Fellside [suggested by John Beresford]
Fellside is a maximum security prison on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. It’s not the kind of place you’d want to end up. But it’s where Jess Moulson could be spending the rest of her life.
It’s a place where even the walls whisper.
And one voice belongs to a little boy with a message for Jess.
Will she listen?
[product description from Amazon]
Author’s Wikipedia page.
Author’s website.
Mike Carey is also the author of The Girl With All The Gifts, which was nominated in October 2014.
Shortlisted for this month
The book selector for the month can choose up to three books for nomination. This month John’s other choices — intended to be on the theme of “authors whose work we’ve read before”, which as it turns out isn’t strictly true of the selected book! — were:
About Grace
Growing up in Alaska, young David Winkler is crippled by his dreams. At nine, he dreams a man is decapitated by a passing truck on the path outside his family’s home. The next day, unable to prevent it, he witnesses an exact replay of his dream in real life. The premonitions keep coming, unstoppably. He sleepwalks during them, bringing catastrophe into his reach.
Then, as unstoppable as a vision, he falls in love, at the supermarket (exactly as he already dreamed) with Sandy. They flee south, landing in Ohio, where their daughter Grace is born. And then the visions of Grace’s death begin for Winkler, as their waterside home is inundated. Plagued by the same horrific images of Grace drowning, when the floods come, he cannot face his destiny and flees.
He beaches on a remote Caribbean island, where he works as a handyman, chipping away at his doubts and hopes, never knowing whether Grace survived the flood or met the doom he foretold. After two decades, he musters the strength to find out… [product description from Amazon]
The book has a separate page on the author’s website.
Author’s Wikipedia page.
Author’s website.
Anthony Doerr is also the author of All The Light We Cannot See, which we read back in January.
Oryx & Crake
In Oryx and Crake, a science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than “fictional science” (no flying cars here), Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fool’s paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world fell apart. [review from amazon.com]
About the Author
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master’s degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her thirty-five years of writing, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and many honorary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid’s Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000.
Atwood’s dystopian novel, Oryx and Crake, appeared in 2003. The Tent (very short fiction) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006.
Margaret Atwood has been said to have an uncanny knack for writing books that anticipate the preoccupations of the public. Acclaimed for her talent for portraying both personal problems and those of universal concern, Ms. Atwood’s work has been published in more than thirty-five languages. She lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson.