Recommended Reading

The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss


Gloss's austere latest (after Wild Life) features a wandering taciturn tomboy who finds her place in rural Oregon while the men are away at war. After she leaves home in 1917, 19-year-old Martha Lessen plans to travel from farm to farm in Elwha County, Oregon, breaking horses left behind by owners away fighting. She winds up in small town Shelby, where farmers George and Louise Bliss convince her to stay the winter with them after she domesticates their broncos with soft words and songs instead of lariats and hobbles. While breaking the town's horses, Martha meets a slovenly drunk, a clan of Western European immigrants and two unmarried sisters running a ranch with the help of an awkward, secretive teenager. When Martha's not making the rounds or riding through the Clarks Range, Louise tries her hand at socializing (or, perhaps, breaking) her, but Martha chafes at town dances, social outings and Louise's hand-me-down church dresses. Gloss's narrative is sometimes as slow as Martha's progress with the more recalcitrant beasts, but following stubborn, uncompromising Martha as she goes about her work provides its own unique pleasures. From November Publishers Weekly, Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


Broken Colors by Michelle Zackheim


The author of Einstein's Daughter and Violette's Embrace, Zackheim delivers the epic life of a woman whose art and survival become ever more tightly bound with passing years. With her firebrand parents dead at the close of WWI, Sophie Marks lives out a protracted childhood aesthetics lesson in the pre-WWII English Midlands with her painter grandfather Eli and poet grandmother Claire. At the Slade School of Art in London, Sophie falls for French student Rene; she returns home pregnant and abandoned. Hitler's bombings bring terror and hardship, and a direct hit upon the family's cottage leaves Sophie bereft. Afterward, in a convalescent sanitarium, Sophie's romance with the shell-shocked and disfigured Maj. Hugh Roderick ends in tragedy, but not before the two exchange portraits. Sophie again returns to her barren homestead and undertakes a very complex form of mourning in her grandmother's garden. Over the 200-plus pages of Sophie's next 55 years, Zackheim introduces the novel's major theme of art as a series of interments and disinterments, new ground being broken as old ground is plundered. Her postwar heroine displays ample pluck and depth of feeling in the face of trauma. From October Publishers Weekly, Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani


"Georgie is on her way to London for lunch with the queen, as one of 99 lucky Commonwealth residents born the same day as Elizabeth II. Her car slips off the road and she is trapped at the bottom of a ravine. As she wills herself to stay alive, she takes a poignant and comic journey through her 80 years, proving there is no such thing as an insignificant life." From Booksense, Marian Nielsen, Orinda Books, Orinda, CA








Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier

"This novel taps into some of the oldest veins of story, the primal ones of night journeys, of being stuck in place, yet adrift, and confused about life's purpose. It is full of people who have lived, even as the fullness of that is revealed only in the protagonist's drawing out of their stories. I'm not sure how much this book might teach us how to live, but it has reminded me of what it is to really read." From Booksense, Rick Simonson, The Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA








Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, by Lawrence Hill

"This book is astonishing for its compelling storyline: A young girl is stolen from her African homeland, enslaved in America in the mid-1700s, freed by the British during the Revolution, sent to Nova Scotia, returned to Sierra Leone, then brought to England to testify in the efforts to abolish slavery. An exciting introduction to a brilliant Canadian writer." From Booksense, Willard Williams, The Toadstool Bookshop, Peterborough, NH








The Gathering by Anne Enright

“Anne Enright has crafted a careful, thoughtful and poignant story of the way a life can be thrown and reconstructed by the events of the past. It is an old theme for novelists, and as an Irishwoman she is well aware of the tradition of which she is a part. Liam Hegarty, a beautiful alcoholic, walks into the sea with his pockets full of stones, leaving his sister Veronica to scour their histories for the incident that set his self-destructiveness in motion. Liam's funeral places her in the middle of the family: she 'never chose to love, but loved all the same'. As Veronica confronts this love and the pain of death, Enright weaves in sex and anger, physical detail and lurching emotion. The Gathering is a very literary novel - the action is on the inside - and it requires concentration to get the best out of it. The best though is very good.” From Jonathan Cape, The First Post.