Book choice for February 2009
Never Let Me Go [suggested by Paula Hyder]
Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were pupils at Hailsham - an idyllic establishment situated
deep in the English countryside. The children there were tenderly sheltered
from the outside world, brought up to believe they were special, and that their
personal welfare was crucial. But for what reason were they really there?
It is only years later that Kathy, now aged 31, finally allows herself to
yield to the pull of memory. What unfolds is the haunting story of how Kathy,
Ruth and Tommy, slowly come to face the truth about their seemingly happy
childhoods - and about their futures. Never Let Me Go is a uniquely moving
novel, charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of our lives.
The novel has its own Wikipedia entry.
About the Author
Kazuo Ishiguro is the hugely acclaimed author of five previous novels: A Pale View
of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day (1989 Winner
of the Booker Prize), The Unconsoled (1995 Winner of the Cheltenham Prize) and
When We Were Orphans (2000, shortlisted for the Booker Prize). He received
an OBE for Services to Literature in 1995, and the French decoration of the
Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Letters in 1998.
He has a Wikipedia entry.
Shortlisted for this month
The nominator can bring one, two, or three books to be chosen by the group (or mandated in the case of only one book being selected). This month, Paula also brought the following interesting selections:
The Tortilla Curtain
When Delaney Mossbacher knocks down a Mexican pedestrian, he neither reports the
accident nor takes his victim to hospital. Instead the man accepts $20
and limps back to poverty and his pregnant 17-year-old wife, leaving Delaney to
return to his privileged life in California. But these two men are fated
against each other, as Delaney attempts to clear the land of the illegal immigrants
who he thinks are turning his state park into a ghetto, and a boiling pot of racism
and prejudice threatens to spill over.
Another novel with its own Wikipedia entry.
About the Author
T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of twenty books of fiction, including, most
recently, After the Plague (2001), Drop City (2003), The Inner Circle (2004),
Tooth and Claw (2005), The Human Fly (2005), Talk Talk (2006), and The Women
(2009). He received a Ph.D. degree in Nineteenth Century British Literature
from the University of Iowa in 1977, his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers'
Workshop in 1974, and his B.A. in English and History from SUNY Potsdam in 1968.
He has been a member of the English Department at the University of Southern
California since 1978. His work has been translated into more than two dozen
foreign languages, including German, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish,
Russian, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese, Danish, Swedish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish,
Hungarian, Bulgarian, Finnish and Farsi. His stories have appeared in most
of the major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire,
The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, The Paris Review, GQ, Antaeus, Granta and McSweeney's,
and he has been the recipient of a number of literary awards. He currently
lives near Santa Barbara with his wife and three children.
Boyle has both a Wikipedia entry
and a website, where you will find a more
extensive biog.
The Road
A father and his son walk alone through burned America, heading through the ravaged
landscape to the coast. This is the profoundly moving story of their journey.
"The Road" boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which
two people, 'each the other's world entire', are sustained by love. Awesome
in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and
the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity,
and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
'The first great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation. Here
is an American classic which, at a stroke, makes McCarthy a contender for the
Nobel Prize for Literature ...An absolutely wonderful book that people will be
reading for generations' - Andrew O'Hagan. 'A work of such terrible beauty
that you will struggle to look away' - Tom Gatti, "The Times". 'So good
that it will devour you, in parts. It is incandescent' - Niall Griffiths,
"Daily Telegraph". 'You will read on, absolutely convinced, thrilled,
mesmerised. All the modern novel can do is done here' - Alan Warner, "Guardian".
Wikipedia entry.
About the Author
Cormac McCarthy, born Charles McCarthy (born July 20, 1933 in Providence, Rhode
Island), is an American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels
in the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres, and has also written
plays and screenplays. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road,
and his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same
name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. He received a
National Book Award in 1992 for All the Pretty Horses.
His earlier Blood Meridian (1985) was among Time Magazine's poll of 100 best
English-language books published between 1925 and 2005 and he placed joint
runner-up for a similar title in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of
the best American fiction published in the last 25 years. Literary critic
Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time,
along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Philip Roth. He is frequently
compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner.
McCarthy too has both a Wikipedia entry
(from which the above is borrowed) and a website.
Previous Months' Book Choices
January 2009
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
March 2007
February 2007
January 2007
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006