Soup and Salad: Val Brelinski Worries About Her Sister, Gordon Lish Fools Around With Raymond Carver, a Bookstore Curates Desert Island Books, War Lit Gets Listed, Susan Henderson Keeps On Keepin’ On, Lisa Gornick Observes, Rebecca Makkai Evangelizes Short Stories....and a Memo From the Completely Self-Serving Department of Vanities

On today’s menu:

On the last day of August in 1970, and a month shy of her fourteenth birthday, Jory’s father drove his two daughters out to an abandoned house and left them there.

1.  That’s the first line of The Girl Who Slept with God by Val Brelinski...and the novel gets even better from there. Religious fundamentalism in central Idaho in the 1970s, a young girl struggling to come of age, a mother who just can’t seem to deal with her daughters’ messy lives, a possible immaculate conception, a hippie commune, a love affair with an ice-cream-truck man...there’s a lot to love here. It is also, Brelinski admits, an autobiographical novel which hews close to the bone. In the novel, Brelinski includes many (though not all) of the facts of her own life and that of her older, devoutly-religious sister. Novelists who put their own families in their books are a brave breed, and in this essay for Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog, Val Brelinski shows us just what’s at stake when she asked her sister Gail to read The Girl Who Slept With God for the first time:

     Gail returned to the states once her missionary-tenure was over, but our lives continued to part ways. She stayed in our hometown in Idaho and retained her faith-filled lifestyle, while I moved to San Francisco and became a “worldy” writer. And because I was incapable of truly knowing my sister, and because I desperately wanted to, I did the thing that many writers do: I wrote about her. I wrote an entire novel devoted to uncovering the mystery that was my older sister, titled The Girl Who Slept with God. In it, her name is Grace and she does a few things that she didn’t in real life, but the majority of the novel is a direct expression of my desire to dissect her, to peel back the careful carapace that she built around herself in order to see what was beneath. Naked, unshelled insects are terrible things to behold, and even worse things to be, and as the publication date of my novel approached, I began to worry.
     Gail had not read the book, nor did she know anything about its contents. This wasn’t her fault, but mine. I deliberately hadn’t told her anything about the novel and I hadn’t sent her an advanced copy of it either. Avoiding trouble until the last possible moment has always been my shameful m.o. An absurd and fanciful part of me even imagined that she might never read the book at all.

2.  “I saw in Carver’s pieces something I could fuck around with. There was a prospect there, certainly. The germ of the thing, in Ray’s stuff, was revealed in the catalogue of his experience. It had that promise in it, something I could fool with and make something new-seeming.”
     It feels like every time editor Gordon Lish opens his mouth, Raymond Carver dies a little more.


3.  I love the idea behind One Grand, a new bookstore in Narrowsburg, New York: celebrated thinkers, writers, artists, and other creative minds share the ten books they would take to their metaphorical desert island. For instance, Neil Patrick Harris’ list includes books like To Kill a Mockingbird, A Confederacy of Dunces, and Bridge to Terabithia. For his list, John Irving chose Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville and several other Dead White Guys.


4.  Speaking of lists, Peter Molin is curating a pretty damn fine one of war literature at his Time Now blog. I’m grateful he includes Fobbit, but I also appreciate all the other works which he’s added to my ever-growing To-Be-Read mountain of books (aka Mount NeveRest).

5.  It’s been a long time since I’ve read something which captures the writer’s life as precisely as this blog post by Susan Henderson (author of Up from the Blue). The struggle is real, people.

     If (my neighbors) happen to see me out and about, they’ll often ask, How’s the book going? It’s a perfectly sensible question, but I always feel like there’s the answer people want to hear, and then the one I’m going to give them.
     What they’re really asking about is the end-product. Is the book done yet? Is it on a shelf in the bookstore?
     When you’re a writer, you regularly answer such questions with no and no. Which gives an illusion of failure. Maybe you’re not writing fast enough. Maybe you’re not smart enough. Maybe you don’t work hard enough. Maybe you’re fooling yourself when you say you’re a writer.
     But most of a writer’s work is not about this end result. It’s about the private and often circular process of thinking, scribbling, re-thinking, rearranging, erasing, scribbling again. This process can take months or years or decades, depending on the writer and depending on the work.

Amen, sister, amen.


6.  At the Story Prize blog, Lisa Gornick (author of Louisa Meets Bear) also captures the essence of what makes writers tick:

     1. To write, I have to observe. I have to push myself to see: sky beyond generic dawn or dusk, drunk beyond scruffy and stumbling. To hear: the breathing of someone so angry he might punch a wall, trees before a hurricane hits. To smell garbage on the eighth day after an apocalypse, feel a sea slick with oil, taste chicken a hallucinating mother browned with shoe polish.
     2. To write, I have to tolerate being alone at my desk, without answering the phone or checking email or looking up Black Friday sales. An act of warfare against the multitasking-google-social media-hegemony.

Click here to read the other five points on Lisa’s list.

7.  While you’re at the Story Prize blog, make sure you read Rebecca Makkai’s funny, sad-but-true essay, What Some Readers Are Missing Out On. Here’s what happened when she was sitting at a table with stacks of her short story collection, Music for Wartime, sitting in front of her:

     I’m one of three authors at a signing table at a benefit. A woman walks up, touching each book. She gets to my story collection. “What’s this about?” she says.
     I say, “It’s a collection of stories, and—”
     And she goes, “Oh.” Not as in, “Oh, how interesting,” but like, “Oh, I thought the hors d’oeuvre you were passing was foie gras, but it’s Spam.” A little to the left of “Oh, no thank you, I would not care for a dead raccoon.”
     And so I decide to call her on it. I make sure to laugh, and I say, “Wait, what’s that about?”
     I’m not a confrontational person. It’s just that this is the 300th time this has happened to me since June, and I’ve reached a breaking point.

8.  And now, from the Completely Self-Serving Department of Vanities: I’ve recently had the good fortune to have several of own short stories published in print and on the web. In fact, numbers-wise, 2015 has been my best year as a short-story writer. If you’re interested in reading some of my fiction which is available online, here’s the list:

     Welcome to the First Day of the Rest of Your War at Litbreak
     Vulture at High Desert Journal
     The Wedding Party at Provo Canyon Review

In print, I’ve got work in F(r)iction (“Thank You”), and (forthcoming) Glimmer Train Stories (“A Little Bit of Everything”), Pleiades (“Kuwaiting”) and The New Guard (“Jesus and Elvis Have a Little Conversation”).

