The Lost Chapter

 by Caroline Bishop

This is the story of an American woman who was sent to a girl's school in France in the 50's.  She did not adjust well to the rules, the curriculum -- organizing parties, flower arranging, managing staff in a household etc.  She is befriended by one of the girls.

The story gets a bit confusing.  There are two girls at the school, they are on an outing to the opera and The American girl falls for a man she meets at intermission.  She eventually convinces her brother to write letters as her father saying this man is her relative and he can take her on outings out of the building.  They eventually have sex and she gets pregnant.  The man tells her to have an abortion.  She can't afford it and decides to run away.  She invites her friend to join her.... but then the friend doesn't show up.  We find out this girl may have killed this man later on accidentally.

We then meet this American woman who is now 70 years of age, a cat lady and print maker.  She befriends a young girl who is grieving the death of her best friend who was hit by a car.  The mother tries to be close to the girl but isn't having success.  The old woman tries to get the girl interested in print making and to go to art school instead of study business.

Then the old woman discovers a book, authored by the woman who was her best friend.  She starts to read it and realizes it is roughly based on her time at the school in France.  The woman decides she needs to reconnect with her BF and invites the girl and her mother to accompany her to France.

The woman does meet up with her friend.  It is the French girl who had a baby.  She and her daughter now run a flower shop. She finds out the man who got her pregnant did not die after all and is still alive.  This takes a big weight off the American.

The old woman and the girl's mother try to convince the young girl that she is not responsible for her friend's death.  However, I am not sure I agree, she had a fight with her friend and pushed her into the street where she was hit and killed.  I think that she is somewhat responsible.

I found the story a bit confusing, with the different woman in life and in the book.  It was kind of predictable.  They keep referring to the girl's father but he is nowhere around, not sure if the parents are divorced or what... I was glad when I was done.

Oh William!

 by Elizabeth Strout

This is one of the books nominated for the Booker Longlist this year.

This book is about a woman, whose second husband died recently, who is having to cope with some issues with her first husband, whom she left years ago.

The woman had periodically met with her first husband over the years, for coffee etc.  It seems that her first husband was very remote and uncommunicative.  The book describes her relationship with her husband and mother-in-law.  It also describes the much better relationship that she had with her second husband.

Her ex-husband's second wife has now left him.  He is not handling that well.  In addition, the man has found out that his mother had a child before him whom she gave up for adoption.  He wants his ex-wife to accompany him on a trip to meet this step sister.  She reluctantly agrees.

The author does a great job of describing the frailties in people and the complexities in their relationships.  The protagonist still loves her ex in some ways but also knows that he drove her and continues to drive her crazy.

They fly to near where the ex was raised and tour a number of locations where he lived, eventually finding the very humble house where is mother was raised (they had not realized she was so poor as a child).  She was wealthy as an adult.

There is also some tension because the ex's mother left her husband to marry a German POW in America.  So there is some tension between the fact that the man's father was a German soldier and the woman's father a solider for the allies.

They eventually stop at the ex's step sister's house.  The woman goes in to talk to her.  Why didn't she make her husband go in and meet the step sister?  It was not her role??

Anyway she finds out the woman has had a good life but does not want to meet her step brother.  Maybe if he had come to meet her she might have changed her mind.

A fascinating character study, except for the woman continually enabling her disfunctional ex husband. Oh William!! about sums up the book.

I can certainly understand why this author has won the Pulitizer prize and other awards for her other books.

 

 

Two Nights in Lisbon

 by Chris Pavone

I have never read anything nor even heard of this author before.  He has published several other action/suspense books.

In this book an American couple travel to Lisbon.  The wife has accompanied her husband on a business trip.  When the wife awakes in the hotel room she is shocked to find her husband is not there and within a couple hours she is in touch with the police to tell them her husband is missing.  She keeps trying to reach him on his cell phone but he is not answering. This seems a bit quick to react and the police tell her that.  She admits they have not been married long but that this is out of character for him.  Eventually she is able to see video surveillance which seems to show her husband getting into a car around 7 a.m.

She then goes to the American embassy where she is again assured that probably nothing is amiss.

