Jedidiah Jenkins: Like Streams to the Ocean, Convergent (Penguin Random House US), 9780593137239, hardback, available also by Penguin UK, Ebury

During the first lockdown in March 2020, I read Jedidiah Jenkins wonderful travel memoir “To Shake the Sleeping Self” which allowed me to travel with him in spirit through the Americas from Oregon to Patagonia on bicycle. I loved his honesty, reflectiveness and adventurous spirit paired with his struggle on this trip to come to terms with his evangelical upbringing and being gay. 

My eyes lit up when I heard that a new book was in the works, “Like Streams to the Ocean”, a very different book, essays with the under title “Notes on Ego, Love and the Things That Make Us Who We Are”.  Jedidiah examines what made him the person he had become at age 38, “talks” warmly with his readers  about ego, work, death, love, being gay, denying himself sex for a very long time due to his Christian upbringing, the meaning of family, friendships and the importance of chosen family. The book is written in snippets, an ongoing conversation one would have with a friend.  

I am probably not the target age group as a reader, could be his mother age wise really, which made some of his musings less relevant to me than it would to a younger person  but most essays are definitely universal, authentic and thought provoking. “Like Streams to the Ocean” did not mean as much to me as his travel memoir but then it is such a different book. His philosophical, kind and open thoughts made me reflect upon things in my own life during these grey days of a long lockdown winter.

 

Ruth Ware: One by one, Harvill Secker, (Penguin Random House UK) trade paperback, 9781787300422

 

Ruth Ware’s latest crime novel “One by One” is my first book by the author who already has a few books published, in Germany her publisher is DTV.  The setting of the novel in a posh French Alpine ski resort during a fierce snow storm suited my mood perfectly as the snow kept falling outside in real life and everyone currently knows what it feels like to be restricted in their movements.

As I started reading I was surprised how quickly the book drew me in and kept me hooked,  reading at a quick pace.  Having read so many thrillers in my professional life, I have to confess that after 70 % of the book I figured out which way the plot could go which was correct but that still left several possibilities for the book to end open which kept me guessing.  “One by One” is a cleverly constructed thriller set around some smartass young employees and their shareholding owners of a hot music app who come together for skiing fun and brain storming retreating to a high class ski chalet in France with cook and full service.  As the company’s group dynamics begin to unfold, an avalanche cuts off the chalet when the group returns from skiing and they realize that Eva, one of the shareholders, has gone missing.  Liz, a young shareholder and the odd one in the group and Erin, the chalet manager, narrate the chilling events as another employee is found dead in his room.  The idea of a group of people caught in a house by some unforeseen event with a murderer on the lose is not a new one, but Ruth Ware has crafted a solid thriller with a special dot com edge which I had great fun reading during monotonous winter days.

 

Yaa Gyasi: Transcendent Kingdom, Knopf (Penguin Random House USA), 9781524711771, C format paperback

Yaa Gyasi’s follow up novel to her exceptional debut “Homegoing” which I absolutely loved is made up of very different material.   “Transcendent Kingdom” deals with loss, depression, addiction, grief, science, religious faith and unmanageable hurt that tore at my heart and moved me very much,  sometimes I had to put it down.  One of the reasons I hesitated to pick up this novel was that I too had a mother suffering with severe depression and the experience of this will always be raw.  But Gyasi is such a fine, brilliant writer, her prose so vivid and exquisite – it was worth it to have read this heart wrenching story.  

The novel centers around Gifty who is a PhD candidate in neuroscience studying reward seeking behavior associated with addictions hoping to find answers in science real life is refusing her. Her mother, an evangelical Christian, immigrated to the US from Ghana to create a better life for her children only to have her husband, the Chin Chin man, return to Ghana leaving her to raise their children Nana and Gifty by herself.  The downward spiral for her family begins, when Gifty’s brother Nana, a promising teenage basketball player insures his ankle and is put on OxyContin, setting him up for years of addiction and finally,  after the families desperate struggle to save him, ending in an overdose death.  The loss of her son sends her mother into severe depression from which she never recovers creating a double loss for Gifty of the two people she loved. 

Gyasi describes Gifty’s feelings of watching beloved family members drifting off into addiction and depression and the feeling of helplessness with such sensitivity and so vividly, it feels like she is familiar with losing someone close under similar circumstances.  For me it was an emotionally hard book to read sometimes but written so beautifully and sensitively it will be one of these books whose characters will resonate with me for a quite some time .

 M.L. Longworth: A Noel Killing, Penguin Random House USA, paperback, 9780143134060

I took a break from the craziness of the world, escaping into the Provence, Aix to be precise, with the lighthearted mysteries of M.L.Longworth, which I have been enjoying from the debut novel  'Death at the Chateau Bremont" when I was still working at Penguin. These novels always do their job in improving my mood, thinking about the food, landscape, wine, smell and light of the Provence. 

