Dear Great Book Guru,  We had a great family Easter celebration recently,  and we  vowed to choose a book we would all read and discuss the next time we got together which will be in about a month.  We agreed we wanted something fast moving and attention gathering… any ideas?  Family of Readers

Dear Family of Readers, I am a big fan of John Grisham, having loved all forty plus of his novels and I believe his latest, THE EXCHANGE, is a good choice for your family.  Set fifteen years after his 1991 bestselling legal thriller THE FIRM, this book answers the question as to what happened to Mitch and Abby Mc Deere who disappeared from Tennessee at the end of the novel.  The Mitch we meet now is very very different - he is living in Manhattan, a partner in a hugely prestigious international law firm, and still married to Abby who is now a cookbook writer (allowing for some great descriptions of culinary extravaganzas). Whether coaching his young sons’ baseball team or attending opening nights at the Met, we sense a well lived, orderly life. So when he receives a call from a colleague in Rome asking him to represent a client in a dispute with the Libyan government, he is reluctant to get involved. Things quickly prove him right as he finds himself caught up in a monstrous kidnapping with international reverberations, eerily mirroring today’s headlines.  A great story dealing with many moral and ethical issues. Highly recommended!

 Dear Great Book Guru, I was at a glorious St. Patrick’s Day celebration where everyone was discussing a new book by a prize winning Irish author.  Some described it as hilariously funny, while others insisted it was a tragedy. All agreed it was very long but a very worthwhile read.  Does it sound familiar?   Perplexed but Interested

Dear Perplexed…. Paul Murray’s THE BEE STING is all these things and more. Set in contemporary Ireland, this 600-plus page book is the story of one family set over generations in which everyone involved makes a bad decision. It is told from the perspectives of Imelda, the beautiful wife of Dickie, owner of a failing car dealership; Cass, their surly teenage daughter who turns to alcohol to ease the tensions of adolescence; and PJ , her younger brother, who is being blackmailed by the town bully.  In each case these characters choose sometimes humorous, sometimes horrific solutions to their problems.  The economic chaos in Ireland plus catastrophic climate changes all work themselves into the story of a family in deep trouble and pain. Besides the four main characters, there are many others richly developed that add to the complexity and beauty of the novel.  The startling conclusion makes this family saga truly  a controversial mystery that leaves you  questioning much of what you have read.  Highly recommended!

Dear Great Book Guru,  My friends and I  have enjoyed many of your mystery and  novel  recommendations but we were wondering if you have some nonfiction we might enjoy.  We want our book club to try a new genre.   In Need of Nonfiction

Dear In Need of Nonfiction, I recently read a very interesting, albeit disturbing book your friends might enjoy: DISILLUSIONED by Benjamin Herold. Herold focuses on five different suburban communities outside of major cities: Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Los Angles, and Dallas.  In each case, he traces a family who moves to one of these communities and shows how their needs and expectations are addressed.  Almost universally, the desire for a good school system is what leads them to their new homes. Soon they realize that high taxes, a crumbling infrastructure, and poor transportation make for a nightmarish situation and the schools are not so great either.  Each family has a unique set of problems with racial discrimination impacting many of them. Younger families seeking to improve their schools quickly find themselves at odds with an aging population who no longer has a need or interest in maintaining stellar educational systems. Mired by cracked roadways and overcrowded classrooms, the new families soon find the promise of the good life that the suburbs had offered to the previous generation is a cruel joke for them. The author offers examples of communities trying to upend these problems, but he was not optimistic that the future would brighten for upcoming generations. A harrowing tale of dreams derailed but also highly recommended as a cautionary tale for community planners and citizens alike! 

 

 Dear Great Book Guru, We are interested in starting a small book club reading only small but extraordinary books - filled with thought provoking ideas.  Any suggestions? Thinking Small

Dear Thinking Small, I just finished in about three hours, the perfect book for you and your friends: THE VULNERABLES by Sigrid Nunez.  In 249 pages Nunez covers aging, friendship, literature, grief, memory,  and -yes- zoology in a beautifully meditative style.  Set in the first months of the pandemic, the novel tells the story of three “vulnerables” who find themselves in  lockdown in  a luxurious New York City apartment.  The trio includes our narrator - a woman in her seventies, a young college student with a history of psychiatric breakdowns, and a spirited parrot - all vulnerable in different ways.  When her friend finds herself  on the West Coast unable to return, she asks the narrator to care for her parrot who is alone as everyone in the building has fled the city for second homes upstate. The narrator spends much of her days and nights thinking about her past and present with many references to her favorite authors, especially Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf, and Charles Dickens. As a writer herself she questions the value of literature in difficult situations.  Through a series of miscommunications, Vetch - a young, troubled college student - arrives to share the apartment, and the two form a mutually beneficial alliance. Eureka the parrot serves as an ever-present source of muted comic relief.  Throughout this novel, we see evidence that even the smallest acts of kindness and generosity can make a huge difference in people’s lives. Highly recommended!  

