September Fiction Blurbs 2015
Smith, Ali - Hotel World
Five people: four are living; three are strangers;
two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel
chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a
dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the worlds,
straining to recall things she never knew. And one
night all five women find themselves in the
smooth plush environs of the Global Hotel, where
the intersection of their very different fates make
for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.
Trevor, William - Story Of Lucy Gault
Captain Gault has decided that his family must
leave Lahardane. They are after all Protestants
living in the big house in rural Cork, and the
country is in turmoil. It is 1921. But 8-year-old
Lucy can't bear to leave the seashore, the old
house, the woods - so she hatches a plan. It is
then that the calamity happens.
Thayil, Jeet – Narcopolis
Narcopolis completely subverts and challenges
the literary traditions for which the Indian novel
is celebrated. It is a book about drugs, sex,
death, perversion, addiction, love, and God and
has more in common in its subject matter with
the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire
than with that of the subcontinent's familiar
literary lights. Above all, it is a fantastical
portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in
a nation about to sell its soul.
Matar, Hisham – In The Country Of Men
Libya, 1979. Nine-year-old Suleiman’s days are
circumscribed by the narrow rituals of childhood:
outings to the ruins surrounding Tripoli, games
with friends played under the burning sun, exotic
gifts from his father’s constant business trips
abroad. But his nights have come to revolve
around his mother’s increasingly disturbing
bedside stories full of old family bitterness. And
then one day Suleiman sees his father across the
square of a busy marketplace, his face wrapped
in a pair of dark sunglasses. Wasn’t he supposed
to be away on business yet again? Why is he
going into that strange building with the green
shutters? Why did he lie?
Fitzgerald, Penelope – The Bookshop
In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow
with a small inheritance, risks everything to open
a bookshop - the only bookshop - in the seaside
town of Hardborough. By making a success of a
business so impractical, she invites the hostility
of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By
daring to enlarge her neighbours' lives, she
crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne.
Florence's warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and
the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late
does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that
lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wants
one.
Keene, Brian – The Rising
THE RISING is the story of Jim Thurmond, a
determined father battling his way across a
post-apocalyptic zombie landscape, to find his
young son. Accompanied by Martin, a preacher
still holding to his faith, and Frankie, a
recovering heroin addict with an indomitable will
to survive, Jim travels from state to state and
town to town, facing an endless onslaught of
undead hordes, and the evils perpetrated by his
fellow man.
Robinson, Derek - Goshawk Squadron
Set during the height of World War I in January
1918, Goshawk Squadron follows the
misfortunes of a British flight squadron on the
Western Front. For Stanley Woolley,
commanding officer of Goshawk Squadron, the
romance of chivalry in the clouds is just a myth.
The code he drums into his men is simple and
savage: shoot the enemy in the back before he
knows you're there. Even so, he believes the
whole squadron will be dead within three
months.
Blackwood, Caroline - Great Granny Webster
Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood's
masterpiece. Heiress to the Guinness fortune,
Blackwood was celebrated as a great beauty
and dazzling raconteur long before she made
her name as a strikingly original writer. This
macabre, mordantly funny, partly autobiographical novel reveals the gothic craziness
behind the scenes in the great houses of the
aristocracy, as witnessed through the unsparing
eyes of an orphaned teenage girl. Great Granny
Webster herself is a fabulous monster, the
chilliest of matriarchs, presiding with steely
self-regard over a landscape of ruined lives.
Waters, Sarah - Fingersmith
Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the
care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer." Mrs.
Sucksby’s household also hosts a transient
family of petty thieves--fingersmiths--for whom
this house in the heart of a mean London slum
is home.
One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives-Gentleman, an elegant con man, who carries
with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she
wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a
naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her
seduction, they all will share in Maud’s vast
inheritance. With dreams of paying back the
kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to
the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to
regret her decision
Mosley, Nicholas - Impossible Object
"The object of life is impossible; one cuts out
fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held
to the back of the head and one's hand has to
move the opposite way from what was
intended."