Front Porch Books: September 2015 Edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of books--mainly advance review copies (aka "uncorrected proofs" and "galleys")--I've received from publishers, but also sprinkled with packages from Book Mooch, independent bookstores, Amazon and other sources.  Because my dear friends, Mr. FedEx and Mrs. UPS, leave them with a doorbell-and-dash method of delivery, I call them my Front Porch Books.  In this digital age, ARCs are also beamed to the doorstep of my Kindle via NetGalley and Edelweiss.  Note: most of these books won't be released for another 2-6 months; I'm here to pique your interest and stock your wish lists.  Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released.  I should also note that, in nearly every case, I haven't had a chance to read these books.  I'm just as excited as you are to dive into these pages.

I begin today with a trio of novels coming in early 2016 from the new imprint Lee Boudreaux Books. I’m especially interested in these releases because the namesake of the Little, Brown imprint has edited and/or acquired some of the best manuscripts in recent memory, including Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt and many others. These first three to roll off the Lee Boudreaux presses promise to carry on that fine legacy.

Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist
by Sunil Yapa

Jacket Copy:  The Flamethrowers meets Let the Great World Spin in this debut novel set amid the heated conflict of Seattle’s 1999 WTO protests. On a rainy, cold day in November, young Victor—a boyish, scrappy world traveler who’s run away from home—sets out to sell marijuana to the 50,000 anti-globalization protestors gathered in the streets. It quickly becomes clear that the throng determined to shut the city down—from environmentalists to teamsters to anarchists—are testing the patience of the police, and what started as a peaceful protest is threatening to erupt into violence. Over the course of one life-altering afternoon, the lives of seven people will change forever: foremost among them police chief Bishop, the estranged father Victor hasn’t seen in three years, two protestors struggling to stay true to their non-violent principles as the day descends into chaos, two police officers in the street, and the coolly elegant financial minister from Sri Lanka whose life, as well as his country’s fate, hinges on getting through the angry crowd, out of jail, and to his meeting with the president of the United States. In this raw and breathtaking novel, Yapa marries a deep rage with a deep humanity, and in doing so casts an unflinching eye on the nature and limits of compassion.

Opening Lines:  The match struck and sputtered. Victor tried again. He put match head to phosphate strip with the gentle pressure of one long finger and the thing sparked and caught and for the briefest of moments he held a yellow flame. Victor—curled into himself like a question mark, a joint hanging from his mouth; Victor with his hair natural and braided, two thick braids and a red bandanna folded and knotted to hold them back; Victor—with his dark eyes and his thin shoulders and his cafecito con leche skin, a pair of classic Air Jordans on his oversized feet, the leather so white it glowed—imagine him as you will because he hardly knew how to see himself.

Blurbworthiness:  “There is nothing to say about Sunil Yapa’s debut novel that its wonderful title doesn’t already promise—its heart beats and bleeds on every page, in prose so raw it feels built of muscle and tissue and sinew and sweat. This book is delightfully, forcefully alive, and I feel more alive for having read it.”  (Eleanor Henderson, author of Ten Thousand Saints)

Tender
by Belinda McKeon

Jacket Copy:  When they meet in Dublin in the late nineties, Catherine and James become close as two friends can be. She is a sheltered college student, he an adventurous, charismatic young artist. In a city brimming with possibilities, he spurs her to take life on with gusto. But as Catherine opens herself to new experiences, James’ life becomes a prison; as changed as the new Ireland may be, it is still not a place in which he feels able to truly be himself. Catherine, grateful to James and worried for him, desperately wants to help-—but as time moves on, and as life begins to take the friends in different directions, she discovers that there is a perilously fine line between helping someone and hurting them further. When crisis hits, Catherine , walled off by a truth he feels unable to share. When crisis hits, Catherine finds herself at the mercy of feelings she cannot control, leading her to jeopardize all she holds dear. By turns exhilarating and devastating, Tender is a dazzling exploration of human relationships, of the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we are taught to tell. It is the story of first love and lost innocence, of discovery and betrayal. A tense high-wire act with keen psychological insights, this daring novel confirms McKeon as a major voice in contemporary fiction, belonging alongside the masterful Edna O’Brien and Anne Enright.

Opening Lines:  Dreams fled away, and something about a bedroom, and some­thing about a garden, seen through an open window; and a windfall, something about a windfall—a line which made Catherine see apples, bruising and shrivelling and rotting into the ground. Windfall-sweetened soil; that was it. And, the flank of an animal, rubbing against a bedroom wall—though that could not be right, could it? But it was in there somewhere, she knew it was; something of it had bobbed up in her con­sciousness.
      She was on the lawn in front of James’s house, a wool blanket beneath her, one arm thrown over her eyes to do the job of the sunglasses she had not thought to bring. It was so hot. It was such a proper summer’s day.

Blurbworthiness:  “Tender rises above every other book on the shelf for its language alone; the beauty of each sentence will break your heart. But the story, full of the pleasures and terrors and betrayals of youth, will do that anyway. There is no way around it: you will weep. Spectacular.”  (Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Story of a Marriage)

As Close to Us as Breathing
by Elizabeth Poliner

Jacket Copy:  In 1948, a small stretch of the Woodmont, Connecticut shoreline, affectionately named “Bagel Beach,” has long been a summer destination for Jewish families. Here sisters Ada, Vivie, and Bec assemble at their beloved family cottage, with children in tow and weekend-only husbands who arrive each Friday in time for the Sabbath meal. During the weekdays, freedom reigns. Ada, the family beauty, relaxes and grows more playful, unimpeded by her rule-driven, religious husband. Vivie, once terribly wronged by her sister, is now the family diplomat and an increasingly inventive chef. Unmarried Bec finds herself forced to choose between the family-centric life she’s always known and a passion-filled life with the married man with whom she’s had a secret years-long affair. But when a terrible accident occurs on the sisters’ watch, a summer of hope and self-discovery transforms into a lifetime of atonement and loss for members of this close-knit clan. Seen through the eyes of Molly, who was twelve years old when she witnessed the accident, this is the story of a tragedy and its aftermath, of expanding lives painfully collapsed. Can Molly, decades after the event, draw from her aunt Bec's hard-won wisdom and free herself from the burden that destroyed so many others? Elizabeth Poliner is a masterful storyteller, a brilliant observer of human nature, and in As Close to Us as Breathing she has created an unforgettable meditation on grief, guilt, and the boundaries of identity and love.

Opening Lines:  The summer of 1948 my brother Davy was killed in an accident with a man who would have given his life rather than have it happen.

Blurbworthiness:  “Vivid, complex, and beautifully written, Elizabeth Poliner’s novel, As Close to Us as Breathing, brims with characters who leave an indelible impression on the mind and heart. This moving story of the way one unforgettable family struggles with love and loss shows an uncommon depth of human understanding. Elizabeth Poliner is a wonderful talent and she should be read widely, and again and again.”  (Edward P. Jones, author of The Known World)

Silence and Song
by Melanie Rae Thon
(FC2)

Reading Melanie Rae Thon’s fiction and poetry is like floating in amniotic fluid while watching the birth of nebulae—Technicolor splashing across your face—and listening to harp music whispering from another world. I want to get lost in this latest book—two novellas joined by a poem—and never return.