 Dear Great Book Guru,  We were at an amazing event last week - Dinner and The Dead - Dinner at Foster Restaurant here in Sea Cliff and The Dead - a dramatization of James Joyce’s most famous short story from the DUBLINERS.  Many of the guests were talking about the latest Man Booker Prize winner that was set in Dublin.  I am intrigued - thoughts?   Booker Prize Reader

Dear Booker Prize Reader, Yes, I always try to review the prestigious Booker Prize winner and this latest is a fascinating and disturbing read: PROPHET SONG  by Paul Lynch.  Set in Dublin a few years in the future, the novel describes a country cast into chaos by unnamed forces.  Eillish Stack, a scientist and mother of four children, is living a comfortable middle-class existence when her husband Larry, a union official, is arrested after participating in a peaceful demonstration with fellow teachers.  Eillish’s nightmare has begun as she tries valiantly to find him, keep her teenage children safe from conscription, her elderly father and infant fed, and her home intact.  The challenges of dealing with monolithic bureaucracy mount as she sees her chances of escaping over the border slip away.  Written with long painful sentences and no paragraph breaks, the novel moves with a feverish pace. Eillish is consumed with the mundane aspects of her life - cleaning her bomb-struck home, keeping milk in the fridge, choosing hair ribbons for her young daughter while the world around her is collapsing. Her sister in Canada offers her a way out but the moral cost is too great. Finally, we are left with the terrifying question - what would any of us do?

 

Dear Great Book Guru, I just came home from a wonderful evening of Scottish music, drink, and poetry - the annual Burns Night at St. Luke’s here in Sea Cliff. What great fun and great conversations!  One of the musicians mentioned an engrossing new novel he had just read about a man looking back over the decades at moments he remembered and questioning why those moments had significance rather than others.  Familiar with the book? A Fan of Robert Burns

Dear Fan of Robert Burns, I’m guessing the book is BAUMGARTNER  by Paul Auster.  Like Burns, Auster takes the pieces of his life and incorporates it into his fiction. Baumgartner is a seventy-year-old philosophy professor who is deeply mourning his wife’s death ten years earlier.  It was a sudden, avoidable swimming accident and Sy Baumgartner revisits that day over and over imagining what he could have done to prevent the tragedy.  Interspersed with this memory are short vignettes of their time together, early childhood incidents living in Newark, his grandfather’s tales of life in Kiev, his attempts to remarry, and encounters with strangers that change destiny.  Throughout this short novel (220 pages), we see how Baumgartner is attempting to control outcomes and make sense of the tragedies he experiences – his and others.  A very thought provoking look at the power of memory and a beautiful love story also - highly recommended!  

 Dear Great Book Guru,  My book group just read “Two Gallants” a  James Joyce DUBLINERS short story and we had a lively discussion about Ireland then and now.  Of course, my thoughts turned  to Ireland as a setting.   I would love to read a novel or a mystery set in the Emerald Isle - perfect for this time of year or… really any of time of the year!  Lover of an Irish Setting

Dear Lover of an Irish Setting,  A few months ago I came upon a series of literary mysteries by an Irish born writer  Dervla McTiernan  (now an Australian citizen) set in Dublin and Galway.  While I have enjoyed all three, my favorite was THE SCHOLAR. The story delves into the world of international big pharma laced with sinister Irish academic overtones.  Emma Sweeney is a researcher in Galway University and lives with her partner, Detective  Cormac Reilly. Driving home late one night, she comes upon the body of Carline Darcy, heir apparent to the multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, Darcy Therapeutics. The company is involved in funding university research, political parties, and a myriad of philanthropic projects.  Emma mistakenly gets Reilly involved and suspicion immediately turns on her. Was she jealous of the young heiress’s recent discoveries or was she afraid her research would be found to be fraudulent? The many faceted world of scientific espionage mixed with familial intrigue leaves the reader wondering who the real villain is and…. could it be our Narrator?