Both the American embassy and the police investigate further and find that both the woman and her husband have changed their names.  This raises suspicion.  Somehow the CIA also seem to be involved so these three agencies start investigating further and tracking the woman's movements.  Eventually one of them tracks the husband's phone to a garbage can in a warehouse district so they think something bad might have happened.

The woman is walking down a street and a motorcycle roars up and hands her a cell phone.  The driver tells her to answer it when it rings.  She does so and is told that her husband has been kidnapped and she needs 3 million euros to get him free.  She and her current husband do not have a lot of money so the woman says she doesn't know where to get that kind of money.

We then learn that the woman was previously married.  While married to her former husband and associate of her husband raped her at a party at his house.  When the woman's husband doesn't support her in her grief and her desire to avenge herself on the rapist she leaves him.  However, she does confront the rapist, telling him she got pregnant from him.  He agreed to give her some money, which she has put in trust for her son, and she has to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

In order to get the money she needs she contacts her ex who tells her he cannot get her the money. She then asks him to get his "friend" to contact her.  The man reluctantly gets in touch with her and she tells him she needs the money and will break the ND agreement with evidence on him if he doesn't help her. He is able to get $2 million dollars to her.

The woman eventually pays the ransom, and gets her husband back.  They are interrogated by the police and decide to try to leave Lisbon.  They sneak out of the hotel, despite a lot of surveillance on them, and manage to make it to Spain.  They decided to try to book separate flights back to the U.S.  The woman is detained by the Spanish police at the request of the Portugese police.  The husband is not located.  The woman is shocked that her husband has disappeared and apparently genuinely upset at this  development.

While all this is going on a blabber mouth employee of the woman as told someone else about the NDA. There is also a reporter the woman encountered in Lisbon who has figured out the rapist is the man in line to be nominated for VP of the US.

In the end we find out that the woman's marriage was a marriage of convenience.  Her husband's sister had also been raped by this man (at 16 years of age) and has not recovered.  The two of them cook up the plan to marry, stage the kidnapping, with the money going to the man's daughter.  Their other goal is to updend the plans for the man to become VP.  As other people break the story the woman is not guilty of violating the NDA.

This was an action packed book, I have to say I didn't anticpate the ending.

Tomb of Sand

 by Geetanjali Shree

This book won the Booker International Prize this year.  It is a massive book, more than 700 pages.

I found the book interesting but a bit frustrating. I enjoyed the creativity and the story but the author has many chapters of "jibber jabber" which may or may not have related to the story itself.  If this had been taken out the book could have been half its length.

The story is about primarily about an old woman in India.  After her husband dies she is living with her son and basically gives up on live.  Refusing to get up or leave her room.  Then one day her grandson gives her a cane with butterflies on it and all of sudden people come to her for her blessings.  

One day the old woman goes awol.  When they find her her daughter, a freelance writer, decides to take her mother home to stay with her for a while.  The daughter is happy to have her mother with her as the mother seems to perk up staying with her.  However, this disrputs her relationship with her boyfriend.

The book is interesting as it tells how the various family members react to and interact with the old woman.  The wife of the son keeps phoning her son who lives in Australia to explain the antics of the old woman and get his advice.

The daughter is pleased to have her mother with her but is concerned that her mother develops to close a relationship with a two spirited person, the female figure a healer, the male figure a tailor.  This person seems to come to control the old woman including convincing her to leave saris behind and just wear long dresses.

The old woman is distraught when she finds out her two spirited person has died/been murdered.  She then insists that she wants to travel to Pakistan/Kashmir.  Is she determined to finish a mission for her murdered friend?  The daughter agrees to travel with her and they do a bit of touring hosted by embassy officials but the old woman gets to places she is not supposed to travel and gets arrested.  The woman and her daughter are treated quite well in prison but the old woman gives the police interviewers a lot of difficulty as she answers nonsense to their questions.

Eventually the old woman asks to see a government official.  She eventually meets him but realizes it is father she wants to see.  She eventually is released from jail and gets to see the old man who may have been her first husband.  With the partition of Pakistan/Kashmir and India did she get displaced from her first husband?  That is what it looks like.   Leaving the old man's home she is shot and dies, as was predicted at the start of the book where it mentioned that she practiced getting pushed and hit so that when she fell down she would die face up.

