A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Bern

Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction

This first novel explores the dark tensions beneath the suburban facade. Certainly the specifically literary pleasures of this book are many.

But I think ''A Crime in the Neighborhood'' feels familiar mainly because so much of it feels true.

Although the cruelties that generations can inflict on each other may be freshly rendered here, we can all recognize them far too well.- New York Times

10-year-old Marsha is in turmoil following the collapse of her parents' marriage, and the brutal murder of a local boy.

When the shy bachelor from next door begins to take an interest in Marsha's mother, Marsha is drawn into a cruel spiral of events that quickly spins out of control.

To visit Suzanne Berne's website and to find out about other books she has written, click on the link below:

http://www.suzanneberne.net/

We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates

We Were the Mulvaneys works not simply because of its meticulous details and gestures.... What keeps us coming back to Oates Country is something stronger and spookier: her uncanny gift of making the page a window, with something on the other side that we'd swear was life itself. - The New York Times Book Review

Everyone knows the Mulvaneys: Dad the successful businessman, Mike the football star, Marianne the cheerleader, Patrick the brain, Judd the runt, and Mom dedicated to running the family.

But after what sometime narrator Judd calls the events of Valentine's Day 1976, this ideal family falls apart and is not reunited until 1993. Oates's 26th novel explores this disintegration with an eye to the nature of changing relationships and recovering from the fractures that occur.

Through vivid imagery of a calm upstate New York landscape that any moment can be transformed by a blinding blizzard into a near-death experience, Oates demonstrates how faith and hope can help us endure.

At another level, the process of becoming the Mulvaneys again investigates the philosophical and spiritual aspects of a family's survival and restoration.

Joyce Carol Oates is one of America's most prolific and well loved authors. To find out more about her, click the link below

http://www.usfca.edu/jco/biography/

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

'Told with a compelling intensity which will keep the reader hooked until the last Undead tomb door swings shut' Sunday Telegraph


'It's the impeccably researched and subtly chilling story of a young woman's search for the truth about her historian father, and his quest to find Vlad himself. It's so refreshing to read genuinely sinister and suspenseful literary horror which does not need to rely on shock tactics' Bookseller

Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian combines a search for the historical Dracula with a profound sense that Stoker got some things right- that the late Mediaeval tyrant kills among us yet, undead and dangerous.

From Stoker, she also takes a sense that the supernatural seems more real when embedded in documentary evidence.

Three generations search for Dracula's resting place, and their stories are nested within each other, so that we know that at least two quests ended badly.

Kostova rations her thrills very carefully. She also has a profound and well-communicated sense of place and period, so that the book is equally at home in 1930s Rumania, Cold War Budapest and 1970s Oxford.
To read more about The Historian and to see what other books Elizabeth Kostova has written, click on the link below:

http://www.theswanthieves.com/

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

'The Secret History tells the story of a group of classics students at an élite American college, who are cerebral, obsessive and finally murderous ... it is a haunting, compelling and brilliant piece of fiction.' The Times

'Donna Tartt has discovered not the usual collegiate mix of sex, drugs and rock and roll, but a heart of darkness as stony and chilling as any Greek tragedian ever plumbed ...A thinking person's thriller.'  Newsday

Truly deserving of the accolade modern classic, Donna Tartt’s novel is a remarkable achievement – both compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful.

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an élite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries.

But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and for ever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill …

About the Author

The Secret History, made her the international literary sensation of 1992. Until the publication of her second book in October 2002, Tartt endured rumours of writer's block and nervous hermithood. But now that The Little Friend is safely in the bag, she says calmly, "it just took a while to write." Trying to meet readers' high expectations after The Secret History was never going to be easy, but Tartt wasn't intimidated by the search for a new idea. She said at the time, "I have my life to resort to."

Raised among the antebellum mansions of Grenada, Mississippi, Tartt experienced the shabby gentility of a changing south. Her extended family members were the stuff of Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner and, for Tartt, "books were the great escape". Fixated by Robert Louis Stevenson and Peter Pan, young Donna was taken on her own imaginative odyssey by her grandfather. A believer in the power of medicine, he fed his granddaughter codeine cough syrup, and much of her childhood was a "languorous undersea existence". A less dubious family contribution was a love of Dickens and Kipling, and Tartt's own storytelling talents were later nurtured at college. Her professor told her she was a genius and, even among classmates such as Bret Easton Ellis, the chain-smoking, Nietzsche-sprouting Tartt cut a dash.

