The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke

May 6, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch. Peirene Press, 2013. Originally published 1990. 112 pgs. Library copy. At the start of Vanderbeke’s novella, a mother and her two teenage children sit down to enjoy a feast of mussels, a meal laboriously prepared for the husband who loves mussels and is expected to shortly arrive home with news of a promotion. The scene is set to be one of domestic tranquility, of the home that every German […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Europe, Fiction, German, Germany, Peirene Press, Translated • Tags: Birgit Vanderbeke

Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon

May 3, 2019 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Davina Porter. Recorded Books, 2005. 44 hours, 50 minutes. Purchased. As the conclusion of Voyager, Claire and Jamie Fraser found themselves washed ashore the coast of Georgia with Jamie’s nephew, foster son, and step-daughter turned foster-daughter-in-law. A hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean destroyed their ship and waylaid their plans to travel back to Scotland from Jamaica and return Ian Murray back to his mother, Jamie’s sister. At the start of Drums of Autumn, the fourth book […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, North America, United Kingdom, United States • Tags: Davina Porter, Diana Gabaldon

The Power by Naomi Alderman

April 26, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. Originally published 2016. 387 pgs. Purchased. Teenage girls across the globe now hold a tremendous amount of power – electric currents flowing through their bodies can be harnessed to hurt, maim, and even kill. As these young women learn how to harness and transfer their powers, they topple male-dominated power structures around the globe, including the Saudi Arabian government, the United States military, and the religious authority of the Pope. The collapse […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Dystopia, Europe, Feminism, Fiction, Women's Prize • Tags: Naomi Alderman

They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple

April 22, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2005. Originally published 1944. 464 pgs. Purchased. When their mother died of influenza, eighteen-year-old Lucy abandoned her dreams to further her education and returned home to care for her father and siblings, including younger sisters Vera and Charlotte. Their sisterly bond morphed into one where Lucy took on the role of mother – protective, worrying, quick to correct and provide advice – and Vera and Charlotte shared secrets and jokes and excluded Lucy from their […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: Dorothy Whipple

Normal People by Sally Rooney

April 19, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Hogarth, 2019. Originally published 2018. 273 pgs. Purchased. In addition to winning the 2018 Costa Book Award for Novel, Rooney’s novel was also longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Needless to say, I was thrilled to see it offered as one of the options for April from Book of the Month, a monthly book subscription service that I’ve been part of for the last six months. So thrilled, […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Europe, Fiction, Ireland, Women's Prize • Tags: Sally Rooney

Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė

April 15, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Translated from the Lithuanian by Delija Valiukenas. Peirene Press, 2018. Originally published 1997. 192 pgs. Purchased. In 1991, a jar filled with scraps of paper was discovered buried in Kaunas, the former capital of Lithuania. The papers document nearly three years in Dalia Grinkevičiūtė after she deported to a Soviet gulag in Siberia in 1941 at the age of fourteen with her mother and older brother. Grinkevičiūtė had buried the papers in 1950, fearing they would be […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Genocide, Indigenious Peoples, Nonfiction, Peirene Press, Russia, Translated • Tags: Dalia Grinkevičiūtė

Faithful Place by Tana French

April 12, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Viking, 2010. 400 pgs. Purchased.  In 1985, Frank Mackey stood on around the corner of the Faithful Place flats in Dublin waiting for his girlfriend, Rosie Daly, to appear. For weeks, he and Rosie had cobbled together a plan to run away to London together where they planned to marry against the wishes of Rosie’s parents and, hopefully, break the cycle of poverty and alcoholism that marked their – read Frank’s – lives in Ireland. Yet Rosie […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Crime, Europe, Fiction, Ireland • Tags: Tana French

Mischling by Affinity Konar

April 8, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Lee Boudreaux Books, 2016. 344 pgs. Purchased. In 1944, twelve-year-old twin sisters named Pearl and Stasha Zagorski are deported to Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. Desperate to save them, their mother seizes on the sight of triplets being led away from the cattle cars by a doctor in a white lab coat, dragging the girls out from under their grandfather’s coat and presenting them to the first guard she sees. Their mother doesn’t know – she […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Genocide, Holocaust, Poland • Tags: Affinity Konar

Thoughts on Three Book of the Month Selections

April 3, 2019 by Christina

About four years ago, a number of the members of my book club in Boston joined Book of the Month, a subscription service that mails you a newly published book out of five options once a month. I passed on subscribing for two reasons: I was able to pick up a number of these titles as read (and unread) castoffs at book club meetings I figured a new book would arrive each month and promptly be added to my bookshelves […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Asia, Europe, Feminism, Fiction, New York, North America, ReadDiverse, United Kingdom, United States • Tags: Candice Carty-Williams, Etaf Rum, Yangsze Choo

Lethal White by Robert Galbraith

March 27, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Mulholland Books, 2018. 656 pgs. Purchased. The fourth installment of Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike series opens with the wedding of Strike’s assistant turned junior private investigator, Robin Ellacott, and the fallout of Strike firing Robin at the end of Career of Evil over concerns for her safety.  Robin wants to go back to working for Strike as a private investigator, but Strike still hasn’t contacted her and her family, especially her fiancée Matthew, aren’t keen on the idea […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Chunkster, Crime, Europe, Fiction, United Kingdom • Tags: J.K. Rowling, Robert Galbraith

Minnie’s Room by Mollie Panter-Downes

March 22, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2002. 125 pgs. Purchased. Subtitled “The Peacetime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes”, this collection of ten short stories presents the realities and dreams of the British people following the end of the World War II. Each story was originally published for the American publication The New Yorker between the years 1947 and 1965, a follow-up of sorts to her short stories from 1938 to 1944. Those wartime stories were published by Persephone Books in 1999 as Good Evening, […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, Short Stories, United Kingdom • Tags: Mollie Panter-Downes

Children of The Cave by Virve Sammalkorpi

March 20, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah. Peirene Press, 2019. Originally published 2016. 176 pgs. Purchased. In 1819, Iax Agolasky travels to northwest Russia as the research assistant to a well-known French anthropologist and explorer named Jean Moltique. The goal of Moltique’s exhibition is to locate lost or ancient tribes in the region, and their search leads them to a cave in the Russian wilderness where a small group of children live. Moltique believes […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fantasy, Fiction, Finnish, Peirene Press, Russia, Translated • Tags: Virve Sammalkorpi