this book plain blew me out of the water. i must say that i listened to it, and that i just discovered the pleasures of listening to audiobooks, something i previously considered anathema. i am a slow reader and i like savoring sentences and reading them over and over. so it was a while before i ...
I've read a lot of haunting novels before, but really, there's something very unique about this one. Oyster is an excellent novel, one that not only looks at the lives of a small group of people living in the outback, but also examines the madness connected with power, secrecy, religious mania a...
Generally enjoy her writing - she has a wonderful prose style - and this one is no exception. Elizabeth and Edward are about to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary and she decides to get all their three children back to their American home. The only problem is that each child has dark memori...
Typical Hospital intertwining of relationships. Had to read it twice to enjoy the nuances more fully and still didn't understand all the physics references. Worth the effort, but definitely not a beach read.
A deft explanation of how the lack of cultural awareness can cause unimaginable chaos. Although the central character, Juliet, means well, her outlook is the product of her western upbringing and her inability to see past her own world view. The outcome, of course, is inevitable and tragic. I won...
An inversion of the Orpheus myth where our hero gets trapped in the Underworld and his lover Eurydice orchestrates his release.Mishka, a half Jewish, half Lebanese Australian studying music in Boston, is our Orpheus while his lover Leela, a transplant from the Bible-belt south (from a town approp...
BookList: The haunting floral scent of frangipani permeates this riveting short-story collection from the Australian author of the novel Due Preparations for the Plague [BKL My 15 03]. Hospital’s strength lies in capturing her character’s interior lives with a poet’s grace and precision. The subj...
He was just getting off the Broadway Local at Times Square, and trying to find the place where you go down the stairs for the crosstown shuttle to Grand Central, when they collided. “My God,” he said. “Faith!” For whole seconds he felt his waking ve...
Tourists who are leaving the island pass it on. New arrivals splurt laughter, clap hands to mouths in embarrassment, cast sidelong glances at the skipper of the Moby Dick, then furtively retell and embellish. The whispering buffets Rufus – his hearing is painfully acute – though he knows no malic...
Sometimes she is in the lower left-hand corner of Charlie’s photograph of the Serra Pelada mine, and sometimes she is at the bottom of the quarry. She has a sense of urgency about climbing up the rock face and escaping, but the ladder sways precariously and no matter how many rungs she negotiates...