nomadreader

The back story: I am a huge fan of Vendela Vida, and when I first heard about her new novel, the advance praise alone had me longing for it. Thankfully, I got a copy from the publisher via Book Browse . The basics: Yvonne is a middle-aged widow with two grown children who decides to travel alone to Datca, Turkey.  The verdict : I savored every word of the novel's 240 pages. Vida does a masterful job of showing the reader how even an intelligent, self-aware and honest character, does not really see what is going on around her. Yvonne's slow admissions of her back story made me realize the better I knew her, the less well she understood herself. I loved  Yvonne, and I loved the descriptions of marriage, parenting, teaching and travel. Overall: it's my favorite read of 2010 so far. Rating: 5 stars (out of 5 stars) Pages: 240 Publication date: June 22, 2010 ( pre-order it from Amazon.com ) Source: I received this book from the publisher As an Amazon ...

  Jill at Breaking the Spine hosts Waiting on Wednesday each week to encourage book bloggers to spotlight an eagerly anticipated upcoming release.   My pick this week is The Lovers by Vendela Vida, who is perhaps best known for the novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and writing the screenplay for Away We Go with her husband, Dave Eggers . I'm a huge fan of her fiction, nonfiction and the film. I couldn't locate a description yet, but I did find two fantastic endorsements from great writers: "Vendela Vida's The Lovers is a spare and haunting meditation on how travel can bring us full circle back to the place from which we should have started. I read it over two days and dreamed about it the second night." (Francine Prose, author of Goldengrove ) Vendela Vida writes with elegance and economy. In this engrossing novel, she has managed to combine a stingingly acute portrait of grief, a moving meditation on love (both filial and romantic)...