Notable books

Featured Book: A Pelican at Blandings by P.G Wodehouse (fiction)

They are back in Blandings Castle, Shropshire, England – the setting for many of Wodehouse's famed comic extravaganzas. Accommodated in the castles 52 bedrooms are a varied number of dotty relatives of Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth. Clarence himself, dottier than any of them, dotes on the Empress of Blandings, an enormous prize-winning sow, and is usually to be seen, day or night, leaning over the wall of her sty.

Bewildered by his many American visitors and in-laws, and dazed by the complicated comings and goings of the many moon-faced young men and dizzy young damsels whom he encounters in the castle and its grounds, Clarence would have long since have collapsed had it not been for his devoted Butler. .
In A Pelican at Blandings, Blandings Castle lacks its usual balm for the Earl of Emsworth, as he is now host to the odious Duke of Dunstable. In the absence of his managing sister, the ninth Earl of Emsworth calls in the Hon. Galahad Threepwood to help him pair off the assorted godsons, impostors and pretty girls. Fortunately, many years membership of the Pelican Club have given Galahad the edge in quick thinking. There is also a little matter of a reclining nude. The painting lies at the centre of numerous intrigues and Gally's genius is once again required to sort things out.

All in all, the ninth book in Wodehouse's "Blandings" series is pretty much exactly what you would expect from the master of the light comic novel – a delight from beginning to end.

Black Flies: A Novel by Shannon Burke (fiction)

Gunshot wounds, crack pipes and rotting corpses abound in this raw and fascinating novel about Harlem paramedics in the mid-1990s, the second novel from former EMT Burke. Oliver Cross graduated from Northwestern as a middle-class do-gooder. But he and his partner, Rutkovsky, a jaded Vietnam veteran and one of the city's best medics, see enough massive trauma to put Cross on the fast track to deep disillusionment.

Of the bizarre, tragic and often shocking emergencies encountered during Cross's rookie tenure, the crisis comes when he and Rutkovsky respond to a call from an abandoned building where a crack-addicted, HIV-positive mother has just given birth to a premature baby, and their handling of the mother and child – believed to be stillborn - will alter the course of both men's lives. Burke is a poet of trauma, and his expert, macabre portrayal takes its toll on the reader just as the job takes its toll on Cross.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (fiction)

It's been 11 years since Junot Díaz's critically acclaimed story collection, Drown, landed on bookshelves and from page one of his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, any worries of a sophomore jinx disappear. The titular Oscar is a 300-pound-plus "lovesick ghetto nerd" with zero game (except for Dungeons & Dragons) who cranks out pages of fantasy fiction with the hopes of becoming a Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien.

The book is also the story of a multi-generational family curse that courses through the book, leaving troubles and tragedy in its wake. This was the most dynamic, entertaining, and achingly heartfelt novel I've read in a long time.

My head is still buzzing with the memory of dozens of killer passages that I dog-eared throughout the book. The rope-a-dope narrative is funny, hip, tragic, soulful, and bursting with desire.

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson (fiction)

The narrator of The Gargoyle is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life.

The book opens with an accident that leaves him recovering in a burn ward. He is seriously contemplating suicide when a strange but beautiful sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel appears at the foot of his bed and insists, bizarrely, that they were once lovers in medieval Germany.

As she spins their tale in Scheherazade fashion and relates equally mesmerizing stories of deathless love in Japan, Iceland, Italy, and England, he finds himself drawn back to life – and, finally, in love. But all is not well.

For one thing, the pull of his past sins becomes ever more powerful as the morphine he is prescribed becomes ever more addictive.

For another, Marianne receives word from God that she has only twenty-seven sculptures left to complete and her time on earth will be finished. All titles available at Vijitha Yapa Bookshop on request.