Joanne Leedom-Ackerman's 3 favorite reads in 2024

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch arrived in the mail from a friend and activist on behalf of refugees with a simple note: I think you’ll like this book. Winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, Prophet Song had missed my attention. I tucked it in my bag, sent a thank you but didn’t start reading it right away.

When I finally dipped in for a few pages, I quickly recognized I was reading a truly original voice. After the first chapter I was entirely planted inside the world and the consciousness of Eilish Stack, mother of four, professional woman whose husband is disappeared in the first chapter and who is left to evaluate, contend, and make life decisions for her children and her father in a country—Ireland—that is falling apart in civil conflict with a tyrannical government that is changing the landscape she has known all her life. Though the story is fiction and the dateline vague, the dynamic is intense and the story plausible for too many locations.

The journey of Prophet Song is both internal and external. Lynch’s brilliant prose shatters open experience and wraps it around one’s own consciousness in the way that the best literature does, allowing the reader to empathize and feel life from another’s point of view. The sentences run on with little punctuation, keeping the reader inside the text without a break, reminiscent of William Faulkner’s prose.

As Eilish’s community falls apart day by day and her husband and sons are pulled one by one into the maelstrom, she is faced with narrower and narrower choices. The challenges of civil unrest, of government crackdowns, authoritarian rule ascendent, war, destruction, and refugees resonate in today’s headlines and also in headlines from the past.

I both listened to the book and read it, moving back and forth from text to audio, and the combination worked for me, capturing the drama in voice and printed word.

Prophet Song is a cautionary tale and a cri de coeur to the reader. Its grim trajectory is delivered with the beauty of art and life enduring.

I was introduced to Susan Muaddi Darraj’s new novel Behind You Is The Sea, a collection of inner-related stories, at a public event where I bought the book and was quickly drawn into the world of the multi-generational Palestinian immigrant families living in Baltimore. As I read Darraj’s family dramas, I found myself remembering another novel, also structured as interlocking stories about families in love and in conflict, these set in a 1950s fictional Kibbutz Yekhat in Israel. The connection with Amos Oz’s Between Friends was not just the narrative structures, but the humanity of the characters and the relations of generations, the pull of the past and its memories and traditions and the lure of the future for the younger family members—the loyalties and the betrayals.

Neither book dwells on politics or polemics except for the emotional and spiritual angst that affects characters. Neither book requires one to be a member of the community to understand the struggles of values and mores in conflict, with aspirations thwarted or realized by separation.

In Behind You Is The Sea (HarperVia), the reader is brought into the homes of three families—the Ballads, the Salamehs, and the Ammars where we meet the original generation transplanted to America, their children and eventually their grandchildren. The paths of family members diverge but all share in what is essentially an American experience in the melting pot, or is it the mosaic, of a multi-cultural society whose foundations are based on this concept of individuals from many cultures flowing together into one citizenry. Some adjust to their neighbors and others stay isolated; most everyone carries a sense of otherness until one realizes that feeling is part of the human condition in spite of wealth, status or origin.

One of the heroes in the novel, if there is a hero, is Marcus Salameh, a police officer who’s never been to Palestine and who struggles to defend his sister and keep some kind of coherence in his family which has lost his mother and whose father stays alienated in his new land.

Through weddings, birthday parties, funerals—the conventions of family life—the reader experiences the community, the shifting perspectives and the quotidian experiences found in most communities. I read and listened to this book, appreciating the story and text as both an audio and text experience.

The epigraph for Behind You Is the Sea sets out the theme and the momentum of the novel: “You have to be loyal to your exile as much as you are loyal to your homeland.” —Ibrahim Nasrallah

Andrey Kurkov’s novel Grey Bees unwinds the story of an Everyman—if only he were every man—in a country in conflict and crisis, caught in the Grey Zone between loyalist and separatist warring factions in the Ukraine. A former inspector of coal mines, now retired on disability, Sergey Sergeyich is one of only two people left in his village of Little Starhorodivka where he and the other resident, a former adversary from school days, learn in their isolation to help each other. In winter it is bitter cold, little food, no electricity or internet and only an intermittent charged cell phone.

Devoted to his bees—creatures more noble and reliable than people—Sergeyich embarks on a journey out of his village as spring comes so that his bees can collect their pollen and make honey in a more peaceful place.

As he journeys through check points of the war zone among Russians, Tartar and Ukrainian citizens attempting to live their lives, he meets a lone woman shopkeeper, a wife of a friend who has disappeared, that man’s abandoned children and others. Grey Bees is a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress, tracking one man’s journey through troubled humanity. In his own village and on the road, he faces choices, and in spite of the dangers and nightmares on the ground (reflected in his own nightmares), he manages to adhere to a moral compass.

While the reader may not grasp all the nuances of the various places and borders—Donetsk, Donbass, Tartars or Ukrainian or Russian forces—the theme and journey are compelling as Sergeyich builds relationships and helps others. He yearns for human contact at the same time he tries to stay apart and service his bees. He understands their work and needs even as he comes to understand there are those who would subvert them.

As with many books, I enjoy the audio and the text and move between them , appreciating the storytelling in both forms.