Jacket Copy:  Immigrants lost in the blistering expanse of the Sonoran Desert, problem bears, bats pollinating saguaros, a Good Samaritan filling tanks at emergency water stations, and the terrified runaway boy who shoots him pierce the heart and mind of Rosana Derais. “Vanishings,” the first story in Silence and Song, is a love letter, a prayer to these strangers whose lives penetrate and transform Rosana’s own sorrow. In “Translations,” the prose poem connecting the two longer fictions, child refugees at a multilingual literacy center in Salt Lake City discover the merciful “translation” of dance and pantomime. The convergence of two disparate events—a random murder in Seattle and the nuclear accident at Chernobyl—catalyze the startling, eruptive form of the concluding piece,“requiem: home: and the rain, after.” Narrated in first person by the killer’s sister and plural first person by the “liquidators” who come to the Evacuation Zone to bury entire villages poisoned by radioactive fallout, “requiem” navigates the immediate trauma of murder and environmental disaster; personal and global devastation; and the remarkable recovery of the miraculously diverse more-than-human world.

Blurbworthiness:  “Melanie Rae Thon belts out her stories in a tone and style reminiscent of classic blues singers....The reader is swept along not only by her remarkable characterizations, but also by the taut, magic current of her prose, which carries an exhilarating rhythmic punch.” (New York Times Book Review)

Opening Lines:  My brother kneels in the back of the Chrysler. Leo Derais, eleven years old: he’s skipped three grades: this fall he’ll start high school.
     He’s just made the most astonishing discovery, has seen the evidence and understands at last how time moves at different speeds in both directions.

Mendocino Fire: Stories
by Elizabeth Tallent
(Harper)

My Fall reading schedule is peppered with big, meaty novels like City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg, Purity by Jonathan Franzen and Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving. Tucked in among those tomes, however, I’d like to sneak in a little short-story refreshment like Elizabeth Tallent’s latest collection whose stories lure me with titles like “Mystery Son,” “Eros 101” and “Mystery Caller.”

Jacket Copy:  The triumphant, long-awaited return of a writer of remarkable gifts: in this collection of richly imagined stories—her first new work in twenty years—the master of short fiction delivers a diverse suite of stories about men and women confronting their vulnerabilities in times of transition and challenge. Beginning in the 1980s, Elizabeth Tallent’s work, appeared in some of our most prestigious literary publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper’s. Marked by its quiet power and emotional nuance, her fiction garnered widespread praise. Now, at long last, Tallent returns with a new collection of diverse, thematically linked, and deeply powerful stories that confirm her enduring gift for capturing relationships at their moment of transformation: marriages breaking apart, people haunted by memories of old love and reaching haltingly toward new futures. Mendocino Fire explore moments of fracture and fragmentation; it limns the wilderness of our inner psyche and brilliantly evokes the electric tension of deep emotion. In these pages, Tallent explores expectations met and thwarted, and our never-ending quest to avoid being alone. With this breathtaking collection, she cements her rightful place in the literary pantheon beside her contemporaries Lorrie Moore, Ann Beattie, and Louise Erdrich. Visceral and surprising, profound yet elemental, Mendocino Fire is a welcome visit with a wise and familiar friend.

Blurbworthiness:  “Elizabeth Tallent is, and always has been, a vivid, meticulous, and astutely inviting writer. These new stories vitally tell us how things are for us, in the most acute and memorable ways. Her ear is perfect; her gaze searing and unmistakable.”  (Richard Ford)

Opening Lines:  Among the son’s bright fucking ideas, that last summer they worked together, was the notion that since there was good money in sport fishing they ought to start taking out parties of tourists. Shug could savor a rank cigar, resting up his bad shoulder while doctors and lawyers baited hooks, and when a senator failed to reel in a big Chinook Shug could grin around the last skunky inch and salt the wound with “Wave bye-bye to your wallhanger, son.”

True False
by Miles Klee
(O/R Books)

As a fan of Miles Klee’s story in the Watchlist anthology, I’m pumped to read this new collection of short stories—most of them very short in length—but, I assume, long and deep when it comes to thematic concerns. I’m a fan of short-shorts. Every now and then, I need a succession of quick, stinging barbs to the brain. Browsing through True False, I can tell already that Klee will deliver the jabs and jazz.

Jacket Copy:  Miles Klee’s first book Ivyland was variously hailed as “sharply intelligent” (Publishers Weekly) and “harsh, spastic” (Justin Taylor): we like to think of True False as intelligently spastic, or sharply harsh—disquieting and funny. A collection of stories that range from the very short to the merely short, these forty-four tales evoke extraordinary scenes in an understated manner that’s marked Klee one of today’s most intriguing writers. From the apocalyptic to the utopic, from a haunted office building to a suburban pool that may be alive, a day in the mind of a demi-god Pythagoras to a secret race to develop artificial love, True False captures a fractured reality more real than our own.

Blurbworthiness:  “Miles Klee is a fresh genius of the American literary sentence, and his every paragraph is aburst with nervous, agitative exactitudes. So much gets itself zanily and definitively rendered in the crackle of his ultravivid prose that True False is not just a joltingly original collection but the essential record of the inner terrors of our hyperurban era.” (Gary Lutz, author of Stories in the Worst Way)

Opening Lines:  The last known speakers of American English were garbagemen.  (from “Dead Languages,” the first story in the collection)

Bad Sex
by Clancy Martin
(Tyrant Books)

Last month, I talked to you about Married Sex. Now, I’d like to have a word about Bad Sex. Bad Sex and Good Writing. Clancy Martin’s new novel is slim, composed of very short chapters (most only a few pages long), and the kind of writing that’s as electric as French-kissing a lamp socket. You’ll sizzle your way through this book quickly, and feel good about yourself afterwards.

Jacket Copy:  “I drink, I hurt myself and the people around me, and then I write.” Brett is in Central America, away from her husband, when she begins a love affair with his friend, Eduard. Tragedy and comedy are properly joined at the hip in this loosely autobiographical book about infidelity, drinking, and the postponing of repercussions under the sun. Though coming undone is something we all try to avoid, Clancy Martin reminds us that going off the rails is sometimes a part of the ride.

Opening Lines:  One of us had to watch our hotel in Tulum during the storm, so I was flying into Cancun International then renting a car. The hurricane had closed all of the airports on the coast, and my flight was delayed, and then cancelled.

