 1930s Mexico City, through a disastrous stint at a military school in Virginia and back again, his fortunes never steady as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution. Sometimes she gives her son cigarettes instead of supper.
He aims for invisibility, observing his world and recording everything with a peculiar selfless irony in his notebooks. Life is whatever he learns from servants putting him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Making himself useful in the household of the muralist, his wife Frida Kahlo, and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, and the howling gossip and reportage that dictate public opinion.
A violent upheaval sends him north to a nation newly caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. In the mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina, he remakes himself in America’s hopeful image. Under the watch of his peerless stenographer, Violet Brown, he finds an extraordinary use for his talents of observation. But political winds continue to push him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach – the lacuna – between truth and public presumption.
This is a gripping story of identity, connection with our past, and the power of words to create or devastate. Like no other novel yet written, it illuminates an era when bold internationalism gave way to a post-war landscape of narrowly defined ‘Americanism’. Crossing two decades, from the vibrant revolutionary murals of Mexico City to the halls of a Congress bent on eradicating the colour red, The Lacuna is as deep and rich as the New World itself.
The Longshot, by Katie Kitamura
Cal was the one. The kid had everything a fighter needed and if he didn’t become a champion then Riley would have no one to blame but himself…
Cal and his long-standing friend and trainer Riley are on their way to Mexico for a make-or-break rematch with the legendary Rivera, who has never been beaten. Four years ago, Cal became the only fighter to ever take Rivera the distance, even though it nearly ended him. Only Riley, who has been at his side for the last ten years, knows how much that fight changed everything for Cal. And only Riley really knows what’s now at stake, for both of them…
Playing Days, by Benjamin Markovits
Fresh out of college and uncertain how to proceed with life, the narrator of Ben Markovits’ Playing Days finds himself drifting towards a career that once obsessed his father – professional basketball. Gaining a place on a minor league German team, he leaves Texas and lands in the small rather desolate town of Landshut, playing basketball with an eclectic group of teammates, training for most of the day and then trying to find ways to fill the rest of it.
It’s an odd, isolated existence, punctuated by the intense excitement – and often intense disappointment – of the game. But then he meets Anke, a young single mother who happens to be the former wife of one of his teammates; and their tentative, burgeoning relationship becomes as significant and as life changing as the game itself.
Beautifully written, Playing Days is entirely recognisable in its depiction of the first long summer after university. Tinged with the melancholy and nostalgia of early steps into adulthood, it’s the story of a young man’s first experience of adult love, and of the discovery of his own limitations.
Beatrice and Virgil, by Yann Martel
Fate takes many forms . . . When Henry receives a letter from an elderly taxidermist, it poses a puzzle that he cannot resist. As he is pulling into the world of this strange and calculating man, Henry becomes increasingly involved with the lives of a donkey and a howler monkey – named Beatrice and Virgil – and the epic journey they undertake together. With all the spirit and orginality that made Life of Pi so treasured, this brilliant new novel takes the reader on a haunting odyssey. On the way, Martel asks profound questions about life and art, truth and deception, responsibility and complicity.
Far North, by Marcel Theroux
Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol this dingy city.
Out on the far northern border of a failed state, Makepeace patrols the ruins of a dying city and tries to keep its unruly inhabitants in check. Into this cold, isolated world comes evidence that life is flourishing elsewhere – a refugee from the vast emptiness of forest, whose existence inspires Makepeace to take to the road to reconnect with human society.
What Makepeace finds is a world unravelling, stockaded villages enforcing a rough and uncertain justice, mysterious slave camps labouring to harness the little understood technologies of a vanished civilization. But Makepeace’s journey also leads to unexpected human contact, tenderness, and the dark secrets behind this frozen world.
Far North leads the reader on a quest through an unforgettable arctic landscape, from humanity’s origins to its likely end. Bleak, haunting, spare – and yet ultimately hopeful, the novel is suffused with an ecstatic awareness of the world’s fragility and beauty, and its unexpected ability to recover from our worst trespasses.
Read a review on our sister site Bookgeeks.co.uk
