Thursday, December 10, 2009

Wading Through My Wishlist



Recent additions to the Great Monstrosity that is my wishlist....
 
Events that took place in London nearly 100 year ago—the Houndsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street—form the basis of Fink's captivating ensemble crime drama. In early 20th-century Russian-occupied Latvia, Rivka Bermansfelt witnesses her father's attack on a Russian soldier, which leaves her a fugitive. She escapes to London and falls in with a colorful group of Jewish and other immigrant revolutionaries who tend to appreciate the arts and wish to live simple lives in America or Australia. While on the surface, the novel relates events of the present day to the terrorism of the past, Fink's story goes deeper, creating a compelling and psychologically driven tale of people who have lost their way in the world.


The lives of four individuals—a dying painter, a blind girl, a landscape artist, and an art curator—intertwine across nearly five decades in this luminous and searching novel of extraordinary power. With How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall, "one of the most significant and exciting of Britain's young novelists" (The Guardian), delivers "a maddeningly enticing read . . . an amazing feat of literary engineering" (The Independent on Sunday).



Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is snort-up-your-coffee funny, breezy yet profound, and poetic without trying. In fact, the whole book reads as if Janzen had dictated it to her best non-Menno friend, in her bathrobe, over cups of tea… It's the narrative voice of the person who grew up in an ethnic religious community, escaped it, then looked back with clearsighted objectivity and appreciation.

6 comments:

Nina said...

Great books for your wishlist. I bet it's long list..just like mine. :)

StephTheBookworm said...

I've been wanting to read Mennonite in a Little Black Dress too. It looks funny.

Unknown said...

I loved How to Paint a Dead Man. It sounds like a boring art book on paper, but in reality it is so emotional - it was one of my 2009 favourites.

Liz @ Cleverly Inked said...

My list keeps growing, I try to wade through but to no avail

Jenn said...

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is showing up in a lot of places...including my TBR list.

Veens said...

This feature is killing me.. i cannot add more to my wishlist, you know!

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