Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Water Dancer, 9780593133118, C format Paperback, International Edition, One World/Penguin Random House US

(German edition "Der Wassertänzer", Karl Blessing Verlag, March 2, 2020)

Ta-Nahesi Coates “The Water Dancer” is probably my favorite literary  book of the year, right alongside Ocean Voong’s “On earth we are briefly gorgeous”. Two very different books but both with such powerful prose that it is almost impossible to decide what to read next as they leave such a void.

In my view Ta-Nahesi Coates, who has written non-fiction before,  winning the National Book Award in 2015 with “Between the World and me”,  has written a debut novel that can stand alongside such masterpieces as “Beloved” by Tony Morrison, Maya Angelou’s work and Colson Whitehead “The Underground Railroad”. 

Reminding me also in parts of the magical realism of Latin American authors but with a very distinct voice of its own, “The Water Dancer” tells the story of Hiram Walker who was born into slavery by an African mother and the white owner of  a tobacco plantation in Virginia.  When his mother is sold, in his pain he loses all memory of her but she has passed on a powerful, mysterious gift to him which reveals itself for the first time when the carriage he and his white half-brother are riding in derails and falls into the river Goose. Only Hiram by magic survives and his real life journey begins. What follows is a dramatic story of atrocities inflicted to generations of slaves, where emotional and physical cruelty and disregard of human pain was considered normal by white people and the bravery and human cost of people working in The Underground  unimaginable.

Sometimes I put the book aside and let the power of the story  and the language do its work in my mind and heart before resuming the read.  I urge you to read this incredible book.

Cara Hunter: All the  Rage, Penguin Paperback (Penguin Random House UK) 9780241985113, pub date January 23, 2020

Cara Hunter’s mysteries are always psychologically very cleverly crafted and “All the Rage” is no exception. Set in Oxford featuring DI Adam Fawley and his colorful team of detectives , Faith Appleford, a beautiful fashion design student is found in a deserted part of the city by a taxi driver, looking very distressed, dazed and with her clothes torn.

Everything points to sexual assault but when Fawley and his team start investigating what might have happened to her; she is unwilling to press charges but is able to remember some striking details which point to an old case Adam Fawley would rather forget.  There are obvious resemblances to a case of a serial rapist whom Fawley was able to get convicted despite him claiming his innocence until the end of the trial. Fawley's wife had been one of the victims who got away.

“All the Rage” has a very plausible plot, the characters are richly drawn and I am really into this down to earth Oxford team of detectives now.  Be prepared for several unexpected developments which keeps you on your toes until the very end of the novel!  

Ocean Vuong: On earth we are briefly gorgeous, 9781787331501, Vintage / Penguin Random House, hardback

German Edition: Auf Erden sind wir kurz grandios, Carl Hanser Verlag, hardback

Ocean Vuong’s „On earth we are briefly gorgeous“ is one of these memorable books that will stay in your head for quite a while.  I still remember some sentences after 6 weeks!   One of the best literary reads for me for quite some time. 

Written by a poet in the most beautiful, elegant prose, this debut novel is many things: a heart-wrenching love story of Little Dog, a boy growing up as an outsider in America with a Vietnamese heritage but also discovering his homosexuality at age 15 to Trevor, the son of a tobacco farmer, a love letter written to his mother Rose who cannot read or write and earns their living slaving away in nail salons, the sometimes funny yet sad portrait of their lives as a family together with his very Vietnamese schizophrenic grandmother Lan, the absence of his biological and substitute father, both white Americans, the flashbacks to his grandmother’s and his mother’s lives during the Vietnam war, this novel is a whole mélange of feelings and memories. Vuong is unusually frank with the description of homosexual sex scenes; the tenderness of Little Dogs and Trevor’s feelings for one another and the heart-wrenching unfolding drama brought a lump to my throat.

Reading this unusual novel has been an absolute delight.

Manda Scott: A Treachery of Spies, 9780552176491, paperback, Corgi

 

Manda Scott’s “A Treachery of Spies” has one of the most complex plots of any spy novel I have ever read.  It is also brilliant and a masterpiece of thriller writing.  I cannot get over how the author created this complex story and kept a check on names, aliases, storylines  not to talk about the extensive research she  must have done . I read the book on holiday which was a good thing as I had time to read solidly, it  kept me completely captured for all its 560 pages and until the very end all kinds of endings were possible.  

Meandering between two storylines that are connected, one during the  Resistance of Nazi occupation in France in the 1940ties and one set in Orleans, France in 2018, this thriller made me feel like I had literally lost the plot sometimes but with every chapter the pieces of the puzzle come together especially once you get to the middle of the book.

Inspector Ines Picaut is called to a cruel murder scene and is very surprised to find a still stunningly beautiful woman in her 90ties obviously assassinated with her tongue cut out as a special touch, something that was done to traitors during WW II by the Resistance.  When she is finally able to identify the woman as Sophie Destivelle, she finds no trace of her existence, her clothes were bought in the US and a card of “Elodie Duval” is sewn into her suit lining.  The car she was killed in belonged to Pierre Duval, the son of Daniel and Lisette Duval, who were famous members of the Resistance providing her a starting point for her investigation. How were the victim and the Duvals connected?  Was Sophie a member of the resistance? What follows is a breathtaking, riveting account of the work of spies in a dangerous period of time in European and French history and the human costs of heroic alliances.  I found myself thinking about some of the characters when not reading and the price they were willing to pay to liberate France from Nazi occupation.

I guarantee you an absolutely fascinating read, one of the more unusual thrillers I have ever read; unfortunately I could find no German translation yet.