In these closing lines from Impossible Object,
one has embodied both Nicholas Mosley's
subject of love and imagination, as well as his
unmatched lyric style. In eight carefully
connected stories that are joined by
introspective interludes on related subjects, the
author pursues the notion, through the lives of
a couple seen by different narrators, that "those
who like unhappy ends can have them, and
those who don't will have to look for them."
Kilroy, Thomas - Big Chapel
It is a novel about a man, a family and a town.
Basing his work upon a notorious clerical
scandal of Victorian Ireland, Thomas Kilroy has
written an anatomy of religious violence that
remains relevant.
In scenes that range from the private and
lyrical to the panorama of a whole community
in convulsion he draws upon a deep knowledge
of the history and folklore of nineteenth-century
Ireland. While there is a great deal of humour
in The Big Chapel it is, finally, a work of grave
tragic proportions.
Hall, Sarah - Electric Michaelangelo
On the windswept front of Morecambe Bay, Cy
Parks spends his childhood years first in a
guest house for consumptives run by his
mother and then as apprentice to alcoholic
tattoo-artist Eliot Riley. Thirsty for new
experiences, he departs for America and finds
himself in the riotous world of the Coney Island
boardwalk, where he sets up his own business
as 'The Electric Michelangelo'. In this carnival
environment of roller-coasters and freakshows, Cy becomes enamoured with Grace, a
mysterious immigrant and circus performer
who commissions him to cover her entire body
in tattooed eyes.
Mistry, Rohinton - Family Matters
At the age of seventy-nine, Nariman Vakeel,
already suffering from Parkinson’s disease,
breaks an ankle and finds himself wholly
dependent on his family. His step-children,
Coomy and Jal, have a spacious apartment but
are too squeamish and resentful to tend to his
physical needs. Nariman must now turn to his
younger daughter, Roxana, her husband, Yezad,
and their two sons, who share a small, crowded
home. Their decision will test not only their
material resources but, in surprising ways, all
their tolerance, compassion, integrity, and faith.
Sweeping and intimate, tragic and
mirthful, Family Matters is a work of enormous
emotional power.
Dangor, Achmat - Bitter Fruit
The last time Silas Ali encountered Lieutenant Du
Boise, Silas was locked in the back of a police van
and the lieutenant was conducting a vicious
assault on Silas's wife, Lydia, in revenge for her
husband's participation in Nelson Mandela's
African National Congress. When Silas sees Du
Boise by chance twenty years later, as the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission is about to deliver
its report, crimes from the past erupt into the
present, splintering Ali’s fragile peace. A
harrowing story of a brittle family on the
crossroads of history and a fearless skewering of
the pieties of revolutionary movements, Bitter
Fruit is a cautionary tale of how we do, or do not,
address the past's deepest wounds.
Unsworth, Barry - Morality Play
It is the late-14th century, a time beset by war
and plague. Nicholas Barber, a young cleric,
abandons his post in the church and joins a
troupe of travelling performers. The players reenact the murder of a young boy, but as they
rehearse they discover the truth has yet to be
revealed.
Storey, David - Pasmore
To all external appearances, Colin Pasmore
has a happy life: not yet thirty, with a wife,
three children, a nice home, and a good job as
a university lecturer, everything seems to be
going right. But after he is beset by a
recurring nightmare, he begins to experience
the terrifying sensation that his whole life is
unravelling. He is suddenly unable to bear the
presence of friends and family, incapable of
touching or communicating with his wife,
dissatisfied and even embarrassed by his job.
He finds himself looking on in helpless horror,
struggling to understand why his entire world
is disintegrating around him. . .
Unsworth, Barry - Pascali’s Island
The year is 1908, the place, a small Greek
island in the declining days of the crumbling
Ottoman Empire. For twenty years Basil Pascali
has spied on the people of his small community
and secretly reported on their activities to the
authorities in Constantinople. Although his
reports are never acknowledged, never acted
upon, he has received regular payment for his
work. Now he fears that the villagers have
found him out and he becomes engulfed in
paranoia. In the midst of his panic, a charming
Englishman arrives on the island claiming to be
an archaeologist, and charms his way into the
heart of the woman for whom Pascali pines. A
complex game is played out between the two
where cunning and betrayal may come to haunt
them both.
