Books I have been reading lately

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

 

Donna Tartt is not a prolific writer but I believe her work is always worth waiting for. This time the  wait has been 11 years and no matter what Vanity Fair says, I thoroughly enjoyed this Pulitzer prize winning new story. I say enjoyed, but that is probably not quite the right expression. I was engrossed from the very beginning and, even though I often intensely disliked, or disapproved of, Theo Decker and his behaviour  this was also equally often tempered by a feeling of sympathy for him and the situations he finds himself in.

 

Theo is a 13-year-old New Yorker whose life is completely torn apart when he loses his mother in a terrorist attack on the Art museum he randomly happens to be in with her. Amongst the chaos and upheaval after the bomb he is asked, by a dying bystander, to take a painting - the 1654 Fabritius masterpiece, The Goldfinch - and a ring to an unknown person at an unknown location.

 

Over the next 14 years this painting accompanies him as he tries to cope with loss and change, moving between strangers and family and between New York, Las Vegas and Amsterdam. This is not an easy read, with some graphic descriptions of violence and drug-taking.

 

 

(Published by Little Brown & Company)

(Published by Arrow Books)

Nowhere on Earth by Josephine Humphreys 

 As if being observed under a microscope, the families in this story live out their lives during a period of huge upheaval at the end of the American Civil War. Described by The New Yorker as "an unusual sort of epic, the great sweep of history writ small...". Rhoda's tale is of life in a mixed-race swampland community in southern North Carolina where loyalties change from day to day and hunger and death are her ever-present companions.

I chose this book because of the cover image and I was hooked from page one. Often challenging but definitely one I would recommend.