It feels like a long time since I’ve read such an accomplished novel. Geraldine Brooks manages to catch the horror of war in a phrase: “…[men] were clinging [to the rocky bluff over the river] as a cluster of bees dangling from a hive, and slipping off in clumps, four or five together.” Her char...
When you read a book by Geraldine Brooks, you know you are in the hands of a master. In Foreign Correspondence, she not only gives a typical memoir, but she adds the twist of looking up her childhood penpals. Most memoirs with a twist or angle, really feel forced, but Ms. Brooks's does not. Large...
Aaargh. I just wrote a bloody long review of this book then the ******* goodreads website ate it. Anyway, starting over...." Read, in the name of thy LordWho hath created all things, whoHath created man of congealed blood.Read, by thy most beneficent Lord,Who taught us the use of the pen,who teac...
This is a book about the bubonic plague so I am basically expected this by the end:Spoilers abound below along with a not insignificant amount of profanity:(view spoiler)[So, expecting this book to be bleak, I shunted all of the emotions I anticipated feeling into the area of my heart where I kee...
Title: People of the Book Binding: Paperback Author: Geraldine Brooks Publisher: HARPER PERENNIAL
I gave myself over in those two years to what shards of happiness I could unearth when I pushed dread of the future away. There were some golden days, when the work of making and mending went on, when music filled the king’s halls, and when the city seemed bathed in a kind of radiance.We made man...
Anne was seated where I had left her, her book open upon the table. Master Corlett had joined her, and Caleb and Joel one on either side of him. A lively seminar of some kind seemed to be under way. Anne’s face, no longer hidden and shadowed, seemed lit with a sharp intelligence as she listened t...
Such a pedestrian enquiry, one that any moderately verbal toddler is schooled to answer briskly with a street address, a house number, the name of a city or a town. Some of us will live in only a few places in our lives; others, like me, are the kinds of people who mess up your address book, cons...
It was a stillness different in kind from the weekday lull of the lonely afternoons. This was a peopled silence, like the self-conscious hush of a crowd in a library.Sunday’s sounds were the sputtering fat of the lamb leg roasting in the oven, the thud of my mother’s knife on the chopping board a...
Quarter-filled Mrs. Butterworth's bottle in living room, sandy sheets throughout, lingering smell. Or, Wanted: gullible tenant for small house, must possess appreciation for chipped pottery, mid-1960s abstract silk-screened canvases, mouse-nibbled books on Georgia O'Keeffe. Or, Available June 1—s...
At neighborhood bakeries women wait in line with their flowery household chadors draped casually around their waists. Their faces seem less lined than they will look later, as they struggle through the crowded city burdened with parcels and children and the countless worries of women in poor coun...
I stopped short at the door. Batsheva was there, the child nestled sleepily against her breast. I had not expected that. She had her head down, her back half turned to me. But even from that partial view, I could see that she was, as David had said, a striking woman: cream...