The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (fiction)
There is another 1985, somewhere in the could-have-been, where Thursday Next is a literary detective without equal, fear or boyfriend. Thursday is on the trail of the villainous Acheron Hades who has been kidnapping characters from works of fiction and holding them for ransom. Jane Eyre herself has been plucked from the novel of the same name, and Thursday must find a way into the book to repair the damage.
She also has to find time to halt the Crimean conflict, persuade the man she loves to marry her, rescue her aunt from inside a Wordsworth poem and figure out who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Aided and Abetted by a cast of characters that includes her time travelling father, Jack Schitt of the all powerful goliath corporation, a pet named Pickwick and Edward Rochester himself, Thursday embarks on an adventure that will take your breath away.
First Line: My father had a face that could stop a clock.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (fiction)
Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "a very different kind of neighbour," an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?
‘Freedom’ comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In his first novel since ‘The Corrections,’ Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage and has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.
First Line: The news about Walter Berglund wasn't picked up locally-he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now-but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not so loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times.
Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder (non-fiction)
Deo was a young medical student who fled the genocidal civil war in Burundi in 1994 for the uncertainty of New York City. Against absurd odds - he arrived with little money and less English and slept in Central Park while delivering groceries for starvation wages - his own ambition and a few kind New Yorkers led him to Columbia University and, beyond that, to medical school and American citizenship.
Tracy Kidder follows Deo back to Burundi, where he recalls the horrors of his narrow escape from the war and begins to build a medical clinic where none had been before.
That his rise followed a familiar immigrant's path to success doesn't make it any less remarkable, but what gives Deo's story its particular power is that becoming an American citizen did not erase his connection to Burundi, in either his memory or his dreams for the future.
First line: On the outskirts of the capital Bujumbura, there is a small international airport.
The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke (fiction)
Faerie is never as far away as you think. Sometimes you find you have crossed an invisible line and must cope, as best you can, with petulant princesses, vengeful owls, ladies who pass their time in embroidering terrible fates, or with endless paths in deep, dark woods and houses that never appear the same way twice.
The heroines and heroes bedevilled by such problems in these fairytales include a conceited Regency clergyman, an eighteenth-century Jewish doctor and Mary Queen of Scots, as well as two characters from Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: Strange himself and the Raven King.
First Line: Above all remember this: that magic belongs as much to the heart as to the head and that everything which is done, should be done from love or joy or righteous anger. |
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