 

Alexandra Fuller: Travel Light, Move Fast, Penguin Press (Penguin Random House USA) 9781984879219, paperback

Ever since a colleague at Penguin USA introduced me to Alexandra Fuller’s “Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness”,  have I been a huge fan of her books.  Her description of growing up with her larger than life parents, Tim and Nicola Fuller in war torn Africa, first in Rhodesia, later in Zambia, spending a free spirited childhood surrounded by wild animals before being sent off to several boarding schools in Africa, are one of the best memoirs I ever read together with “Don’t lets go to the dogs tonight”.

She is witty, brutally honest with herself and her family (no wonder her family call her books these “awful books” and hope she stops writing), her emotions raw when she writes; she made me laugh out loud and also had me crying many times.  “Travel Light, Move Fast” is no exception, it is brilliant. It is a document to her unforgettable character of a father who died suddenly aged 82 during a trip with her mother to Budapest.  The book is homage to his life philosophy, the man himself who was the black sheep of a wealthier English family and his marriage to her mother Nicola who was raised on a farm in Kenya.  Alexandra Fuller  weaves back and forth masterfully  between her days spent  at her dying fathers bed site and memories of him and their family life in Africa, his misadventures and failures,  forever resilient never giving up but just moving on to another place. At times I asked myself how much loss and misery a person can endure and still come out optimistic. Her accounts of what it was like growing up in such circumstance  with her sister Vanessa kept me glued. She loved and adored her father but never overlooked his flaws.  The loss of him becomes surreal when her ailing mother and Bobo, as she is called by her parents, have to fly home to their farm to Zambia with her father’s ashes on their laps.   The second half of the book is called ”The Widows Farm” dealing with her and her mother’s grief trying to carry on as a family on their Zambian farm without her level headed father holding the entire family together. When she returns to Wyoming to her own family, his loss becomes even more unbearable. But nothing prepared me for her rawest grief and shock at the end of the book, tears rolling down my face reading.   

It is one of the finest accounts of a very unusual family, life and love of family I have ever read.  This book will stick with me for a while, I hope she never stops writing.

Gytha Lodge:  She lies in Wait

9780241362976, hardback & 9781405938488 B format, available, Penguin Random House UK,

 

“She lies in Wait” is a well- crafted dark psychological thriller centered on a group of six teenagers and later adults, set in two time zones, 1983 and the present,  with alternating chapters, another  one of my summer reads.

Aurora Jackson, the youngest of the group, vanishes without a trace when the group of friends is out on a camping weekend experimenting with drugs, alcohol and sex in 1983. When they all wake up the next morning, Aurora’s sleeping bag is empty and she is gone. A then rookie DJ Sheen takes part in an extensive search for Aurora who remains lost. Despite some suspicious evidence pointing towards two of the male teenagers, there is never enough to nail them down and the body is never found. 30 years later the body is finally discovered, hidden in a hollow close to the river with a stash of drugs. DJ Sheens reopens the cold case and what follows are fascinating interview dynamics between the DJ and the group of friends who all claim to be innocent but who obviously have a lot to hide particularly since some of them have become wealthy and well known in their community. And one of them is obviously guilty.

The novel takes many twists and turns, you keep on guessing as if you were the detective in the case and the ending is very realistic. My only criticism is that it took too long for my taste, 400 pages could have been edited down somewhat. But that is probably the publishing professional in me speaking….

A captivating holiday read or for a rainy weekend.

 

Fiona Davis: The Masterpiece, Dutton, (Penguin Random House USA), 9781524742973, paperback

(German Edition: Wege ihrer Sehnsucht, 19. September 2019, Goldmann, Paperback

 

Summer time for me is often a time for light hearted reading. What attracted me to Fiona Davis “The Masterpiece” was her being inspired by two facts for this novel:  the artist Helen Dryden who was one of the most well paid female illustrators and industrial designers in 1920 and 30ties New York when female artist hardly had any recognition and the Supreme Court’s ruling to declare the Grand Central Terminal in New York a landmark saving it from developers. I had no idea there had actually been a  famous art school housed in the terminal, the Grand Central School of Art, which was founded by painters John Singer Sargent, Walter Leighton Clark and Edmund Greacen.

Davis’s novel “The Masterpiece” has two story lines: 1920ties and 1930 New York and 1974 with two strong female characters at its heart.   Clara Darden whose character is based on Helen Dryden using fictional liberties, is a teacher for illustrations at the Grand Central School of Art when magazines only used illustrators  before the event of photography. She is determined to make her way as a serious artist even if it means having no money and  going to bed hungry at night. Through a stroke of luck she meets Oliver whose admiration and advances she happily gives into. His family connections help her breaking out into the New York art world landing her a job as a highly paid illustrator at Vogue.  Clara’s artistic friendship with Levon Zakarian, a successful painter and fellow teacher at the art school, who originally started out being rival slowly turns into something more intimate and she finds herself being torn between two men.  But when the Great Depression of the 1929 hits, everyone’s life is tragically altered.

In 1974 Virginia Clay, a new divorcee, is trying to find her bearings after a severe illness and being traded in for a less flawed woman by her husband.    Never having had to work as a lawyer’s wife she finds the only job she can land is at the information booth of the Grand Central Station terminal which barely covers supporting herself and her teenage daughter Ruby. By sheer accident she discovers the closed off section of the former art school and is fascinated by a stunning watercolor she finds which has obviously been left behind.  Trying to find out more about the art school and  who the artist in question gives her a new purpose in life. When she and her coworkers learn that the fading beauty of what  once was a  glorious Grand Central station has brought developers on the plan who are eager to tear down the building for their own gain, Virginia gets involved to save this historic landmark.

I had great fun reading Fiona Davis' well-crafted “The Masterpiece” which will appeal to readers who are interested in historical fiction set in the world of art with a light mystery as a backdrop.