.
O’Faolain, Julia - No Country For Young Men
Set in present-day Dublin, No Country for Young
Men involves an Irish-American targeted for
elimination by terrorists, an unsolved 1922
murder, a moving love affair, a mad nun and
what happens to a society when memory
displaces thought.
Schlee, Ann - Rhine Journey
It is the summer of 1851. An English family is
making a romantic journey by paddle-steamer on
the Rhine, and Charlotte’s imagination is stretched
to the limit - one might almost say, to the breaking
point. She is the unmarried sister of the Reverend
Charles Morrison with whose family she is
travelling. As they board the boat, Charlotte
suddenly mistakes a passenger for the man she
gave up years ago, at her brother’s insistence.
From that moment, this extraordinarily evocative
novel creates an aura of romantic, erotic tension
that is a compelling as it is mysterious. Charlotte’s
interior passion is counterpointed with the stifling
manners of the time, and inexorably she is drawn
closer to confrontation with the passenger, and
herself.
The Essence Of The Thing
Nicola only went to buy cigarettes and upon
returning finds a stranger in her apartment. He
looks like her live-in boyfriend, Jonathan, but he
can't actually be the dependable known quantity
whom Nicola loves that goes by the name of
Jonathan. Can he? Before Nicola stands a man
who is strong and adorable just like the old
Jonathan, only this one is no longer hers! This sad
tale of love gone south still has its funny side. You
have either to laugh or cry when you see, as
acutely and elegantly as St John captures it here,
the things women will do to hold on to love, and
the things men will do to escape it
Ellis, Alice Thomas - The 27th Kingdom
The Roman Catholic Russian ancestors of Aunt
Irene, the central character were persecuted and
forced to flee to the Ukraine, Lithuania, Austria or
as the story-tellers would have it, across 27 lands
and 30 countries until they came to the 27th
Kingdom. For the good, kind and infinitely friendly
Aunt Irene, her handsome but wicked nephew,
Kyril, and Focus, a cat of alarming intelligence,
this is Dancing Master House, a minute dwelling in
the Chelsea. Two gossips, Mrs. O'Connor and Mrs.
Mason, one dead common with criminal
connections, the other an impoverished lady of the
upper classes, clean for and take care of the needs
of Aunt Irene and Kyril. From Wales, Irene's sister,
the Mother Superior, sends Valentine, a beautiful, young West Indian
postulant, ostensibly to test her vocation but really because of the
embarrassing discovery that Valentine has miraculous powers. The story
runs between angels and demons in a style which epitomizes the refreshing
eccentricities of English humor.
Deposition Of Father McGreevy
In a London pub in the 1950s, editor William
Maginn is intrigued by a reference to the
reputedly shameful demise of a remote mountain
village in Kerry, Ireland, where he was born.
Maginn returns to Kerry and uncovers an
astonishing tale of an increasingly isolated village
where the women mysteriously die - leaving the
priest, Father McGreevy, to cope. McGreevy
struggles to preserve what remains of his parish
against the rough mountain elements, and the
grief and superstitions of his people.
Self, Will - Umbrella
“A brother is as easily forgotten as an
umbrella.”—James Joyce, Ulysses
1918 Audrey Death—feminist, socialist and
munitions worker at Woolwich Arsenal—falls ill
with encephalitis lethargica as the epidemic
rages across Europe, killing a third of its victims
and condemning a further third to living
death.1971 Under the curious eyes of
psychiatrist Dr. Zack Busner, assumed mental
patient Audrey Death lies supine in bed above a
spring grotto that she has made every one of the
forty-nine years she has resided in Friern Mental
Hospital.2010 Now retired, Dr. Busner travels
waywardly across North London in search of the
truth about that tumultuous summer when he
awoke the post-encephalitic patients under his
care using a new and powerful drug.