While fellow graduates sought conventional employment, Tartt became a "professional houseguest" who started writing The Secret History. Nine years later, the classical cleverness and adolescent angst of her murderous aesthetes sold millions and meant the author need never again pick up her pen. But despite being translated into 23 languages, Tartt remains "a writer, not a TV personality", whose job it is to "dive deep". Now aged 38, the gamine-featured, pint-sized perfectionist is unfazed by the transitory nature of celebrity, concentrating instead on "the five books I have in me".  Of her own style, Tartt remains vague, following Kipling's instructions only to "drift, wait and obey". Her continuing royalties have afforded her as much time to drift and wait as she needs to produce another opus. Her army of fans may be champing at the bit for more of her work, but Donna Tartt remains a defiantly bookish character, "moving a comma round very happily for hours".

There was a ten year gap between Donna Tartt publishing her first book, The Secret History and her second, The Little Friend.

To read an interview with her in the Guardian about both books, click on the link below:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/oct/19/fiction.features

A Shadow Falls... - Senior lecturer in English at University College, London, John Mullan deconstructs Donna Tartt's The Secret History - click on the link to find out more...

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

'No serious writer of this century has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination than Graham Greene' - Time

'Our Man In Havana' is Greene's satirical tale of espionage and intrigue.

Jim Wormold is selling vacuum cleaners in Cuba before being enlisted by a fellow Brit named Hawthorne to spy on Cuba for England.

Wormold is out of his league in the world of cloak and dagger missions, sensitive information gathering, and covert operations. He is a middle-aged father of a 17 year-old beauty named Milly, his wife ran off with an American some years before.

Running a small vacuum cleaner business in Havana with an assistant named Lopez, the British Secret Service has completely misjudged who he is. Unwilling to disappoint them or to give up the $150 a month salary plus $150 a month expenses, he fabricates coded reports of military construction sites (drawn by tracing vacuum cleaner parts), expenses accounts, and lists of fictitious operatives and informants.

Things get really complicated when the home office in London is impressed with his efforts and sends him a secretary named Beatrice and a radio operator named Rudy....

About the Author

Perhaps the ultimate moralist thriller-writer, Greene had a facility for combining literary observation with populist plot, and himself divided his books into serious fiction (The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American) and "entertainments" (Brighton Rock, Our Man in Havana).

Evelyn Waugh singled out for praise the new coolly cinematic quality of his style, but he is now most known for a sort of atheistic Catholicism (George Orwell sneers that Greene thinks "there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only").

However, when the Vatican condemned The Power and the Glory and demanded revisions, Greene merely referred the Pope to his publisher.

Graham Greene was a prolific writer and many of his books have been made into films. To find out more about him, click on the link below:

http://greeneland.tripod.com/index.htm

Here's the opening scene from the 1959 British comedy noir starring Alec Guinness.

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book 2005

'A sensitive and touching story of a child exposed too early to religious intolerance and the uglier side of the Nigerian state.' J. M. Coetzee

'It's a mature coming-of-age story, and an engrossing portrait of Nigerian society.' The Times

The limits of fifteen year old Kambili's world are defined by the high walls of her family estate and the dictates of her repressive and fanatically religious father. Her life is regulated by schedules: prayer, sleep, study, and more prayer.

When Nigeria begins to fall apart during a military coup, Kambili's father, involved mysteriously in the political crisis, sends Kambili and her brother away to live with their aunt. In this house, full of energy and laughter, she discovers life and love -- and a terrible, bruising secret deep within her family.

This is Adiche's first novel and was shortlisted for the Orange fiction prize in 2004.

To find out more about her and her books, go to the link below:


http://www.l3.ulg.ac.be/adichie/cnabio.html

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize 1921

Set in 1870's New York, Age of Innocence follows the courtship of an upperclass couple and how a beautiful woman surrounded by scandal threatens their happiness.

Newland Archer has made a highly desirable engagement to May Welland but when he meets her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska who has left her Polish husband, he begins to doubt his choice of bride.

Countess Olenska shocks staid New York society with her unconventional views about how to conduct her life (especially her decision to divorce her husband).

Newland begins to question the hypocrisy of his life in a gilded cage and falls in love with Ellen.


About the Author

Edith Wharton once said, about critics and biographers: "After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them & invent others." It seems that there is an abundance of blatantly wrong or just slightly incorrect information about Wharton's life and literature; it also seems that this problem was one Wharton herself faced.

