The Mind’s Eye [suggested by Naomi Montague]
Janek Mitter stumbles into his bathroom one morning after a night of heavy drinking, to find his beautiful young wife, Eva, floating dead in the bath. She has been brutally murdered. Yet even during his trial Mitter cannot summon a single memory of attacking Eva, nor a clue as to who could have killed her if he had not. Only once he has been convicted and locked away in an asylum for the criminally insane does he have a snatch of insight — but is it too late?
Drawing a blank after exhaustive interviews, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren remains convinced that something, or someone, in the dead woman’s life has caused these tragic events. But the reasons for her speedy remarriage have died with her. And as he delves even deeper, Van Veeteren realizes that the past never stops haunting the present…
The Mind’s Eye by Håkan Nesser is the first novel in the stunning Van Veeteren series, which currently comprises ten novels. [product description from Amazon]
Both the book and the series have their own Wikipedia page.
Author’s Wikipedia page.
Author’s website.
Shortlisted for this month
The book selector for the month can choose up to three books for nomination. This month Naomi’s other selections were:
A True Story Based on Lies
A True Story Based on Lies is a remarkable and original novel that addresses the universal issues of class discrimination, male oppression and female servitude through dual narratives ofspellbinding power.
Set in contemporary Mexico, the book charts the consequences of a sexual relationship between Leonora, a servant in the wealthy O’Connor home, and her master. When a child, Aura Olivia, is born from this union she is brought up as the daughter of the house. As the novel unfolds, the ‘true’ story gradually emerges. [product description from Amazon]
Author’s Wikipedia page
Author’s website.
White Teeth
Epic in scale and intimate in approach, White Teeth is an ambitious novel. Genetics, eugenics, gender, race, class and history are the book’s themes but Zadie Smith is gifted with the wit and inventiveness to make these weighty ideas seem effortlessly light.
The story travels through Jamaica, Turkey, Bangladesh and India but ends up in a scrubby North London borough, home of the book’s two unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal. They met in the Second World War, as part of a “Buggered Battalion” and have been best friends ever since. Archie marries beautiful, buck-toothed Clara, who’s on the run from her Jehovah’s Witness mother, and they have a daughter, Irie. Samad marries stroppy Alsana and they have twin sons: “Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks.”
Big questions demand boldly drawn characters. Zadie Smith’s aren’t heroic, just real: warm, funny, misguided and entirely familiar; reading their conversations is like eavesdropping. A simple scene, Alsana and Clara chatting about their pregnancies in the park: “A woman has to have the private things – a husband needn’t be involved in body business, in a lady’s … parts.”
Samad’s rant about his sons – “They have both lost their way. Strayed so far from what I had intended for them. No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave – acutely displays “the immigrant fears – dissolution, disappearance” but it also gets to the very heart of Samad.
White Teeth is a joy to read. It teems with life and exuberance and has enough cleverness and irreverent seriousness to give it bite. [Review by Eithne Farry on Amazon]
The book has its own Wikipedia page.
About the Author
Novelist Zadie Smith was born in North London in 1975 to an English father and a Jamaican mother. She read English at Cambridge, graduating in 1997.
Her acclaimed first novel, White Teeth (2000), is a vibrant portrait of contemporary multicultural London, told through the story of three ethnically diverse families. The book won a number of awards and prizes, including the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book). It also won two EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Awards) for Best Book/Novel and Best Female Media Newcomer, and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Author’s Club First Novel Award. White Teeth has been translated into over twenty languages and was adapted for Channel 4 television for broadcast in autumn 2002. Her tenure as Writer in Residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts resulted in the publication of an anthology of erotic stories entitled Piece of Flesh (2001). More recently, she has written the introduction for The Burned Children of America (2003), a collection of eighteen short stories by a new generation of young American writers.
Zadie Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man (2002), a story of loss, obsession and the nature of celebrity, won the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction. In 2003 she was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’.
Her third novel, On Beauty, was published in 2005, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction. She has also written a non-fiction book about writing – Fail Better (2006).
Zadie Smith is currently a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.
The above taken from Contemporary Writers.com, Smith also has an entry on Wikipedia.