A fascinating, sometimes confusing and overly verbose book but I could see why it was justified to win the Booker.

Black Cake

 by Charmaine Wilkerson

I found this a very interesting story.

It starts with a woman dying and leaving a tape for her children, one of whom she is estranged from.  The daughter comes back reluctantly.  She and her brother had been close but have drifted apart especially since she did not come back for her father's funeral.  We eventually find out she did return for it but had been beaten up by a lover and didn't want people to see her in that state.

The girl had fallen out years before when she couldn't settle on a career and especially when she announced she was gay.  She left home after her parents reaction to this announcement.

The mother's message tells them she had a past and a different name.  As a young woman in the caribbean her father, a gambler, was going to marry her off to the man he owed money to.  The girl is shocked that her father would do this to her.  When her groom dies at the wedding ceremony she runs away.  Everyone thinks she poisoned him.

She flees to England and then is involved in a train crash on a train to scotland.  She is assumed to be her frend, who has died in the crash, and goes along with the misunderstanding.  She gets a job, is raped by her employer and gets pregnant.  She has to give up the baby but is haunted by this especially as she ages.

She eventually runs into a boy she loved in the caribbean.  They both change their names and move to America where they marry and have two children.

The mother tells them she has tried to track down her lost daughter.  

The children are shocked at all this news, it takes them time to digest it.  The lawyer eventually tracks down their sister.  She is shocked by the news she has siblings and comes to meet them but then leaves

Evenutally she comes back and they share some of their mothers black cake.

This was a very interesting story.  I really enjoyed it.

Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

 by Stuart Turton

This is a kind of ground hog day scenario

A group of people as gathered at a family estate on the anniversary of the death of the son of the estate owners years before.  A guest at the estate sees what he thinks is a woman being attacked/murdered and is injured himself.  He manages to make his way back to the house.  Over the next few hours the man finds that he is inside the heads/bodies of several of the guests.  

He finds that he is tasked with trying to find out who murders the daugther of the family.  If he manages to solve this he will be allowed to leave the property.  The man finds it very disconcerting to inhabit these different people, at different times of the day.  He meets a woman Anne who appears to be trying to help him and he wants to save her also.

The book then goes through various times of day and characters as the "main character" tries to figure out what is going to happen.  I appears that the daughter of the family is engaged against her will to a much older man, a friend of the family.  The marriage is being orchestrated so that her husband will bail the family out financially.  The scenario seems to be that the young woman kills herself rather than go through with the marriage.

As the story progresses the main character eventually figures out that the young woman wants to fake her suicide but her brother actually tries to kill her.

It was a novel idea to a story and structured quite well between all the personas.  However by the end it was getting quite confusing as to who did what and who knew what.

Dictionary of Lost Words

 by Pip Williams     

This is the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, told from the point of view of the daughter of one of the men who worked on the project.  The daughter initially started as a young child, hanging out in the workshop where her father and others were working.  She spent a lot of time underneath the table where the men were working.

This project took several decades to complete.

The task was to identify words and then find usage of them in literature, or in newspapers that document the usage.  After that the team members attempted a definition of the term.  Some termswere open to a lot of discussion.

The young girl is sometimes left in the care of a young maid who works in the house on the property.  They become very close friends.  While the maid is only a few years older than the girl she becomes something like a mother figure for her as the young girl's mother is dead.

As time goes by the girl starts to realize that "women's words" do not necessarily make it into the dictionary or if they do they are often disparaged.  The maid takes her to the local market and the young woman starts writing down words she hears there and the sentence in which they are used, then cites the name of the person who spoke the words.  She keeps her precious words in a box under the maid's bed.

Eventually the young girl is given a job helping the men working on the dictionary, sorting words, running the papers with the completed words to the printers.  She meets a young typesetter there and they eventually become close friends and eventually marry.  Her boyfriend/fiance publishes her words into a book, The Dictionary of Lost Words.  She is overjoyed at this wonderful surprise.

The book is well written and gives excellent details as to all the work that went into the compilation of the dictionary.  I had picked it up on a whim and really enjoyed it.