Born Edith Jones, January 24, 1862, she went on to become the first woman to ever win the Pulitzer prize for her novel The Age of Innocence, in 1921. You can read Wharton's own impressions of her life in the autobiography A Backward Glance. Her life story is as interesting as those of the women in her novels, and her biography is an excellent source of history, entertainment and context.

To find out more about Edith Wharton's life, click on the link below

http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/index.html

Here's the trailer for the 1993 Martin Scorcese film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary is one of the most important French novels of the 19th century.


Written in 1856, it is Flaubert's first published novel and is considered his masterpiece.

Madame Bovary is the story of Emma Bovary, an unhappily married woman who seeks escape through forbidden relationships with other men. 

The book could be viewed as an expose of the situation of women in the 19th century; women who had not yet been emancipated and were expected to obey their husbands, to stay in their homes while the men went to work, or left for months on end to fight in wars.

Emma Bovary also serves as a voice for Flaubert, who patterned the character's personality after his own. Emma Bovary's "rebellious" attitude against the accepted ideas of the day, reflects Flaubert's views of the bourgeoisie.

Ultimately, Madame Bovary's indiscretions and her obsession with Romance lead to her downfall, which not only appeases the guardians of morality, but shows us Flaubert's view of the world wasn't one of naive optimism.

The novel was attacked for obscenity by public prosecutors when it was first serialized in La Revue de Paris between October 1 and December 15, 1856, resulting in a trial in January 1857 that made the story notorious. Flaubert was acquitted in 1857 and the book became a bestseller and remains one of the most influential books ever written.

To read A.S. Byatt's review of Madame Bovary, click on the link below:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/jul/27/classics.asbyatthttp://

To find out more about Gustave Flaubert's life, click on the link below:

http://www.madamebovary.com/default.htm

Here's the opening scene of the 2000 BBC version that I think is rather good...

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

"All art is quite useless."

This is a story about debauchery and corruption of innocence. It is set in the late 19th Century. Violent twists and a sneaky plot make this novel a distinct reflection of human pride and corrupt nature.

The story begins with Basil Hallward, an artist painting a magnificent picture of his subject - a handsome young man named Dorian Gray. Dorian Gray starts as the essence of young innocence, with his path in life to find peace in his heart.

This innocence becomes corrupt when he realises that youth and beauty are an illusion, and that the finished picture will become a mockery of him when old age reaches his youthful complexion and wrinkles mark his unblemished face. He wishes that he would stay looking young, beautiful and innocent as he gets older, and that the picture would get older in his place.

He gets what he wishes for. Dorian has the appearence of an angel, yet his soul becomes as corrupt as the Devil - which is what the picture now represents. The purity of his soul becomes corrupted, which is reflected as the ageing and disfigurement of the picture. Dorian now has a visible reflection of his true self which tortures him to no end.

Dorian Gray, still on his path to find peace, tries anything to stay as he was when the picture was painted, ensuring that nothing can get in his way until this happens.

A book on moral corruption, Oscar Wilde no doubt took inspiration for this book from many aspects of his own life, and observations made of society at that time. One could even speculate that this is almost an autobiographical piece of writing.

To find out more about the life of Oscar Wilde, click on the link below:


http://http//www.cmgww.com/historic/wilde/index.php

Over 120 years after it was condemned as 'vulgar' and 'unclean', an uncensored version of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray is published by Harvard University Press - find out more here...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/27/dorian-gray-oscar-wilde-uncensored

Here's the trailer to the 2009 film version starring Colin Firth...

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2005

'This startling shocker strips bare motherhood... the most remarkable Orange prize victor so far' Polly Toynbee, Guardian

'One of the most striking works of fiction to be published this year... A powerful, gripping and original meditation on evil' New Statesman

What sort of a mother hates her own son? Eva Khatchadourian does. What she'd hoped for was someone to bear witness to her life and to give her and her husband Franklin something else to talk about. Perhaps she had Kevin for the wrong reasons, she reflects, because he is not at all what she wanted. There's something strange about the boy who wears nappies till the age of six, yet who is otherwise frighteningly precocious.

