nomadreader

The backstory: Nora Webster  was on the 2014 Folio Prize shortlist, a 2015 Carnegie Medal finalist, and a 2014 New York Times  Notable book. I previously liked The Testament of Mary  by Toibin. The basics: Nora Webster's husband dies, leaving her a young widow with four children, no job, and financial challenges in 1960's Ireland. My thoughts: It's the second book I've read by Toibin, and only in hindsight did I realize both feature strong, conflicted female narrators. Nora Webster is a fascinating woman. As I think about it, my mind is filled with cliches to describe it: quiet, haunting, evocative. It is all of those things. It's a book I appreciated perhaps more than I enjoyed. There's a timeless, classic quality to it. It's set mostly in the 1960's, and Toibin captures the essence of the time and place so beautifully one might think it was written at that time. Nora Webster  is a character-driven novel. It's one I enjoyed the time I spe...

The backstory: Family Life  won the 2015 Folio Prize and was named one of the 5 best books of 2014 by The New York Times . The basics:  "We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more: when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important. Pressing an elevator button and the elevator closing its doors and rising, they have a feeling of power at the fact that the elevator is obeying them. Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land. Ajay, the family’s younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longin...

The backstory: Outline  is on the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction longlist. It's also shortlisted for the 2015 Folio Prize . The basics: Outline  is billed as a novel of ten conversations. It begins with Faye, a recently divorced writer with two sons, on a flight from London to Athens, Greece, where she will teach writing. My thoughts: Outline  is very much a novel of ideas. There is no real plot to speak of, and its main character is the titular outline--we get but an outline of her through her interactions with strangers and friends alike. Still, I found it was a more cohesive story than I expected. Because it was billed as a novel of ten conversations, I made the mistaken assumption that these ten conversations would be with ten different people (spoiler: they're not.) While we only see some characters once, other appear several times, which helps ground the narrative and makes it feel more like a novel than a chronological series of short stories. As...

The backstory: How to Be Both  is on the 2014 Booker Prize short list. Update: It also won the 2015 Baileys Prize  and was shortlisted for the 2015 Folio Prize . The basics: How to Be Both  is told in two parts, one from the point-of-view of George, a 16-year-old Cambridge (England) girl in current time, and the other from the spirit of Francesco del Cossa, a 15th century Italian artist. Which narrative you read first depends on the book; half the copies were printed with George's narrative first. My thoughts: A few years ago, I read my first Ali Smith novel, There But For The  ( my review ), when it was longlisted for the Orange Prize . I didn't love it, but I was impressed with Smith and her ideas, so I was eager to see what she would do next. Before starting this book, I did something I rarely do: I looked at a professional review (I usually think reviews give too much away.) I'm so glad I knew there are two orders in which to read this novel before I st...