Uncommon Weather by Richard Chiappone has my two favorite qualities in a book: a laugh-out-loud sense of humor, and deep emotions.
These short stories feature many characters I've never seen before in literary works. The protagonists include a woman on an all-female ice hockey team struggling with a teetering marriage; workers in a remote oil drilling site where few females ever visit; and a do-gooder trying to save an abandoned dog that doesn't like people.
With sharp insights and amazing one-liners, Richard Chiappone brings us right into these lives against the backdrop of current-day Alaska, rooted in majestic natural beauty, and rootless in a world of displaced souls seeking happiness.
Manuel Puig's Tropical Night Falling is not like any other novel you've ever read. Set in Rio de Janeiro, the novel is told mostly through conversations between two sisters in their 80s who have left their native Argentina to live in Brazil. The sisters maintain a lively gossip about their neighbors, and the reader fits together the clues in their dialogue to construct the plot.
The novel's story is not just about the sisters, but also about the characters on their block, whose lives interweave in fascinating and unpredictable ways.
The author, Manuel Puig, is best known for writing the novel that the movie, Kiss of the Spider Woman, is based on. He's one of the great masters of modern fiction, and translator Suzanne Jill Levine has done an amazing job of bringing Puig's slangy and elegant Spanish into enjoyable English.
Trust is such an amazing novel because it is divided into four sections, each narrated by a different character. All four narrators relate a story that has the same characters and setting, but is told from a different perspective.
With every section, the reader feels they have finally arrived at the definitive truth of the story. No, the next section, unbelievably, flips the whole picture upside down. And that keeps happening!
Also, the book is set in New York City in the first half of the twentieth century, and the author skillfully portrays that world with delicious details.
Longlisted for the Booker Prize The Sunday Times Bestseller
Trust is a sweeping, unpredictable novel about power, wealth and truth, set against the backdrop of turbulent 1920s New York. Perfect for fans of Succession.
Can one person change the course of history?
A Wall Street tycoon takes a young woman as his wife. Together they rise to the top in an age of excess and speculation. But now a novelist is threatening to reveal the secrets behind their marriage, and this wealthy man's story - of greed, love and betrayal - is about to slip from his grasp.
My book is a memoir about someone I never really knew: my dad, Lee Rogow. He was a widely published fiction writer, drama critic and glamorous man-about-town in Manhattan of the 1950s, captain of a submarine-chaser in World War II—and he died tragically in a plane crash when I was only three.
To solve the mystery of who my dad really was, I created a hybrid mix of my father’s confidential writings that had sat in my sister’s basement for seven decades, vintage photos from World War II and the 1950s, and imaginary conversations between myself and my dad.
