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ADULT - BEST OF THE BEST (BOB) 2011-12
ADULT - BEST OF THE BEST (BOB) 2011-12
"Of Mutability" by Jo Shapcott
Winner of the Costa Book Award (January 2011)
Jo Shapcott's award-winning first three collections, gathered in "Her Book: Poems 1988–1998", revealed her to be a writer of ingenuous, politically acute and provocative poetry, and rightly earned her a reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation. In "Of Mutability", Shapcott is found writing at her most memorable and bold. In a series of poems that explore the nature of change – in the body and the natural world, and in the shifting relationships between people – these poems look freshly but squarely at mortality. By turns grave and playful, arresting and witty, the poems in "Of Mutability" celebrate each waking moment as though it might be the last, and in so doing restore wonder to the smallest of encounters.
"One Day" by David Nicholls
Winner of the Galaxy National Book Award (November 2010)
'I can imagine you at forty,' she said, a hint of malice in her voice. 'I can picture it right now.'
He smiled without opening his eyes. 'Go on then.'
He smiled without opening his eyes. 'Go on then.'
So where will they be on this one day next year?
And the year after that? And every year that follows?
Twenty years, two people, ONE DAY.
"The Lacuna" by Barbara Kingsolver
Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction (June 2010)
The Lacuna is the heartbreaking story of a man’s search for safety, of a man torn between the warm heart of Mexico and the cold embrace of 1950s McCarthyite America. Born in the U.S. and reared in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salomé. Making himself useful in the household of the famed Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution. A violent upheaval sends him north to a nation newly caught up in World War II. In the mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina he remakes himself in America’s hopeful image. But political winds continue to throw him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach – the lacuna – between truth and public presumption. A gripping story of identity, loyalty and the devastating power of accusations to destroy innocent people. The Lacuna is as deep and rich as the New World.
"The Finkler Question" by Howard Jacobson
Winner of the Man Booker Prize (October 2010)
'He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one…'
Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czech always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results.
Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor's grand, central London apartment.
It's a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you have less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends' losses.
And it's that very evening, at exactly 11:30 pm, as Treslove, walking home, hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country, that he is attacked. And after this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change.
"The Finkler Question" is a scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.