Kevin's behaviour progresses from destructive to malicious to murderous. His greatest skill is the ability to absent himself from the scene of a crime, but Franklin plays down Eva's suspicions and insists that they go on playing happy families. In some ways, Franklin's continued optimism in the face of the obvious is more sinister than Kevin's devious destructiveness. It is Franklin's deliberate blindness that prevents Kevin's sociopathic traits from being taken seriously - or was it, Eva wonders, her fault that one morning Kevin lures seven fellow students, a teacher and a cafeteria worker into his school gymnasium and picks them off one by one with the crossbow his father bought him for Christmas?

We Need to Talk About Kevin takes the form of a series of letters to Franklin after the murders and asks: were they such bad parents? Is the way that Kevin turned out their fault? Could things have been different? The novel is an elegant psychological and philosophical investigation of culpability with a brilliant denouement.

About the Author

At age seven, Lionel Shriver decided she would be a writer. In 1987, she made good on her promise with The Female of the Species, a debut novel that received admiring reviews. Shriver's five subsequent novels were also well-received; but it was her seventh, 2003's We Need to Talk About Kevin, that turned her into a household name.

A graduate of Columbia University, Shriver is also a respected journalist whose features, op-eds, and reviews have appeared in such publications as The Guardian, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the Economist. Since her breakthrough book, she has continued to produce bestselling fiction and gimlet-eyed journalism in equal measure.

Lionel Shriver talks about Kevin - How does it feel to have your widely rejected manuscript become a best-selling, prize-winning novel, then a book-club favourite and now the toast of the Cannes film festival? The author of We Need to Talk About Kevin explains here...

To read interviews with Lionel Shriver about this difficult and confrontational book, click on the links below

http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum118.php

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2003/oct/04/weekend7.weekend2

Frozen in Time by Ali Sparkes

Two cryonically frozen children are brought back to life after fifty years - and find themselves caught up in a thrilling contemporary adventure.

1956 Freddy and Polly have always known their father is a genius so they've never minded helping him with his experiments. Even when that means being put into cryonic suspension-having their hearts frozen until their father wakes them up again. They know it will only be for an hour or two, so there's nothing to worry about...
2009 Ben and Rachel have resigned themselves to a long, boring summer. Then they find the hidden underground vault in the garden and inside it two frozen figures, a boy and a girl. And as if that isn't spooky enough, when Rachel accidentally presses a button, something unbelievable happens...

Ali Sparkes has written other books including the brilliant Shapeshifter series.
To find out more about her, click the link below

http://http//www.alisparkes.co.uk/

A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly

'A GATHERING LIGHT is a remarkable debut, a book that sweeps across the genre boundaries of murder, mystery, romance, and historical fiction - resulting in an original novel that is both gripping and touching.' Scott Turow 

'If ever a book deserved to cross over, this is it this is a wonderfully rich, involving and beautifully written book.' Adele Geras, The Guardian 

'Part history, part compelling murder mystery, Jennifer Donnelly's A GATHERING LIGHT brings the past to powerful and vivid life.' Celia Rees

When Mattie Gokey is given a bundle of letters to burn she fully intends to execute the wishes of the giver, Grace Brown. 


When Grace Brown is found drowned the next day in Big Moose Lake, Mattie finds that it is not as easy to burn those letters as she had thought.


And, as she reads, a riveting story emerges - not only Grace Brown's story but also Mattie's hopes and ambitions for the future and her relationships with her friends and family. 


Published to widespread acclaim this wonderful novel, part murder mystery and part coming-of-age story, is an astounding and accomplished piece of literature.


Read the opening of Chapter 1 here...

When summer comes to the North Woods, time slows down. And some days it stops altogether. The sky, gray and lowering for much of the year, becomes an ocean of blue, so vast and brilliant you can’t help but stop what you’re doing—pinning wet sheets to the line maybe, or shucking a bushel of corn on the back steps—to stare up at it. Locusts whir in the birches, coaxing you out of the sun and under the boughs, and the heat stills the air, heavy and sweet with the scent of balsam. 


As I stand here on the porch of the Glenmore, the finest hotel on all of Big Moose Lake, I tell myself that today — Thursday, July 12, 1906 — is such a day. Time has stopped, and the beauty and calm of this perfect afternoon will never end. The guests up from New York, all in their summer whites, will play croquet on the lawn forever. Old Mrs. Ellis will stay on the porch until the end of time, rapping her cane on the railing for more lemonade. The children of doctors and lawyers from Utica, Rome, and Syracuse will always run through the woods, laughing and shrieking, giddy from too much ice cream.


I believe these things. With all my heart. For I am good at telling myself lies.

Find out more about the book and the author by clicking here...