I did something, while reading this book, that I rarely do: I repeatedly flipped back to re-read sentences—sometimes to find missed clues, sometimes to savor the jewel-like writing.
Early on, I noticed an interesting detail about one character. But I became so absorbed in the plot that I forgot about it… so I thought. Until almost the end, when that tiny seed exploded. (How did the author manage to plant a seed so easily forgotten, yet so tenacious?)
I also loved how the novel pushes deeper and deeper into the motivations, secrets, and fears of the five main characters—two sisters who come to England from Australia in the early 1950s and the three men who uproot their lives—revealing more about the characters than they know themselves.
"The Transit of Venus is one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century." - The Paris Review
Finalist for the National Book Award Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award
The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard-the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves
The Transit of Venus is considered Shirley Hazzard's most brilliant novel. It tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life…
I love James McBride’s novels because he so clearly loves the wide, noisy universe of characters that he creates—complicated, loving, scared, brash, generous, self-centered, deeply religious, happily law-skirting, and (occasionally) nasty people from almost all backgrounds, each with a vivid personality and backstory.
Plus, McBride sure knows how to write a page-turning plot. (I confess that my head was spinning a bit from all the twists in this story, which centers around a hardscrabble neighborhood’s effort to rescue a deaf, orphaned, 12-year-old boy from a Dickensian mental institution.)
For the few hours that I spent in this world, my faith in human goodness was restored.
“A murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel . . . Charming, smart, heart-blistering, and heart-healing.” —Danez Smith, The New York Times Book Review
“We all need—we all deserve—this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for…
I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel that packed so much power, so beautifully, into so few (192) pages.
Michka, the central character, wants to find and thank the nameless family who saved her life during the Holocaust. But she is losing her vocabulary through encroaching dementia. Marie, who was a kind of foster daughter, and Jerome, her speech therapist, desperately want to help Michka, or just understand her.
Through their loving efforts at communication, the book subtly explores issues like: What is the role of language? What do we owe the people in our lives?
All this is told almost as much by what isn’t on the page, as what is. It’s a book that made me work, think, and cry.
(I read the book in the original French, which is why I’m not crediting a translator.)
'Extraordinary ... The beating heart of this novel is the exquisite empathy it demonstrates ... There is a gentle magnificence at work in its pages' Irish Times
'Tender, poignant and heartfelt ... A generous novel that celebrates communication, connection and courage' Daily Mail
Marie owes Michka more than she can say - but Michka is getting older, and can't look after herself any more. So Marie has moved her to a home where she'll be safe.
But Michka doesn't feel any safer; she is haunted by strange figures who threaten to unearth her most secret, buried guilt, guilt that she's…
When Miranda’s fiancé, Russ, is being vetted for his dream job in the U.S. attorney’s office, the couple joke that Miranda’s parents’ history as antiwar activists in the Sixties might jeopardize Russ’s security clearance. In fact, the real threat emerges when Russ’s future employer discovers that Miranda was arrested for felony kidnapping seven years earlier—an arrest she’d never bothered to tell Russ about.
Miranda tries to explain that she was only helping her best friend, in the midst of a nasty custody battle, take her daughter to visit her parents in Israel. As Miranda struggles to prove that she’s not a criminal, she stumbles into other secrets that will challenge what she thought she knew about her own family, her friend, Russ—and herself.
