"In his wickedly brilliant first novel, Debut Dagger Award winner Alan Bradley introduces one of the most singular and engaging heroines in recent fiction: eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. It is the summer of 1950—and a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia’s family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”
-- From Goodreads
The second book is A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. I have heard great things about this book too. I think it is a long one though so it may need to be a summer read if we pick it.
"Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find -- through love or through exacting maternal appraisal -- a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence."
-- From Goodreads
Finally I thought I'd suggest Gilliad by Marilynne Robinson. I read this several years ago and loved it.
"The narrator, John Ames, is 76, a preacher who has lived almost all of his life in Gilead, Iowa. He is writing a letter to his almost seven-year-old son, the blessing of his second marriage. It is a summing-up, an apologia, a consideration of his life. Robinson takes the story away from being simply the reminiscences of one man and moves it into the realm of a meditation on fathers and children, particularly sons, on faith, and on the imperfectability of man."
-- From Goodreads
2 comments:
It's funny. I was actually planning on recommending Gilead. I haven't read it, but a friend of mine did and wrote this review:
"I don't like choosing favorites. I don't think I should be compelled to announce with any finality what is my favorite of anything. It's just too superlative for someone as indecisive as I am.
"But if someone held a gun to my head and said they'd shoot me if I didn't name my favorite book in the world, my first thought would be Gilead. Since the first time I read it a few years ago, it has remained in me the way no other compilation of words ever has. To find God in a book-- and in such rich abundance-- outside of canonized scripture is something to be heralded. If I could serve a two-year mission sharing this book with poor and sad illiterates of the world, I would leave today.
"While plot is secondary or even tertiary to the narration of this work, it is intoxicating in its simple beauty and meandering message. It is therapy, it is light, it is good grief. I would challenge even the most impatient reader to sit with this book, feel it in your hands, pour over its wisdom and absorb its worth."
That made me want to read it.
These look so good. Let's just read these and call it good. :)
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