The Examined Life [suggested by Wendy Gibson]
This book is about learning to live.
In simple stories of encounter between a psychoanalyst and his patients, The Examined Life reveals how the art of insight can illuminate the most complicated, confounding and human of experiences.
These are stories about our everyday lives: they are about the people we love and the lies that we tell; the changes we bear, and the grief. Ultimately, they show us not only how we lose ourselves but how we might find ourselves too. [Product description from Amazon]
About the Author
Author’s website.
Wikipedia page.
Shortlisted for this month
Wendy’s other two choices for this month were:
The Farm
If you refuse to believe me, I will no longer consider you my son…
Daniel believed that his parents were enjoying a peaceful retirement on a remote farm in Sweden, the country of his mother’s birth. But with a single phone call, everything changes.
Your mother…she’s not well, his father tells him. She’s been imagining things – terrible, terrible things. In fact, she has been committed to a mental hospital.
Before Daniel can board a plane to Sweden, his mother calls: Everything that man has told you is a lie. I’m not mad… I need the police… Meet me at Heathrow.
Daniel is immediately caught between his parents – whom to believe, whom to trust? He becomes his mother’s unwilling judge and jury. Presented with a horrific crime, a conspiracy that implicates his own father, Daniel must examine the evidence and decide for himself: who is telling the truth? And he has secrets of his own that for too long he has kept hidden…
In a thrilling novel as transfixing as it is meticulously crafted, Tom Rob Smith creates a community, a family, a marriage and a mind in crisis, striking to the very heart of the relationship between a mother and her son. [Product description from Amazon]
About the Author
Author’s Wikipedia page.
Author’s website (which unfortunately, at the time of writing, is completely nadged. Attempts to reach ‘The Farm’ page (or the ‘Events’ page) merely repeat the information displayed on the ‘News’ page).
Five Star Billionaire
In the Man Booker prize-longlisted ‘Five Star Billionaire’ Tash Aw charts the overlapping lives of migrant Malaysian workers, forging lives for themselves in sprawling Shanghai.
Justin is from a family of successful property developers. Phoebe has come to China buoyed with hope, but her dreams are shattered within hours as the job she has come for seems never to have existed. Gary is a successful pop artist, but his fans and marketing machine disappear after a bar-room brawl. Yinghui has businesses that are going well but must make decisions about her life. And then there is Walter, the shadowy billionaire, ruthless and manipulative, ultimately alone in the world. [Product description from Amazon]
This novel has a Wikipedia page.
About the Author