Our October Author of the Month: ALAN HOLLINGHURST

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of the novels The Swimming-Pool Library; The Folding Star; The Spell; The Line of Beauty, winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Stranger’s Child; and The Sparsholt Affair. He has also received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. He lives in London.

In his new novel, Our Evenings, Dave Win, the son of a Burmese man he’s never met and a British dressmaker, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities emerge, even as Dave is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates. Our Evenings follows Dave from the 1960s on — through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security. From “one of our most gifted writers” (The Boston Globe), Our Evenings sweeps readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.

Our September Author of the Month: HEATHER O'NEILL

HEATHER O’NEILL is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her most recent novel, When We Lost Our Heads was a #1 national bestseller and was a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. Her previous works include The Lonely Hearts Hotel, which won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads, as well as Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, and Daydreams of Angels, which were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize two years in a row. She has won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award.

Her new novel, The Capital of Dreams, is a breathtaking dark fairy tale of survival and betrayal. Fourteen-year-old Sofia Bottom lives in a small country that Europe has forgotten. But inside its borders, the old myths of trees that come alive and fairies who live among their roots have given way to an explosion of the arts and the consolations of philosophy. No one, from the clarinetists to the cabaret singers, is as revered as Sofia’s brilliant mother, the writer Clara Bottom. How can Sofia, with a tin ear and an enduring love of the old myths, ever hope to win her mother’s love? When the country’s greatest enemy invades, and the Capital is under threat, at last Clara turns to her daughter. Sofia must smuggle her new manuscript to safety on the last train evacuating children from the city. But the train draws to a suspicious halt in the middle of a forest, and Sofia runs for her life, losing her mother’s most prized possession.

Read More...

Our August Author of the Month: ELIF SHAFAK

ELIF SHAFAK is an award-winning British-Turkish author of a dozen novels, including The Island of Missing Trees, which was short-listed for the Costa Novel Award, and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Her work has been translated into fifty-six languages. She holds a PhD in political science and has taught at universities in Turkey, the United States and the United Kingdom. She lives in London and is an honorary fellow at Oxford University.

A dazzling feat of storytelling from one of the greatest writers of our time, Shafak’s new novel There Are Rivers in the Sky is a rich, sweeping novel that spans centuries, continents and cultures, entwined by rivers, rains and waterdrops. It asks who gets to control memory. And it tells a powerful story about the cost of forgetting.

This is the story of one lost poem, two great rivers and three remarkable lives—all connected by a single drop of water. In the ruins of Nineveh, that ancient city of Mesopotamia, hidden in the sand, lie the fragments of a long-forgotten poem: the Epic of Gilgamesh. In Victorian London, an extraordinary child is born at the edge of the dirt-black Thames. Arthur’s only chance of escaping poverty is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a printing press, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, with one book soon sending him across the seas: Nineveh and Its Remains. In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a Yazidi girl living by the River Tigris, waits to be baptized with water brought from the holy city of Lalish in Iraq. The ceremony is cruelly interrupted, and soon Narin and her grandmother must journey across war-torn lands in the hope of reaching the sacred valley of their people. In 2018 London, brokenhearted Zaleekhah moves to a houseboat on the Thames to escape the wreckage of her marriage. Zaleekhah foresees a life drained of all love and meaning—until an unexpected connection to her homeland changes everything.

Our July Author of the Month: KEVIN BARRY

Kevin Barry is an Irish writer. He is the author of three collections of short stories and three novels. City of Bohane was the winner of the 2013 International Dublin Literary Award. Beatlebone won the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize and is one of seven books by Irish authors nominated for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award, the world’s most valuable annual literary fiction prize for books published in English. His 2019 novel Night Boat to Tangier was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. Barry is also an editor of Winter Papers, an arts and culture annual.

The Heart in Winter is one of the year’s most anticipated books — a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives.