BLURB


REVIEW

BLURB
A modern serial killer - hunting an ancient secret. A woman is left to die as the rebuilt Globe theatre burns. Another woman is drowned like Ophelia, skirts swirling in the water. A professor has his throat slashed open on the steps of Washington's Capitol building. A deadly serial killer is on the loose, modelling his murders on Shakespeare's plays. But why is he killing? And how can he be stopped?

REVIEW
Bought as a guilty pleasure at the airport, I'm about half way through this book and loving it.
Comparisions with The DaVinci Code are inevitable, and while elements of the hyper-active plot, and near encylopediac knowledge from some of the characters are similar, I am finding this to have a bit more bite.
Philistine that I am, I can far more easily relate to books on the Bard than on DaVinci and this is really making a difference. Whereas with one I felt a far more passive reader, in this I'm linking my own knowledge into the story far more, which is always a good sign.

And then i finished it.

what a let down.

it totally shied away from breaking any new ground and ended in an almost direct da-vinci code style.

very disappointing.


(grumble mumble, the wild west and shakespeare, ridiculous...)

BLURB

A moving tale of survival becomes a grave and stately hymn to the revivifying qualities of language and learning in this impressive debut by a Canadian poet. The main narrator, Jakob Beer, who tells his story at age 60 in 1992, was a Polish survivor of the Holocaust who, after losing his entire family in 1939, was rescued by Antanasios Roussos, a middle-aged scholar and polymath, who took Jakob to safety and raised him on the Greek island of Zakynthos. Jakob's narrative is a rich chronicle of intellectual hungers generously satisfied, as "Athos's tales of geologists and explorers, cartographers and navigators" stimulate his young disciple's active imagination - an imagination also possessed by vivid memories of Jakob's dead parents and sister Bells, who appear to him as both vocal and visible presences. The pair travel to Athens, where Jakob's own insistent memories jostle against stories of that city's wartime sufferings, and thence to Toronto, where "Athos" has been invited to teach, and where he dies - leaving Jakob to complete his mentor's masterwork, a study of how the Nazis distorted archaeology to after the past and "prove" Aryan supremacy. Jakob's life thereafter is devoted to his own writing (he is a gifted poet), to a search for love he never seems quite able to fulfill, and, centrally, to his progression from experiencing "the power of language to destroy to omit to obliterate" to discovering in "poetry, the power of language to restore." Then, in an only partially successful shift, the novel's last third observes Jakob's later life and his legacy from the viewpoint of a younger friend and admirer, who is himself the child of Holocaust survivors and whose sensitivity to what Jakob's life signifies is aided by his own realization that "Every moment is two moments" (that is, the past is always present in the present). A stunning work, quite beautifully written, and a lovely homage to the imperiled yet indomitable culture and individuals it celebrates.

REVIEW

BLURB
When Mattie is given the letters by a guest at the hotel in which she has a summer job she thinks that the giver is simply upset. But the next day when the woman is found drowned in Big Moose Lake Mattie has to decide if she will read the letters, or burn them as the woman requested. But Mattie has problems enough of her own as she is growing up and trying to decide on her future. Her desire to be a writer and her dreams of life outside the small rural community in which she has always lived are beginning to overwhelm her ...

Lent to me by a lady at work, this book provided a window both into the past and a life totally unknown to me. That it was based on an actual crime was also something I had been unaware of..

A terrific find.

BLURB
Set in London during the harsh winter of 1900, this novel is a curious mix of art history and the crime fiction genre.

An elderly and famous Claude Monet is ensconced in a suite at the Savoy Hotel, obsessively trying to paint the light and the reflections of the fog and mists on the river Thames.

The 6th floor of the Savoy has been totally given over as a hospital to wounded officers from the British war against the Boers in South Africa and there are rumours of strange things going on.

Meanwhile a young gentleman from the Foreign Office has discovered a body of a woman in the river and we become embroiled in the resulting police investigations. Garretty, a dour Irish policeman is determined, despite some high ranking cover-up, to solve what is becoming an increasingly gruesome and perverse series of murders.

This is fabulous book!! It totally captured my imagination and I couldn't put it down for a moment once I had begun. Everything, from the delightfully creepy first chapter, to the intrigue of the middle classes - gripped me and wouldn't let go. A well thought, expertly executioned story!

This book follows the lives of people in Paris and in a small French town during the German invasion and occupation. The townspeople and the occupiers sometimes see each other as people, sometimes as enemies. The first part mainly describes the exodus, the second part the occupation.
This book was interesting, very well told, and hard to put down. The humanity and non-humanity of both sides was apparent. A shame the author was killed in a concentration camp before it was completed.

This book was kind of hard to get into. I had a hard time at first keeping everyone straight but once I got into I couldn't stop reading. How hard it must have been during this time in France. I was so amazed at the end how the author had planned to have 5 sections but only managed to get the first two done before she was arrested. Am glad the daughters finally read it and had the book printed for all to read.

Suite Francaise is the (fictionalized) account of when the Germans invaded France during WW II. The book is actually only 2/5 of the way finished...the author died in a concentration camp during the war before she could finish it. My one negative thought about the book is that the author never once mentions concentration camps or the Nazi's vendetta against minorites. Considering the author herself was Jewish, I thought it was a big strange she didn't even mention it.

