The King's English Bookshop

Three prepubescent boys vaguely supervised but essentially alone, run feral on the decks of a ship. Also on board are the slightly older (and lovely) Emily; the enigmatic but ancient (at least in the eyes of the boys) Miss Lasqueti; Daniels, who tends a secret garden in the bowels of the ship; a wounded Lord, a fake Baron, a mute, and a shackled prisoner who appears with his guards late each night. As one of the young boys, Myna, narrates, he slips seamlessly from present to future and back again to shipboard, weaving the fragments of lives he and his friends witness, the bits and pieces of conversation they overhear, into a mysterious tapestry of their own design—a design that turns out to bear only partial relationship to reality. The journey and the tale proceed at a deceptively quiet pace, suddenly coming to a full boil in unexpected ways as Myna engages in surprising escapades, encounters characters in shocking situations, responds in the unpredictable ways young boys are capable of. The pace then quiets again as he views these startling events through the hindsight of memory. The misperception of youth, its ardent loyalties and heedless heroics, the distant, bloodless vistas of adult recall, the unexpected connections, the missed chances and unrealized relationships are cumulative in affect. As in The English Patience, Ondaatje has, in The Cat’s Table, blended passion and adventure, metaphor and memory, into a blindingly good and unforgettable work of fiction.

Justin Torres, a newcomer to the world of fiction, has just published a book, We the Animals, in which three feral boys savage the landscape in which they find themselves. The three boys study the adult world, trying to make sense of it and their perceptions and misperceptions color their eventual fates. The boys run wild in their own home, alternately savaging and loving their mother, their neighbors, the landscape in which they reside. Their father, who drinks, and skips in and out of their lives, loves his sons ferociously but is also capable of ferocious cruelty. Their mother loves joyously—when she’s not too depressed to love at all. The boys themselves are three untamed puppies, growling and biting, licking and panting, running in mad circles. The narrator, the youngest, gradually gains a more distinct voice, separating out from the pack in this beautiful, mad, wilderness of violent familial love. The language is so immediate that I laughed and wept, cringed and occasionally shut the book to breathe.

Two time frames coalesce during the course of this powerful novel, one a single day, February 27, 1934, (the first anniversary of the burning of the Reichstag), the other comprised of the years leading up to that fateful day, from 1899 forward. We first meet Thekla as a talented and passionate young teacher who not only feels overwhelming responsibility for the boys in her classroom, but also suffers guilt for having supplanted her former teacher, who is Jewish. Then it is 1899, Thekla is born, the young family moves to Burgdorf, and her mother becomes housekeeper to a family that seems oddly connected to mother and child. Back and forth the reader goes from the early years of the 1900s to the fateful day in 1934 that is the nexus of the tale, watching young Thekla grow to adulthood, watching boys who are nearly men fast approaching another world war. We see from the inside the almost impossible choices with which Germans were faced in 1934, see their need to deny, their paralyzing fear, the lies that made existence both possible and impossible to bear—lies that allowed the Nazis to create a fire from which there was no escape for the children of Germany. – Betsy Burton

This gorgeously written novel follows the lives of the men who set sail from Marstal—a sleepy Danish fishing village when the book opens—and spans the century from the conflicts of 1848 to World Wars I and II. Following events through the eyes of Laurids, who vanishes; his son Albert, who searches the world for his father; and Knud Erik, the boy Albert mentors We, the Drowned chronicles not just the adventures of these men on the high seas, but also the changing reality of the community from which they set sail. Violence is omnipresent as men travel to strange ports, fight wars, and struggle to survive. Captain Cook’s shrunken head plays a part in the tale and so does a man trading pearls for the flesh of natives in order to feed cannibals. Strange, almost magical vignettes, dreams that presage dark reality, exotic settings all create drama, but the central drama in the novel is the fate of the community that unites the characters. Jensen has managed to at once involve us in particular lives and a breathless tale while delivering a stunning picture of the grand sweep of history and the particular fate of a single community.

The retelling of the story of the death of Hector and of the brutalizing of his body by Achilles, of King Priam and his journey out of Troy and into the enemy camp to rescue his son’s battered body, Ransom is a tale of men and Gods, of fate and chance, bringing to vivid life the sweat and blood and stench of battle, the fears and sorrows of men and women, and also the overarching forces that pull us toward the heavens, pitch us into the depths of hell. One such force is the telling of tales, the discovery of new ways of seeing what we thought we knew. At once a retelling of a piece of The Iliad, it is a tale in its own right—one in which the two main characters, Priam and Achilles, discover, however briefly, new ways of looking at the world, new ways of experiencing their own pain. Malouf’s prose, always possessed of lyricism and power, here takes on an authority—and beauty—of Homeric proportions. The sentences literally make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. And the revelations make you reconsider things you thought you knew.

An orphanage struggling to exist in the aftermath of the Korean War is the landing place for an American GI who fought in that war, a young girl who has lost her family to war’s carnage, and a missionary’s wife who carries scars from the horrors of 1930s Manchuria. Using the orphanage where they came together as fulcrum, Lee moves us back in time to the pasts that brought each character to that orphanage and the emotional conflagration that occurred there, and forward to the present in America 30 years later. Combining the brilliant language of A Gesture Life and the narrative sweep and historical accuracy of Time of Our Singing or A Chain of Voices, Lee has created a profound book about war, yes, but also about love.

Quirke, a pathologist who is waging a war on alcoholism, is asked by his daughter Phoebe to look into the disappearance of her close friend. No one has seen April for two weeks and although she is in some ways a mystery to her friends, this is unusual behavior. April’s group of friends and her prominent Irish family are the suspects in a plot that combines mystery with the touching duet of love played out by the father and daughter, Quirke and Phoebe, both of whom fight demons and long for love neither seems able to give. Not just an intriguing mystery, this is a layered and moving novel as well, written under the pen name used by Booker prize-winning novelist John Banville.