Blurbworthiness:  “Bad Sex is like a diamond, cut clean, dangerously sharp, brutally hard and yet paradoxically beautiful, ruthlessly honing in on the plight of a woman caught in the throes of alcoholism, desire, marriage and adultery. Like Camus in The Stranger, Martin digs into the philosophical through precise narrative, exposing the big questions for the reader to answer.”  (David Means, author of Assorted Fire Events)

Old Silk Road
by Brandon Caro
(Post Hill Press)

As a writer of war fiction, I inevitably read a lot of war fiction. This past reading year has seen a lot of great novels pass before my eyes: The Valley by John Renehan, I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them by Jesse Goolsby, and A Hard And Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti among them. Now along comes a fresh and promising novel set in Afghanistan by an equally fresh and promising writer who also happens to be a war veteran. I can’t wait to deploy my imagination into the world of war and madness, as written by former Navy corpsman Brandon Caro.

Jacket Copy:  Old Silk Road is a prescient, powerful novel of the Afghan war by someone who’s been there. Norman “Doc” Rodgers suspects he won’t make it out of this one alive. He’s a young combat medic in Afghanistan, eager to avenge his father’s death in the World Trade Center, and make sense of a new world that feels like it’s fallen to pieces. Haunted by hallucinatory encounters, his only solace is a barely concealed addiction to the precious opiates he’s supposed to dole out sparingly to those beyond aid. In this tautly-plotted debut novel, Brandon Caro, a veteran who served in Afghanistan, tells the story of a soldier’s undoing in raw, incendiary, hypnotic prose that forces us to ask ourselves about what we know about the futility of war–and what other outcome we can expect?

Opening Lines:  The sun shone hard and the wind billowed in from the west the day I first killed a man.

Blurbworthiness:  “In our era of yellow ribbon patriotism and collective detachment from America’s brushfire wars, Brandon Caro’s Old Silk Road should serve as an IV of truth for any citizen still trying to give a damn. In tight, gritty prose, Caro taps into deep emotional veins the way only fiction allows for, and his drug-addled anti-hero Doc is as distinct a protagonist I’ve yet come across in post-9/11 war literature. Care about the consequences of America’s foreign adventures? Read this novel.” (Matt Gallagher, author of Kaboom)

A Free State
by Tom Piazza
(Harper)

I love a good chase novel. And when it’s wrapped in the complexities of racial issues, identity and our national shame of slavery, that makes it all the more attractive. Tom Piazza’s new novel is a book to run toward, not flee.

Jacket Copy:  The author of City of Refuge returns with a startling and powerful novel of race, violence, and identity set on the eve of the Civil War. The year is 1855. Blackface minstrelsy is the most popular form of entertainment in a nation about to be torn apart by the battle over slavery. Henry Sims, a fugitive slave and a brilliant musician, has escaped to Philadelphia, where he earns money living by his wits and performing on the street. He is befriended by James Douglass, leader of a popular minstrel troupe struggling to compete with dozens of similar ensembles, who imagines that Henry’s skill and magnetism might restore his troupe’s sagging fortunes. The problem is that black and white performers are not allowed to appear together onstage. Together, the two concoct a masquerade to protect Henry’s identity, and Henry creates a sensation in his first appearances with the troupe. Yet even as their plan begins to reverse the troupe’s decline, a brutal slave hunter named Tull Burton has been employed by Henry’s former master to track down the runaway and retrieve him, by any means necessary. Bursting with narrative tension and unforgettable characters, shot through with unexpected turns and insight, A Free State is a thrilling reimagining of the American story by a novelist at the height of his powers.

Opening Lines:  City haze shot through with morning sun. Buildings razed, buildings rising, dust drifting off the dirt streets drying in the morning air. Clank of carts on cobblestones, barrels unloaded, the men shouting, the mist burning off the river.

Blurbworthiness:  “Once I’d begun reading A Free State, I couldn’t leave my chair. It combines bite-your-nails tension with deeply felt evocations of the brutalities of slavery, the perplexities of racial masquerading and the transcendent joys of making music. At the end (Piazza) executes a swerve so bold, it’ll take your breath away.”  (David Gates, author of A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me)

Lay Down Your Weary Tune
by W. B. Belcher
(Other Press)

Just like that waterlogged wool cap snagged out of the river in the opening sentence of Lay Down Your Weary Tune,  I was hooked right from the start with W. B. Belcher’s opening lines (see below). I’m intrigued and entranced and can’t wait to read more.

Jacket Copy:  In this debut novel, a ghostwriter of the memoirs of a reclusive folk music icon—part Woody Guthrie, part Bob Dylan—attempts to glean fact from fiction, only to discover the deeper he digs into the musician’s past, the more his own past rises to the surface. Despite his fame, Eli Page is a riddle wrapped in a myth, inside decades of mask-making. His past is so shrouded in gossip and half-truths that no one knows who he is behind the act. Jack Wyeth, a budding writer, joins Eli in Galesville, a small town on the border of New York and Vermont, only to learn that the musician’s mind is failing. As he scrambles to uncover the truth, Jack is forced to confront his own past, his own hang-ups, and his own fears. At the same time, he falls for a local artist who has secrets of her own, he becomes linked to a town controversy, and he struggles to let go of his childhood idols and bridge the divide between myth and reality. Set against a folk Americana aesthetic, Lay Down Your Weary Tune is an emotionally charged exploration of myth-making, desire, and regret, and the inescapable bond between the past and present.

Opening Lines:  When little Sammy Sweet fished a waterlogged wool cap out of the river, Trooper Mark Calvin, of the New York State Police, said it was “definitive” proof that Eli had drowned. Case closed. Time to get on with our lives. But three days later, in the hollow behind the paper mill, Sammy snagged Eli’s bruised leather satchel from the murmuring backwash. A half a mile upstream from Eli’s last known location, the discovery was fodder for a new round of conspiracy theories, conjectures, and what-if scenarios. To further infuriate the investigators, the bag’s limp, deformed body wore a small bullet hole just above its clasp. Members of the trolling media, busybodies, and Galesville’s newfound tourists all voiced the same question from the same village sidewalks and gas pumps and bar stools: “What the hell happened to Eli Page?”

Blurbworthiness:  “As beautiful and artfully constructed as an old guitar, Lay Down Your Weary Tune feels both familiar and wholly original. William Belcher’s debut is a highly readable wonder.”  (James Scott, author of The Kept)

The History of Great Things
by Elizabeth Crane
(Harper Perennial)

I really shouldn’t have to do much more than whisper these words in your ear: “Elizabeth Crane has a new novel coming out.” That should be enough to get you all twitterpated, enough to make you run and mark your calendar for April 5, 2016, enough to send you back to your bookshelf to read (or re-read) Crane’s previous books (We Only Know So Much, When the Messenger Is Hot and You Must Be This Happy to Enter) before this new one arrives. But if, for some reason, that’s not enough, read on for further proselytizing, arm-twisting, and brow-beating. The History of Great Things is coming, and it’s the one to put on top of your 2016 must-read list.

