The one silver lining of the lockdown is that it has given us ample hours to catch up with our reading. From some of the finest historical fiction to poignant stories of friendships, familial bonds, love and loss, here are some of the latest additions to our bookshelves!
A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende
“A defiantly warm and funny novel, by somebody who has earned the right to argue that love and optimism can survive whatever history might throw at us” – Daily Telegraph
September 3, 1939, the day of the Spanish exiles’ splendid arrival in Chile, the Second World War broke out in Europe.
Victor Dalmau is a young doctor when he is caught up in the Spanish Civil War, a tragedy that leaves his life—and the fate of his country—forever changed. Together with his sister-in-law, the pianist Roser, he is forced out of his beloved Barcelona and into exile.
When opportunity to seek refuge arises, they board a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda to Chile, the promised “long petal of sea and wine and snow”. There, they find themselves enmeshed in a rich web of characters who come together in love and tragedy over the course of four generations, destined to witness the battle between freedom and repression as it plays out across the world.
A masterful work of historical fiction that soars from the Spanish Civil War to the rise and fall of Pinochet, A Long Petal of the Sea is Isabel Allende at the height of her powers.
Suncatcher by Romesh Gunesekera
“Gunesekera artfully renders the unequal relationship between the two boys, and the fractures within their families” – New York Times
Ceylon is on the brink of change. But Kairo is at a loose end. School is closed, the government is in disarray, the press is under threat and the religious right are flexing their muscles. Kairo’s hard-working mother blows off steam at her cha-cha-cha classes; his Trotskyite father grumbles over the state of the nation between his secret flutters on horseraces in faraway England. All Kairo wants to do is hide in his room and flick over second-hand westerns and superhero comics, or escape on his bicycle and daydream.
Then he meets the magnetic teenage Jay, and his whole world is turned inside out.
A budding naturalist and a born rebel, Jay keeps fish and traps birds for an aviary he is building in the garden of his grand home. The adults in Jay’s life have no say in what he does or where he goes: he holds his beautiful, fragile mother in contempt, and his wealthy father seems fuelled by anger. But his Uncle Elvin, suave and worldly, is his encourager. As Jay guides him from the realm of make believe into one of hunting-guns and fast cars and introduces him to a girl—Niromi—Kairo begins to understand the price of privilege and embarks on a journey of devastating consequence.
Taut and luminous, graceful and wild, Suncatcher is a poignant coming-of-age novel about difficult friendships and sudden awakenings. Mesmerizingly, it charts the loss of innocence and our recurring search for love—or consolation —bringing these extraordinary lives into our own.
Apeirogon by Colum McCann
The novel of a lifetime about two men and their daughters: divided by conflict, yet united in grief.
Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin live near one another—yet they exist worlds apart. Rami is Israeli. Bassam is Palestinian. Rami’s license plate is yellow. Bassam’s license plate is green. It takes Rami fifteen minutes to drive to the West Bank. The same journey for Bassam takes an hour and a half.
Both men have lost their daughters. Rami’s thirteen-year-old girl Smadar was killed by a suicide bomber while out shopping with her friends. Bassam’s ten-year-old daughter Abir was shot and killed by a member of the border police outside her school. There was a candy bracelet in her pocket she hadn’t had time to eat yet.
The men become the best of friends.
In this epic novel—named for a shape with a countably infinite number of sides—Colum McCann crosses centuries and continents, stitching time, art, history, nature and politics into a tapestry of friendship, love, loss and belonging. Musical, muscular, delicate and soaring, Apeirogon is the novel for our times.
Don’t let him Know by Sandip Roy
“A believable and wonderfully written story of secrets between the generations” – The Times
In a boxy apartment building in an American university town, Romola Mitra, a young bride, anxiously awaits her first letter from home in India. When she accidentally opens the wrong letter, it changes her life. Decades later, her son Amit finds the letter and thinks he has discovered his mother’s secret. But secrets have their own secrets sometimes, and a way of following their keepers.
Moving from adolescent rooftop games to adult encounters in gay bars, from hair salons in Calcutta to McDonald’s drive-thrus in California, this is an unforgettable story about family, the struggle between having what we want and doing what we feel we must—and the sacrifices we make for those we love.
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
“Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature” – Guardian
Danny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish mansion. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve: Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her wit, her brilliance. The siblings grow and change as life plays out under the watchful eyes of the house’s former owners, in the frames of their oil paintings.
Then one day, their father brings Andrea home. Though they cannot know it, her arrival to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve’s lives…
Told with Ann Patchett’s inimitable blend of humour, rage and heartbreak, The Dutch House is a book for our times; of family, love, loss, and the powerful bonds of place and time that magnetize and repel us for our whole lives.
Which of these books would you like to be your next read? Let us know in the comments section below. Stay safe and #ReadwithBloomsbury.