And of course the mystery, in "A Noell Killing" an American tour operator and later a priest are killed during a christmas market and Antoine Verlaque, Bruno Paulik and Marine Bonnet are doing their best to find the killer. Atmospheric and delightful as ever...

 

Catherine Menon: Fragile Monsters, 9780241439296, C format paperback, Penguin Random House UK, January 2021

I started Catherine Menon’s debut novel “Fragile Monsters” in the old year and finished it on New Year’s Day 2021. I am still astonished that this is a debut, the writing is so exquisite, the story so full of imagination, the characters so complex and colorful.  I was completely captured by the narration that alternates between Mary’s voice, her recollections of her family starting with her British father and Indian mother and their troubled lives, and that of her granddaughter Druga’s.  The book comes with a deserved quote from none lesser than Hilary Mantel who says “Takes an immediate grip on the reader’s imagination and doesn’t let go”. I underwrite this 100 %, it gripped me from the first page.

Set in Malaysia between the 1920 to the present, this could have been a historical novel except it isn’t at all.  The fragile monsters being unspoken  ghosts of the past that give this book an Asian magical realism touch, drifting  between  past reality, what might have been and  the current situation.  Druga is visiting her testy, sharp tongued, difficult grandmother Mary in her small home town in rural Malaysia after having lived in Canada for some time, now working as a mathematician at the university in Kuala Lumpur.  An accidental fire and Mary’s admission to the hospital is the beginning of the reappearance of the “fragile monsters”, unspoken dark secrets every generation of this family seems to have suffered and is haunted by anew .  Druga’s own troubled life and her probing questions are answered by her grandmothers ever shifting recollections which often made me think of fairy tales. A great literary debut that I am positive will find many enchanted readers.  

 

Anne Hillerman: The Tale Teller, 9780062391964, Harper Collins, paperback

Several years ago, Anne Hillerman, a journalist herself,  stepped into the large footsteps of her famous writer father, Tony Hillerman, bestselling author and inventor of Navajo Tribal police detective Joe Leaphorn . I have read and loved them all; Tony Hillerman was a master story teller with intelligent plots moored in Navajo customs and culture , always an interest of mine.  When Hillerman passed away, Anne admirably picked up the baton from her father concentrating more on Leaphorns sidekicks,  tribal police officers Chee and Bernie Manuelito in her narrations. 

Feeling nostalgic about previous travels to the Southwest and four corner country of the Navajo reservation, I read “The Tale Teller” her latest paperback novel.  Joe Leaphorn takes center stage again working as a consultant to a museum which received an anonymous donation only to find that the most precious historical gift, a Navajo dress worn by Juanita on the Long Walk to a forced encampment in 1863, had disappeared.  A murder and a stolen piece of ancient Navajo jewelry involving officers Chee and Bernie provide two separate strands to the main story   Really enjoyed this entertaining armchair trip to Arizona and New Mexico, Anne Hillerman’s plotting and writing gets closer with every book to the yet unrivaled mastery of her father.

(no German publisher so far of her novels, available in English only. Tony Hillerman is published by Rowohlt repertoire) 

 

Raynor Winn: The Wild Silence, 9780241401460, Michael Joseph/Penguin Random House UK

Raynor Winn’s first book “The Salt Path” was one of these books you stumble across by accident and end up thinking about for a long time. At least that is how it was for me.   I wasn’t surprised the book became a bestseller eventually as it is such a moving read.  When Raynor and her husband Moth lose their house and livelihood, they decide to pack up and walk 630 miles along the English coastline, the South West Coast Path, instead of giving up or ending up in social housing.  Their hike becomes even more incredible after Moth is diagnosed with an incurable neurological disease which makes walking unbearably painful for him at times while living on next to nothing allowing them only to sleep in a tent sometimes their day ration not being more than a chocolate bar and plain noodles. The strength, love and trust  between them despite their hardship makes this such a wonderfully life affirming book.

“The Wild Silence” is the follow up to what happened to their lives after they reach the end of their hike moving into a renovated former church in Cornwall which is offered to them rent free by a generous donor.   Beautiful nature writing, Raynor’s recollection of her troubled childhood only made bearable by finding solace in nature, the story of how they met and fell in love  make up a large part of “The Wild Silence”  but it also deals with Moth’s worsening illness, him struggling not to give in  by studying for a degree and Ray trying to find a way for Moth to not lose that fight which again comes in an unexpected way through a person that has read “The Salt Path”  and enables them to start a new life as farmers on an abandoned farm  being closer to nature and working hard physically.   The last fourth of the book narrates another short hike they undertake, the Laugavegur Trail in Iceland, which sounded pretty crazy and unappealing to me.   I was not as taken by “The Wild Silence” as I was with “The Salt Path” but if you walked and suffered with them in spirit reading the first book, you definitely want to know what direction their life took,  I am glad I know now.