A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
Welcome to LitReaderNotes, a book review blog. Find book suggestions, search for insights on a specific book, join a community of readers.
All in Contemporary Fiction
In Bewilderment, however, Richard Powers doesn’t limit the reader to life on planet earth; rather, through the first-person voice of his protagonist, astrobiologist Theo Byrne, Powers’ writing wanders the universe in search of life, but always returns home. Layering astronomy, biology, and neuroscience, this novel challenges its reader to think more broadly, to consider alternative truths, and to recognize how little we know about ourselves, our planet, and our universe.
J. R. Thorp’s debut novel, Learwife (2021) is a lyrical, internal monologue of King Lear’s widow during some undefined point in British medieval history. The novel opens as news of Lear’s death, and that of his three daughters, reaches a convent in northern England. Here, amidst the stone walls and industrious lives of the nuns, resides the estranged wife of King Lear who slowly unravels her story while she grieves the family she had already lost. Thus, Thorp’s Learwife begins where Shakespeare’s tragic King Lear concludes and provides the missing queen’s perspective through her memories and her grief.
Tracy Chevalier has written many an impressive historical fiction (Girl with The Pearl Earring being probably her most famous). I picked up At the Edge of the Orchard (2016) this spring and allowed myself to fall into the historical spaces the book brings to life. This novel is divided into two halves. The first half, set in Ohio’s Black Swamp, in the 1830s alternates perspective between a husband and a wife. The second half follows their youngest son on his meandering journey west (through the 1840s and 50s). In this novel, Chevalier’s sparse writing creates characters who come alive amidst the harsh conditions of nineteenth-century pioneer life.
When a Ficus carica, commonly known as the edible fig, takes up a narrative voice in a novel, readers should know they are in for something unique. In the case of The Island of the Missing Trees (2021) by Elif Shafak, the tree narrator, the multiple storylines and settings (contemporary London and twentieth-century Cypress), and the beautiful prose all work to utterly transport the reader.
I recently picked up Sarah Winman’s recent historical fiction novel: Still Life (2021). In addition to its beautiful cover of flowers and parrot, the reference to the world of painting in its title immediately piqued my interest, as did its setting of Florence, Italy.
If you enjoy books that tackle ambitious projects, play with historical trends and technologies, dig into themes of contemporary import, and end hopefully, I encourage you to pick up Cloud Cuckoo Land and then keep reading.
For readers who appreciate a suspenseful fantasy interwoven with a good dose of romance, Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015) and the four books that come after it will delight.
The first in this series, A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015) establishes the divided world in which we find our heroine, Feyre Archeron.
Sometimes we find our way to delightful novels that transport us to fictional communities full of quirky, loveable characters; Felicity Hayes-McCoy’s Library at the Edge of the World (originally published in the UK in 2016) and the four novels that continue the Finfarran Peninsula series (Summer at the Garden Café, UK published 2017; The Mistletoe Matchmaker, 2017; The Transatlantic Book Club, 2019; and The Month of Borrowed Dreams, 2020) offer their reader precisely that.
Caroline Lea’s recent historical fiction, The Metal Heart: A Novel of WWII (2021) fictionalizes events on the northern Scottish islands of Orkney during the 1940s. Twin sisters, Dorothy and Constance, flea to a remote island said to be cursed after the death of their parents. Facing the brutal elements as winter descends, the sisters find their isolation invaded by a population of prisoners of war who are relocated by the British Army to Orkney in order to labor on a protective earthen barrier around the islands.
Emily Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines (2020) is an unsettling read; one replete with ghosts, curses, nightmarish yellow jackets, and plenty of the uncanny. Yet, in addition to the horror—a genre Danforth clearly plays with on multiple levels in PBH—the reader meets the witty, modern narrator, with her references to social media posts and snide humor. Plain Bad Heroines explores the lives and loves of women, both contemporary and early twentieth-century, as they unapologetically make their own ways. Plain Bad Heroines, like Danforth’s first novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, is LGBTQ fiction.
Elisabeth Sharp McKetta’s She Never Told Me About the Ocean (2021) scrutinizes the experiences and emotional lives of various mothers and daughters, set on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific ocean, with a hefty dose island myth. Through a story that incorporates the everyday and the mythical, She Never Told Me About the Ocean highlights the interconnectedness of birth, death, and humanity.
Nuala O’Connor’s brilliant, moving, and yes, delightful, NORA: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce (2021) gives today’s readers a first-person narrative through which to meet and admire Nora Barnacle Joyce. From her own perspective, O’Connor’s Nora shares details of her life with legendary James Joyce, from courtship, to shared self-exile, parenthood, chronic illness, literary success, and, ultimately, death.
Catherine A Hamilton’s debut novel, Victoria’s War (2020), is a moving and informative historical fiction. Victoria’s War opens as Germany invades Poland, shattering the life of its titular character.
works that envision various possible experiences of enslavement and the Underground Railroad like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2017), provide modern Americans with ample food-for-thought when considering race relations, questions of reparations, and more. Whitehead’s novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017 and the National Book Award, provides an alternate history of slavery in the American South, not in terms of downplaying its brutality, but by exploring various means of dealing with its consequence.