Jacket Copy:  A witty and irresistible story of a mother and daughter regarding each other through the looking glass of time, grief, and forgiveness. In two beautifully counterpoised narratives, two women—mother and daughter—try to make sense of their own lives by revisiting what they know about each other. The History of Great Things tells the entwined stories of Lois, a daughter of the Depression Midwest who came to New York to transform herself into an opera star, and her daughter, Elizabeth, an aspiring writer who came of age in the 1970s and ’80s in the forbidding shadow of her often-absent, always larger-than-life mother. In a tour de force of storytelling and human empathy, Elizabeth chronicles the events of her mother’s life, and in turn Lois recounts her daughter’s story—pulling back the curtain on lifelong secrets, challenging and interrupting each other, defending their own behavior, brandishing or swallowing their pride, and, ultimately, coming to understand each other in a way that feels both extraordinary and universal. The History of Great Things is a novel about a mother and daughter who are intimately connected and not connected enough; it will make readers laugh and cry and wonder how we become the adults we always knew we should—even if we’re not always adults our parents understand.

Opening Lines: You’re late. Two weeks, forty-one hours late, nine pounds, ten ounces. That’s a lot. That’s like a bowling ball coming out of me.
      —I’ve heard this part before, Mom.
      —Just let me have my say and then you can have yours.
      —Fine.
      So you’re a giant bowling ball coming out of me. If bowling balls were square. It hurts like a bitch. Honestly. No one mentioned this detail to me in advance. I may as well be pushing out a full-grown adult. Wearing a tweed pantsuit. Think about that. That’s what they should tell kids in sex ed. Not that sex ed exists now, because it doesn’t. Sex exists. Not ed.

Studies in the Hereafter
by Sean Bernard
(Red Hen Press)

C’mon, admit it: you’re obsessed with death. Or, to be more exact, you have a healthy curiosity about “life after death.” Does it exist? Will it be cotton-candy clouds or fire and brimstone? Will we romp with our dogs, take long walks with our loved ones, eat pickles on our ice cream without a trace of guilt? Will Warren Beatty serenade us with a saxophone? Sean Bernard’s new novel Studies in the Hereafter may not have all the answers, but he’s certainly got some interesting questions. This is one book I want to read before I die.

Jacket Copy:  A disillusioned office bureaucrat in the afterlife has come to realize that maybe heaven isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Bored by the endless routine of work, golf, and vegan food, he finds his one saving grace in his Field Studies: detailed reports he compiles on the living in order to determine their best fit in his world. While working on his 62nd Field Study, he begins to fall for Tetty, a detached Basque-American beauty living in Nevada, while struggling to understand what she sees in Carmelo, a clumsy scholar obsessed with the elusive Basque culture. When people start going missing from heaven for no apparent reason, the narrator learns that Field Study 62 may hold the key to explaining the disappearances.

Opening Lines:  I’m just a bureaucrat. I live an ordinary life—if you can even call it a “life.”
      Maybe that sounds bad. Personally, when I hear other people say they live ordinary lives, I imagine days of dull routine, the waking up to alarm, the showering, the coffee, the dead-eyed commute to work, the sitting at desk and compiling reports and trying to lower a work-stack that will never end. Middling lunches. Hollow office gossip. Reading too-familiar human interest stories. More gossip. Home. Dinner. Television. Bed. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
      When I hear people say their lives are like this, are “ordinary,” I pity them a bit. Because after all isn’t existence our only chance to touch the trembling mysteries of the soul and the universe and etc?
      Then I remember—oh, that’s my life, too.

Blurbworthiness:  “A novel that makes us laugh while breaking our hearts; that is thought-provoking as it entertains; that is profoundly new, even while looking askance at old assumptions. Herein are vegan angels, time-hopping dead bureaucrats, and a love story for the ages. Quite simply: this novel is a joy." (Christopher Coake, author of We’re in Trouble)

Front Porch Books: August 2014 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of books--mainly advance review copies (aka "uncorrected proofs" and "galleys")--I've received from publishers, but also sprinkled with packages from Book Mooch, Amazon and other sources.  Because my dear friends, Mr. FedEx and Mrs. UPS, leave them with a doorbell-and-dash method of delivery, I call them my Front Porch Books.  In this digital age, ARCs are also beamed to the doorstep of my Kindle via NetGalley and Edelweiss.  Note: most of these books won't be released for another 2-6 months; I'm just here to pique your interest and stock your wish lists. Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released.

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton (Ecco):  Maybe it’s because I’m just emerging from the depths of Anthony Doerr’s mesmerizing novel All the Light We Cannot See, in which miniature models of two French cities (Paris and Saint-Malo) figure prominently, but ant-scale versions of urban areas fascinate me.  Then again, maybe it’s the notion of being able to hover like God over these small worlds that draws me closer.  Whatever the reason, Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist makes me want to shrink down and really get inside this novel.   That fantastic cover design goes a long way toward hooking me, too.  Here’s the Jacket Copy:

On a brisk autumn day in 1686, eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman arrives in Amsterdam to begin a new life as the wife of illustrious merchant trader Johannes Brandt. But her new home, while splendorous, is not welcoming. Johannes is kind yet distant, always locked in his study or at his warehouse office—leaving Nella alone with his sister, the sharp-tongued and forbidding Marin. But Nella’s world changes when Johannes presents her with an extraordinary wedding gift: a cabinet-sized replica of their home. To furnish her gift, Nella engages the services of a miniaturist—an elusive and enigmatic artist whose tiny creations mirror their real-life counterparts in eerie and unexpected ways. Johannes’ gift helps Nella to pierce the closed world of the Brandt household. But as she uncovers its unusual secrets, she begins to understand—and fear—the escalating dangers that await them all. In this repressively pious society where gold is worshipped second only to God, to be different is a threat to the moral fabric of society, and not even a man as rich as Johannes is safe. Only one person seems to see the fate that awaits them. Is the miniaturist the key to their salvation...or the architect of their destruction?

Check out these atmospheric Opening Lines:

      The funeral is supposed to be a quiet affair, for the deceased had no friends. But words are water in Amsterdam, they flood your ears and set the rot, and the church’s east corner is crowded. She watches the scene unfold from the safety of the choir stall, as guildsmen and their wives approach the gaping grave like ants toward the honey. Soon, they are joined by VOC clerks and ship’s captains, regentesses, pastry-makers – and him, still wearing that broad-brimmed hat. She tries to pity him. Pity, unlike hate, can be boxed and put away.
      The church’s painted roof – the one thing the reformers didn’t pull down – rises above them like the tipped-up hull of a magnificent ship. It is a mirror to the city’s soul; inked on its ancient beams, Christ in judgement holds his sword and lily, a golden cargo breaks the waves, the Virgin rests on a crescent moon. Flipping up the old misericord beside her, her fingers flutter on the proverb of exposed wood. It is a relief of a man shitting a bag of coins, a leer of pain chipped across his face. What’s changed? she thinks.
      And yet.
      Even the dead are in attendance today, grave-slabs hiding body on body, bones on dust, stacked up beneath the mourners’ feet. Below that floor are women’s jaws, a merchant’s pelvis, the hollow ribs of a fat grandee. There are little corpses down there, some no longer than a loaf of bread. Noting how people shift their eyes from such condensed sadness, how they move from any tiny slab they see, she cannot blame them.

