Book of the Week
All Together NowElizabeth McKenzie2015, 328 pagesFiction Gill Hornby has an excellent sense of the frustrations and small joys of everyday life. In All Together Now the community choir in Bridgeford, a small town whose civic pride in in decline, and whose High Street shops are threatened by a proposed superstore on the edge of town. Through a cast of characters who sing in the choir, Hornby tells the story of the town trying to get...
Book of the Week: Lapham Rising
Lapham Rising Roger Rosenblatt 2006, 243 pages Fiction The hero of Roger Rosenblatt’s satire is Harry March, a well-known author, who lives on a tiny island in Quogue, in the Hamptons. His wife has left him for a Hollywood events planner, he hasn’t written anything in some time, and he’s been jettisoning his belongings. He lives – and converses with – his West Highland White Terrier, Hector. Eschewing banks, he keeps his savings in...
Book of the Week: ‘Night of the White Buffalo’
Night of the White Buffalo Margaret Coel 2014, 290 pages Fiction A white buffalo calf is born on the Broken Buffalo ranch owned by Dennis Carey and his wife. They are a white couple who for some reason never hire Native American help. The white calf is extremely rare and sacred to the Arapahos, and thousands flock to see it.In the Arapaho culture, the white calf means that the spirit has come to be with its people, an amazing...
Book of the Week: In the Heart of the Sea
In the Heart of the SeaNathaniel Philbrick 2001, 296 pages Nonfiction In 1821, a ship based out of Nantucket was sailing off the coast of Chile when it spotted a drifting lifeboat. The lifeboat contained two survivors of the Essex, a whaler that had been hit by a sperm whale and sunk in the middle of the Pacific Ocean three months before. Herman Melville based his novel Moby Dick on the Essex tragedy, but where Melville ends (with the...
Book of the Week: ‘MARTians’
MARTians Blythe Woolston 2015, 216 pages Fiction In a dystopian near-future, Zoë Zindleman has just been forcibly graduated from her newly privatized high school. Zoë now has the choice of belonging (body and soul) either to AllMART or to QMART, where “your smile is [our] welcome mat.” She also needs to make a choice about where to live: either in the perpetually for-sale house that her mother has abandoned, the sinister MART...
