All The Birds, Singing [suggested by Wendy Gibson]
Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It’s just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep – every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags.
ake’s unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colour and sound, a story held in the scars that stripe her back. [Product description from Amazon]
About the Author
Wikipedia page.
Author’s website.
Shortlisted for this month
Wendy’s other two choices for this month were:
The Sound of Things Falling
No sooner does he get to know Ricardo Laverde in a seedy billiard hall in Bogotá than Antonio Yammara realises that the ex-pilot has a secret. Antonio’s fascination with his new friend’s life grows until the day Ricardo receives a mysterious, unmarked cassette. Shortly afterwards, he is shot dead on a street corner. Yammara’s investigation into what happened leads back to the early 1960s, marijuana smuggling and a time before the cocaine trade trapped Colombia in a living nightmare. [Product description from Amazon]
The book has a Wikipedia page.
About the Author
Wikipedia page.
There are very few English language pages with biographical details, but if you read Spanish or you’re happy to rely on Google Translate, there’s this.
The Goldfinch
Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love – and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.
d thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph – a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate. [Product description from Amazon]
The book has a Wikipedia page.
About the Author
Wikipedia page.
Still no website after all this time (strange, but that’s obviously how she prefers it), but there is this interview from 2002, shortly after the publication of her second novel. It’s long, but interesting (at least the first two-thirds are – I ran out of time after that).