I Love You More by Jennifer Murphy (Doubleday):  Novels narrated by precocious young girls are as old as mockingbirds, but Jennifer Murphy’s debut somehow feels fresh right from the Opening Lines:

      The rumors started before my daddy’s body got cold. I’d made my peace with the lies by then—lies I’ve learned are a necessary evil—and, being from the South, I’m used to cloying (that means sickeningly sweet) smiles, but I hadn’t figured on the sideways glances, hushed talk, loud silence. Feigned ignorance. I mean someone’s dying had always made the front page of the Hollyville Herald. Even Mrs. Morgan’s twenty-year-old cat got a paragraph, but not my daddy. The particulars of Oliver Lane’s funeral were tucked in the ad section between an upcoming gun show, an irony I’m sure was lost on the editor, and a JESUS LOVES YOU, standard filler for slow news days. Thankfully there was no mention of murder, or of the fact that the police suspected Mama or one of those other two ladies. It wouldn’t be polite to put such things in writing.
      My name is Picasso, like the artist. Mama said she named me Picasso because he painted about truth, but I think Mama misinterpreted his words. What Pablo Picasso said was this: Art is a lie that makes us realize truth. What I think he meant is that great art is born from skillful lying, and something else, something much more profound, that lying is okay as long as its end goal is altruistic. Well that’s how I read it anyway, and that’s how I’ve been able to justify what happened that day.

“What happened that day” is at the heart of I Love You More, one of the more intriguing books to land on my front porch this month.  Here’s the Jacket Copy:

One man, three wives, the perfect murder. A scintillating novel of betrayal and conspiracy. Picasso Lane is twelve years old when her father, Oliver, is murdered at their summer beach house. Her mother, Diana, is the primary suspect—until the police discover his second wife, and then his third. The women say they have never met—but Picasso knows otherwise. Picasso remembers the morning beautiful Jewels showed up at their house, carrying the same purse as her mother, and a family portrait featuring her father with two strange boys. Picasso remembers lifting the phone, listening to late night calls with Bert, a woman heavily pregnant with Oliver's fourth child. As the police circle and a detective named Kyle Kennedy becomes a regular fixture in their home, Picasso tries to make sense of her father's death, the depth of his deceit, and the secrets that bind these three women. Cunningly paced and plotted, I Love You More is a riveting novel of misplaced loyalty, jealousy, and revenge.

Blurbworthiness:  “When I really, truly love a book, I feel a kind of deep excitement-envy-admiration that verges on awe.  My requirements: the story must make me forget everything but it, and the writing must be lean, evocative, and powerful.  I Love You More is all of these things.  I really, truly love it so much that I wish I’d written it myself.  In its pages, Jennifer Murphy deftly balances light and dark, humanity and heartlessness, love and murder, and creates characters so well drawn you feel as if you know them, as well as a mystery so compelling you can barely look away from the page.”  (Jennifer Niven, author of American Blonde)

Ordinary Sins by Jim Heynen (Milkweed Editions):  My advance copy of Jim Heynen’s story collection is a thin book—no thicker than saltine cracker, really—but it is fat with characters.  We meet these people in 47 stories spread across 96 pages.  You do the math.  At that rate, Heynen better be a pretty damned good writer to put flesh on the bones of one character before moving on to the next.  From what little I’ve sampled from the book, I’d say he succeeds more than he fails.  Several of the titles begin with “Who,” a silent “The Man” or “The Woman” preceding it: “Who Jingled His Change,” “Who Loved Her Dog,” “Who Didn’t Like to Have People Watch Him Eat,” “Who Talked to His Bees,” etc. We also meet “The Hoarder,” “The Hardware Store Man,” “The Checkout Clerk,” “The Couple That Never Fought,” and “The Lepidopterist,” whose Opening Lines are:

He had an eye for the detailed web in the clearwings and for the colors in the brimstones and sulphurs. He admired the excited movement in the flashers and skippers, and savored the sweet diversity of the fritillaries, the leafwings, and the metalmarks.

I also like the way the short-short story “The Chapstick Guy” opens:

For some reason this man wore so much chapstick on his lips that if he fell on his face he’d leave a skid mark like a slug. Nobody ever commented about it, even though his lips slid around so much when he talked that you’d think he was trying to invent a new language for romance.

There, I’ve already given you half of this piece of flash fiction.  You’ll need to buy the book to find out what happens to The Chapstick Guy.  Along with fresh, inventive fiction, Ordinary Sins features drawings by Tom Pohrt.  Blurbworthiness:  “Ordinary Sins gives you people-watching in book form.  Each eccentric in this pantheon is a magnet for your gaze, their excesses fascinating, exasperating, bizarre—then suddenly familiar.  ‘Hey, I have relatives like these characters!’  And eventually you will see yourself, recognize your quirks, and thanks to Jim Heynen’s portraits of us all, you may forgive yourself.  Why be human if you can’t be odd in your own glorious way?  This is a book to revel in.”  (Kim Stafford, author of The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft)

Keep Your Friends Close by Paula Daly (Grove):  Fans of Paula Daly’s debut novel What Kind of a Mother Are You? will definitely want to get in line for this new book, a tense marital thriller that has shades of Diabolique and Single White Female.  Here’s the Jacket Copy, which is sure to unnerve even the happiest of marriages:

Natty and Sean Wainwright have a rock-solid marriage—with two teenage daughters, a successful hotel business, and a beautiful house, they are a model family. When their younger daughter falls gravely ill on a school trip to France, Natty rushes to her side. Luckily, Natty’s best friend from college, Eve Dalladay, is visiting and offers to stay with Sean to lend a hand in the Wainwright household. But Natty returns home to find that Eve has taken to family life a little too well: Sean has fallen in love with her. With no choice but to put on a brave face for the children, Natty attempts to start anew—yet no matter how hard she tries to set herself upright, Eve is there to knock her down again. Then Natty receives a mysterious note that says Eve has done this before—more than once—and the consequences were fatal. On a mission to reveal Eve as a vindictive serial mistress, Natty must navigate through a treacherous maze of secrets and lies that threatens her life and the safety of her loved ones.