I am in the middle of reading this novel and it is terrific. I read the "French Version Preface" first (at the back of the book) and discovered that the author was Jewish and interned at a concentration camp where she died in 1942, and that the book "Suite Francaise" was really not finished when she died. It is a marvelous read so far, but since I know that it was unfinished, I am not looking forward to the end.

Now that I have finished reading this book, the above entry was right. I'm sorry there is no more to read. The interrelationships between the French countryside residents and the German occupiers was so well written that I felt I was there with them. Human relationships are not always what we expect them to be. How sad that the author was unable to continue writing. It is a book that I won't forget.

BLURB
Suite Française contains two unfinished sections, Storm in June and Dolce, of a planned five-part work about the invasion and occupation of France in World War II. The appendices contain the author's notes for what the other three sections would contain, her correspondence and correspondence about her (especially after she was sent to Auschwitz where she died), and preface to the French edition that outlines her personal history.

This work only recently came to light after Ms. Nemirovsky's surviving daughter, Denise Epstein, began typing out her mother's long-ignored notebook for a memory project.

As you read this work, you'll be responding at two levels: To the monumental tale of a nation unexpectedly brought to its knees and beholden and exposed to its conquerors . . . and to the real human tragedy of a family that would lose both parents while the two daughters survived by being hidden by their governess and those who opposed the Nazis.

I can't find the words for this book yet. It was ... sublime, and disturbing, and glorious, and compelling, and rich, and moving. I hope I can review it more articulately later.

I did not care for this book. It was just too dreamy and "Freudian" and too much fantasy. I never really understood the point of it.

BLURB
It is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying yet restrained narrative of the Holocaust. It is a searing vision of the wounds of our century, and an attempt to heal them. Interweaving poetry and case history, fantasy and historical truth-telling, THE WHITE HOTEL is a modern classic of enduring emotional power that attempts nothing less than to reconcile the notion of individual destiny with that of historical fate.


REVIEW
I think that if I had read this book in its heyday, I'd have loved the smybolism, the imagery, the passion and the psychology, all wound into a tight little book.
Instead, I thought that it was interesting, but that the subject matter has been covered before, and more sophistically since then.

I'm gald that I read it. Its given me lots of things I want to research further, but not an earth mover.

I can't find the words for this book yet. It was ... sublime, and disturbing, and glorious, and compelling, and rich, and moving. I hope I can review it more articulately later.

BLURB
Despite the outward success of his visit to the USA, Sigmund Freud always spoke as if some trauma had befallen him there. He blamed the country for physical ailments that afflicted him long before his visit. Freud’s biographers have been bemused by his reaction, wondering whether some terrible unknown event might have happened in America that could explain this. The Interpretation of Murder is strikingly written literary thriller constructed around Freud’s American visit. An attractive young debutante is discovered bound, whipped and strangled in a luxurious New York apartment and another society beauty narrowly escapes the same fate. But nothing about the attacks--or the victims--is as it seems.


REVIEW

I really enjoyed this book - i found it to be a well researched, structured, intelligent and detailed novel. While very much enjoying the 'Freud' aspect of the novel, I thought that the story itself was strond enough to stand without 'the grandfather of psychoanalysis', though I must admit I was distracted enough not to pick up on the ending until I was reading it - an excellent thing for a spoiler queen like me!


Good story, good plot, and while not the most original in the world, a fab whodunnit with enough twists to keep an avid reader on their toes!

BLURB
Amongst the ancient papyri of the Dead Sea, a remarkable scroll is discovered. Written in the first century AD, it purports to be the true account of the life of Jesus, as told by Youdas the sicarios - Judas Iscariot.

If authentic, it will be one of the most incendiary documents in the history of humankind. The task of proving - or disproving - its validity falls to Father Leo Newman, one of the world's leading experts in Koine, the demotic Greek of the Roman Empire, and a man the newspapers like to call a 'renegade priest'.

But as Leo absorbs himself in Judas' testimony, the stories of his own life haunt him. The story of his forbidden yet irresistible love for a married woman. The story of his mother's passionate and tragic affair amidst the war-time ruins of Rome. They are stories of love and betrayal that may threaten his faith just as deeply as the Gospel of Judas...

With a dramatic narrative that spans from the Europe of the Second World War to Jerusalem two thousand years after Jesus' birth, THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS is a compelling and erudite thriller.

BLURB
The appearance of two outsiders on a Mediterranean island - one a castaway and atheist, the other a child suckled by wolves and knowing nothing of God - find themselves the subjects of a bizarre experiment.

REVIEW
Really enjoyed this strange little book, as did my mum (which as you know is my gold standard).

So, its all about religion really. The two, mentioned above, have the misfortune to be on an island, a very religious island, during the insquisition. The wolf girl is found and very nearly put to death by local shepherds, before coming to the attention of the state ruler.
A priest, as well as a prince (lucky devil), he sees this as the perfect opportuntity to decide whether knowledge of god is an innate trait - known even to a savage raised by wolves, or not.
She is bundled off to the nuns to be raised in a convent. Those who are to care for her are warned never to even mention the word of god to her.

Meanwhile, the other strange is a well spoken, intelligent, articulate and educated atheist. He speaks honestly and openly and doesn't quite get that if he doesn't convert...he may die.

It's the smallest, gentlest feeling novel, that flows so well, and covers some 'heavy' serious topics without ever getting high handed or prechy.

And five counterarguements to Thomas Aquinas...gotta be useful!