I've thought about the end of this book, about a family man whose job it is to distribute coal in Ireland and who does so to a Magdalene Laundry, so many times since reading it. The note Keegan lands on is so filled with beauty and hope. When I recall the final scene I have the abstract feeling that something has gone right.
"A hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that transcends country, transcends time." —Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers
Small Things Like These is award-winning author Claire Keegan's landmark new novel, a tale of one man's courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family
It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him…
Melchor doesn't use paragraph breaks and barely any periods, which makes for a daunting read. But once I committed I found myself flying through breathless screeds, simultaneously defensive and accusatory from the POVs of a handful of residents of a small Mexican village where a witch, who deals in everything from soothsaying to abortifacients, was found floating face down in the reservoir. This book was stunning in every sense. Like nothing I've ever read.
The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse-by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals-propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.
Like Roberto Bolano's 2666 or Faulkner's greatest novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a…
I was so taken by this book about the wives of a couple of engineers in Vietnam in 1963. The narrator is green in every sense (in her marriage, in her understand of the political landscape, in her desires), and the woman she becomes close to, though also trapped by her circumstances, is the opposite, refusing to be simply so. I found their dynamic and the way they are both ultimately held in place to be so revealing of power and lack thereof.
Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews, Los Angeles Times, NPR, Oprah Daily, Real Simple, and Vogue
A riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award.
You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.
American women―American wives―have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on…
A People Best Book of Summer A New York Times Most Anticipated Book of the Summer
A riveting investigation into a cold case asks how much control women have over their bodies and the direction of their lives.
July 1970. Eighteen-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling left her house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Four months later, her remains were discovered just beyond the mouth of a culvert overlooking the Cedar River. Her homicide has never been solved.
Fifty years cold, Paula’s case had been mostly forgotten when journalist Katherine Dykstra began looking for answers. A woman was dead. Why had no one been held responsible? How could the powers that be, how could a community, have given up? Tracing Paula’s final days, Dykstra uncovers a girl whose exultant personality was at odds with the Midwest norms of the late 1960s. A girl who was caught between independence and youthful naivete, between a love that defied racially segregated Cedar Rapids and her complicated but enduring love for her mother, and between a possible pregnancy and the freedoms that had been promised by the women’s liberation movement but that still had little practical bearing on actual lives. The more Dykstra learned about the circumstances of Paula’s life, the more parallels she saw in the lives of the women who knew Paula and the women in Paula’s family, in the lives of the women in Dykstra’s own family, and even in her own life.
Captivating and expertly crafted from interviews with Paula’s family and friends, police reports, and on-the-scene investigation, What Happened to Paula is part true crime story, part memoir, a timely and powerful look at gender, autonomy, and the cost of being a woman.