Are you nervously twisting your wedding band around your ring finger yet?  Here’s some Blurbworthiness to seal the deal:  “The suspense, dread and paranoia intensify with each page.  Paula Daly explores what happens when a serpent invades the family nest, twisting truth into lies and illuminating our deepest fears.  A novel that explores the power of family, love and betrayal, and what lengths we will go to keep our loved ones safe.”  (Denise Hamilton, author of Damage Control)

The Children Act by Ian McEwan (Nan A. Talese):  There are some authors whose new novels I will buy before the last syllable of their name leaves a bookseller’s lips: Richard Ford, John Irving, Alice McDermott, Benjamin Percy, and Shari Holman, to name just a few.  Add Ian McEwan to the list.  Starting with Atonement, I have been a die-hard fan.  So, it was with heart-flutters of joy that I received his newest release, The Children Act, which is due out next month.  Turning to the Opening Lines, I was struck by the Dickensian Bleak House homage:

London. Trinity term one week old. Implacable June weather. Fiona Maye, a High Court judge, at home on Sunday evening, supine on a chaise lounge, staring past her stockinged feet toward the end of the room, toward a partial view of recessed bookshelves by the fireplace and, to one side, by a tall window, a tiny Renoir lithograph of a bather, bought by her thirty years ago for fifty pounds. Probably a fake. Below it, centered on a round walnut table, a blue vase. No memory of how she came by it. Nor when she last put flowers in it. The fireplace not lit in a year. Blackened raindrops falling irregularly into the grate with a ticking sound against balled-up yellowing newsprint. A Bokhara rug spread on wide polished floorboards. Looming at the edge of vision, a baby grand piano bearing silver-framed family photos on its deep black shine. On the floor by the chaise lounge, within her reach, the draft of a judgment. And Fiona was on her back, wishing all this stuff at the bottom of the sea.

I don’t know about you, but I can really feel that room and hear those raindrops.  Here’s the Jacket Copy to convince the unconvinced:

Fiona Maye is a leading High Court judge who presides over cases in the family court. She is renowned for her fierce intelligence, exactitude, and sensitivity. But her professional success belies private sorrow and domestic strife. There is the lingering regret of her childlessness, and now her marriage of thirty years is in crisis. At the same time, she is called on to try an urgent case: Adam, a beautiful seventeen-year-old boy, is refusing for religious reasons the medical treatment that could save his life, and his devout parents echo his wishes. Time is running out. Should the secular court overrule sincerely expressed faith? In the course of reaching a decision, Fiona visits Adam in the hospital—and encounter that stirs long-buried feelings in her and powerful new emotions in the boy. Her judgment has momentous consequences for them both.

See How Small by Scott Blackwood (Little, Brown):  Judging by its Opening Lines, I suspect See How Small is going to be an emotionally-rough book to read:

      We have always lived here, though we pretend we’ve just arrived. That’s the trick, to make forgetful shapes with your mouth so everything feels new and unremembered. But after a while we slip up. A careless word, an uninvited smell, a tip of the tongue taste of something sweet, makes the room suddenly familiar—and we have to begin again. Like startled infants, we look to your face to tell us what comes next. You came into the fire.
      Take off your clothes, the men with guns said.
      Please, we said.
      Now, they said.
      Please let us go, we said. We won’t tell anyone.
      Not anyone? They smiled with their guns.
      Not anyone, we said. Please.
      Our jeans and boots and jackets and shirts were piled high in the middle of the floor, like a breaking wave.
      The tile was cold under our feet.
      Across the room, the stainless steel ice cream case gleamed. On the floor beside it, the cash register drawer sprawled on its side.

The narrators of that first chapter are three teenage girls who (no spoiler here) are murdered in a rather brutal fashion.  Though you might think this is a novel told by ghosts (a la The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold or The Night Country by Stewart O’Nan), Blackwood soon moves his narrative, like a roving camera, to other members of the small town so we get a chorus of voices filling us in on what happened in that ice cream parlor.  Hard as it may be, I really can’t wait to read this heartbreaking novel.  Blurbworthiness:  “Horrible deaths of the innocent, and the various means and tactics by which the living manage to go on in the aftermath of unsolved horror, form the heart of Scott Blackwood’s haunted and haunting novel, See How Small.  His prose is crisp and his narrative approach is fresh and inventive, calmly pushing forward, with characters rendered so convincingly you think about sending cards of condolence or calling with advice on the investigation.”  (Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone and The Maid’s Version)

Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut (Europa Editions):  Europa’s cover design for Damon Galgut’s third novel could be a frame from a Merchant-Ivory film.  That wouldn’t be too far off, actually, since Arctic Summer is a fictionalized biography of E. M. Forster whose novels A Room With a View, Maurice and Howards End Ismail Merchant and James Ivory put before the camera.  I don’t know much about Forster (haven’t read his books, though I’ve seen some of the movie versions), so I’m especially interested to read Galgut’s treatment of his life.  Here’s the Jacket Copy:

Damon Galgut's third novel, a fictionalized biography of English author E. M. Forster, focuses on Forster's many years in India and the process of writing his masterpiece, A Passage to India. This compact, finely wrought novel also addresses Forster's unforgiving childhood in England and the homosexuality he feared and repressed throughout his life. Psychologically acute without being sentimental, Forster's relationships are described with compassion and great care. Galgut is a master at constructing strange, compelling landscapes, and Arctic Summer shifts seamlessly between staid, restricting England and Cairo and vibrant, pleasantly, absurd India. Moments of gentle humor shine through the sparse prose, lending Forster a humanity that makes his story all the more heartbreaking.

Even the Opening Lines have a formality that seems to be in line with something Forster himself would write:

In October of 1912, the SS City of Birmingham was travelling through the Red Sea, midway on her journey to India, when two men found themselves together on the forward deck. Each had come there separately, hoping to escape a concert that some of the other passengers were organising, but they were slightly acquainted by now and not unhappy to have company. It was the middle of the afternoon. They were sitting in a spot that offered sun and shade, as well as seclusion from the wind. Both carried books with them, which they politely set aside when they began to speak.

Blurbworthiness:  “In describing these adventures and encounters, as well as meetings with Edward Carpenter and others, Galgut has so seamlessly incorporated Forster’s diaries, letters and novels into his narrative that it is often hard to tell which novelist is which.”  (The Telegraph)

If Not For This by Pete Fromm (Red Hen Press):  Just as I will stand in a long, out-the-door-and-around-the-corner line to buy a new Ian McEwan novel, any time a fresh Fromm hits the bookstore shelves, I’m there.  In this case, I happened to be at Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, Montana for a reading by fellow Big Sky novelist Malcolm Brooks when I spied the woman on the cover of If Not For This floating past me.  Snatch and grab.  This new novel, set partially in my home state of Wyoming, looks especially good.  Exhibit A: the Jacket Copy:

After meeting at a boatman’s bash on the Snake River, river runners Maddy and Dalt embark on a lifelong love affair. They marry on the banks of the Buffalo Fork, sure they’ll live there the rest of their days. Forced by the economics of tourism to leave Wyoming, they start a new adventure, opening their own river business in Ashland, Oregon: Halfmoon Whitewater. They prosper there, leading rafting trips and guiding fishermen into the wilds of Mongolia and Russia. But when Maddy, laid low by dizzy spells, with a mono that isn’t quite mono, both discovers she is pregnant and is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, they realize their adventure is just beginning. Navigating hazards that dwarf any of the rapids they’ve faced together, Maddy narrates her life with Dalt the way she lives it: undaunted, courageous, in the present tense. Driven by her irresistible voice, full of wit and humor and defiance, If Not For This is a love story like no other.