Barnes, Julian – The Sense Of An Ending
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn
at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they
would navigate the girl-less sixth form together,
trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit.
Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the
others, certainly more intelligent, but they all
swore to stay friends for life.
Now Tony is retired. He's had a career and a
single marriage, a calm divorce. He's certainly
never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is
imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a
lawyer's letter is about to prove.
Naipaul, V.S - In A Free State
"In a Free State" is set in Africa, in a place like
Uganda or Rwanda, and its two main characters
are English. They had once found liberation in
Africa. But now Africa is going sour on them. The
land is no longer safe, and at a time of tribal
conflict they have to make a long drive to the
safety of their compound. At the end of this drive
- the narrative tight, wonderfully constructed, the
formal and precise language always instilled with
violence and rage - we know everything about
the English characters, the African country, and
the Idi Amin-like future awaiting it.
9
Byatt, A.S – The Children’s Book
When children’s book author Olive Wellwood’s
oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip
sketching in the basement of a museum, she
takes him into the storybook world of her family
and friends. But the joyful bacchanals Olive
hosts at her rambling country house—and the
separate, private books she writes for each of
her seven children—conceal more treachery and
darkness than Philip has ever imagined. The
Wellwoods’ personal struggles and hidden
desires unravel against a breathtaking backdrop
of the cliff-lined shores of England to Paris,
Munich, and the trenches of the Somme, as the
Edwardian period dissolves into World War I and
Europe’s golden era comes to an end.
Patterson, James - Mistress
As Ben Casper watches his best friend plummet
from her sixth-floor apartment balcony, he
realises his life is about to change. Diana had
no reason to kill herself, she had to have been
pushed. Diana worked for the CIA, so the
investigation into her death is kept tightly under
wraps. But Ben is a political journalist, and can
feel that something isn’t right. Ben starts
investigating for himself and soon discovers
Diana was leading a double life he knew nothing
about. But when more people involved die in
questionable circumstances, it’s clear that
someone doesn’t want the truth to be
uncovered. And unless Ben drops his
investigation, he could be next
Foulds, Adam - Quickening Maze
In 1837, after years of struggling with
alcoholism and depression, the great nature
poet John Clare finds himself in High Beach—a
mental institution located in Epping Forest on
the outskirts of London. It is not long before
another famed writer, the young Alfred
Tennyson, moves nearby and grows entwined
in the catastrophic schemes of the hospital’s
owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr. Matthew
Allen, as well as with his lonely, adolescent
daughter, and a coterie of mysterious local
characters. With remarkable lyrical grace, the
cloistered world of High Beach and its residents
are richly brought to life in this affecting and
enchanting book.
Woodward, Gerard - I’ll Go To Bed At Noon
Colette Jones has had problems of her own
with alcohol, but now it seems as though her
whole family is in danger of turning to booze.
Her oldest son, Janus, the family's golden boy,
has wasted his talents as a concert pianist. His
drinking sprees with his brother-in-law, Bill, a
pseudo-Marxist supermarket butcher who sees
alcohol as central to the proletarian revolution,
have turned violent and landed him in trouble
with the police. Meanwhile Colette's recently
widowed older brother is desperate to numb
his grief. This is a darkly funny novel about a
quirky, troubled family as it lurches from farce
to tragedy to pub and back again.
Birch, Carol – Jamrach’s Menagerie
Nineteenth-century London comes vividly
alive in this story a street urchin named Jaffy
Brown. After a close call with an escaped
tiger, Jaffy goes to work for Mr. Charles
Jamrach, the famed importer of exotic
animals. As the years pass, Mr. Jamrach
recruits Jaffy and another boy named Tim to
capture a fabled dragon during the course of
an epic three-year whaling expedition in the
East Indies. But when a violent storm sinks
the ship, Jaffy and Tim are forced to confront
their relationship to the natural world and the
wildness it contains. Jamrach’s Menagerie is a
truly gripping novel about friendship,
sacrifice, and survival.