Blurbworthiness:  “What do you do when you get everything you most desire in this life, but getting through every day requires you to be a superhero?  In Pete Fromm’s smart, gorgeous, uplifting and heartbreaking new novel, If Not For This, you consider yourself damn lucky.”  (Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of Once Upon a River)

The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit by Graham Joyce (Doubleday):  Another novel I picked up on that same Country Bookshelf visit (CB really knows how to curate books to my taste) was this new one by British writer Graham Joyce.  I’ve mentioned his earlier end-of-the-world tale, The Silent Land, earlier here at The Quivering Pen, so this was an easy sell to me.  The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit looks like it might make for some great late-summer beach reading (if only I had a beach here in Montana….).  Check out the Opening Lines:

      It was 1976 and the hottest summer in living memory. The reservoirs were cracked and dry; some of the towns were restricted to water from standpipes; crops were failing in the fields. England was a country innocent of all such extremity. I was nineteen and had just finished my first year at college.
      Broke and with time on my hands, I needed a summer job. Looking for a way out from the plans my stepdad had made for me, I got an interview at a holiday resort on the east coast. Skegness, celebrated for that jolly fisherman in gum boots and a sou’wester gamely making headway against a sea- ward gale: It’s so bracing!
      But when I arrived in Skegness there wasn’t a breath of wind, not even a sigh. The train rumbled in on hot iron tracks, decanted me and a few others onto the platform, and wheezed out again. The dirty Victorian red brick of the station seemed brittle, powdery. Flowers potted along the platform wilted and the grubby paintwork was cracked and peeled. I took a double-decker bus—mercifully open-topped—and asked the driver to drop me at the resort. He forgot and had to stop the bus and come up the stairs to tell me he’d passed it by. I had to backpack it a quarter of a mile, all in the shimmering heat. I followed the wire-mesh perimeter of the site with its neat rows of chalets and the seagull-like cries of the holidaymakers.
      I thought I might get a job as a kitchen porter or as a white-jacketed waiter bowling soup plates at the holidaymakers. Any job at all, just so long as I didn’t have to go home. The manager in charge of recruitment—a dapper figure in a blue blazer and sporting a tiny pencil mustache—didn’t seem too interested. He was preoccupied with sprinkling bread crumbs on the corner of his desk. As I waited to be interviewed a sparrow fluttered in through the open window, picked up a crumb in its beak, and flew out again.

And here’s the Jacket Copy (complete with a plague of ladybugs!) to further entice us, like birds to crumbs:

David, a college student, takes a summer job at a run-down family resort in a dying English resort town. This is against the wishes of his family... because it was at this resort where David's biological father disappeared fifteen years earlier. But something undeniable has called David there. A deeper otherworldliness lies beneath the surface of what we see. The characters have a suspicious edge to them. David is haunted by eerie visions of a mysterious man carrying a rope, walking hand-in-hand with a small child...and the resort is under siege by a plague of ladybugs. Something different is happening in this town. When David gets embroiled in a fiercely torrid love triangle, the stakes turn more and more menacing. And through it all, David feels as though he is getting closer to the secrets of his own past. This is a darkly magic and sexy book that has a strong suspense line running through it. It's destined to continue to pull in a wider circle of readers for the exceptionally talented Graham Joyce.

Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas (Hogarth):  This new novel by the author of The Slap had me in its grip right from the Opening Lines—words which immediately shot this 433-page book to the top layers of my To-Be-Read pile:

      When the rain first spills from those egg-white foams of cloud that seem too delicate to have burst forth in such a deluge, I freeze. The heavy drops fizz on the dry grass as they hit; I think this is what a pit of snakes would sound like.
      And suddenly the rain is falling in sheets, though the sky is still blue, the sun still shining. The Glaswegians on the pebbled shore are yelling and screaming, rushing out of the water, huddling under the trees, running back to their cars. Except for the chubby young man with the St Andrews tattoo on his bicep, criss-crossed white lines on blue; he is standing in the water up to his knees, grinning, his arms outstretched, welcoming the rain, daring it.
      And just as suddenly the rain has stopped and they all slink back to the beach. Two young boys race past me and throw themselves into the lake. A teenage girl throws away the magazine she has been sheltering beneath, takes out a compact and starts to powder her cheeks and nose, to reapply colour to her lips till they are the pink of fairy floss. Someone has turned the music back on and the words when love takes over roar through the valley. A pale skinny youth with broken teeth and a mop of greasy black hair dives past me; sheets of crystal-clear water splash all over the wading tattooed guy, who grabs his friend, holds him from behind in a bear hug, and ducks him under. He sits on him, laughing. A woman shouts from the shore, "Get off him, Colm, get off him!"
      The chubby guy stands up, grinning, and the thin boy scrambles to his feet, coughing water.
      The girls and the women are all in bikinis, the boys and the men are all in shorts, and bare-chested or in singlets. Except me: I have jeans on and two layers on top, a t-shirt and an old yellowing shirt. The sun feels weak to me; it can’t get any stronger than pleasant, it can’t build to fire, it can’t manage force.

The narrator is Danny, a troubled competitive swimmer who—well, here, let’s let the Jacket Copy explain the plot of Barracuda:

Fourteen-year-old Daniel Kelly is special. Despite his upbringing in working-class Melbourne, he knows that his astonishing ability in the swimming pool has the potential to transform his life, silence the rich boys at the private school to which he has won a sports scholarship, and take him far beyond his neighborhood, possibly to international stardom and an Olympic medal. Everything Danny has ever done, every sacrifice his family has ever made, has been in pursuit of this dream. But what happens when the talent that makes you special fails you? When the goal that you’ve been pursuing for as long as you can remember ends in humiliation and loss? Twenty years later, Dan is in Scotland, terrified to tell his partner about his past, afraid that revealing what he has done will make him unlovable. When he is called upon to return home to his family, the moment of violence in the wake of his defeat that changed his life forever comes back to him in terrifying detail, and he struggles to believe that he’ll be able to make amends. Haunted by shame, Dan relives the intervening years he spent in prison, where the optimism of his childhood was completely foreign. Tender, savage, and blazingly brilliant, Barracuda is a novel about dreams and disillusionment, friendship and family, class, identity, and the cost of success. As Daniel loses everything, he learns what it means to be a good person—and what it takes to become one.

I hate to leave you with an unforgivable pun….but, really, I can’t wait to dive into this novel.