NEW BOOKS IN THE DEERING PUBLIC LIBRARY

NEW BOOKS IN THE DEERING LIBRARY

At The Water’s Edge, Sara Gruen, 2015

This book was written by the author of the popular novel Water For Elephants. Here is what Goodreads said about it:

“In her stunning new novel, Gruen returns to the kind of storytelling she excelled at in Water for Elephants: a historical timeframe in an unusual setting with a moving love story. Think Scottish Downton Abbey.
After embarrassing themselves at the social event of the year in high society Philadelphia on New Year’s Eve of 1942, Maddie and Ellis Hyde are cut off financially by Ellis’s father, a former army Colonel who is already embarrassed by his son’s inability to serve in WWII due to his being colorblind. To Maddie’s horror, Ellis decides that the only way to regain his father’s favor is to succeed in a venture his father attempted and very publicly failed at: he will hunt the famous Loch Ness monster and when he finds it he will restore his father’s name and return to his father’s good graces (and pocketbook). Joined by their friend Hank, a wealthy socialite, the three make their way to Scotland in the midst of war. Each day the two men go off to hunt the monster, while another monster, Hitler, is devastating Europe. And Maddie, now alone in a foreign country, must begin to figure out who she is and what she wants. The novel tells of Maddie’s social awakening: to the harsh realities of life, to the beauties of nature, to a connection with forces larger than herself, to female friendship, and finally, to love.”

Most of those who submitted reviews to Goodreads gave it three stars, not a very compelling endorsement, but as one of the reviewers said: ‘WW? Scotland? Loch Ness Monster? Sign me up.’

The Discrete Hero, Mario Vargas Llosa, 2015 (translated by Edith Grossman)

Following is a copy of the review of this book given by Alan Cheuse on NPR.

ALAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: I admit it. When I see the name Mario Vargas Llosa on the cover of a novel, it's nearly impossible for me not to like the book. The Peruvian Nobel Prize-winner is a central figure in modern fiction, and he's changed my life as a reader and as a writer. And this time around, I was enthralled. This is the tale of two Peruvian businessmen, both of whom find themselves late in life on the verge of life-changing situations. A trucking company owner from the provincial northern desert city of Piura - he's called for Felicito - is in a rather lifeless arranged marriage, has two sons - one of them rather troubled - and a young and beautiful mistress. When we meet him, he's just become the apparent victim of an extortion threat. The other businessman, Ismael Carrera, a Lima insurance executive and a widower, finds a new love and finds himself in the middle of a war with his two spoiled and rather nasty playboy sons. As we go back and forth between these two men, the plot builds with a tension usually reserved for novels about war and politics. One of the colleagues of the insurance executive, a dear friend and deep thinker, puts it this way:

“My God, what stories ordinary life devised, not masterpieces to be sure. They were doubtless closer to soap operas than to Cervantes and Tolstoy, but then again, not so far from Zola, Dickens or Galdos.”

Somewhere between soap opera and Dickens and Zola - not a bad place to be - this peerless novel about ordinary people wrestling with the nature of fate, happiness, success - this big book about ordinary people living out big modern themes is the best new novel I've read in many, many months.

Live by Night, Dennis Lehane (2013)

World Gone By, Dennis Lehane (2015)

These two novels join Dennis Lehane’s earlier novel, The Given Day (2008), which is available in the Deering Public Library, to form a sort of trilogy that begins in Boston in 1919 and loosely follows one Irish family to Florida in the 1940’s.

The Given Day is a research-filled epic that takes place in a year that Janet Maslin’s review in the NY times described as: “… a time of intense, roiling trouble. The Black Sox scandal, the start of Prohibition, the Spanish flu pandemic, extreme racial unrest and the savage police strike that turned Boston into “an uncaged zoo,” terrifyingly summoned by the author, all contributed to that book’s searing power.” The Given Day focused on the Coughlin family with a difficult police captain as father and headstrong eldest son, Danny, also a police officer, as the pivotal character. The youngest son, Joe, was allowed to develop in the background and then take center stage for Live by Night and World Gone By.

 Live by Night took place mostly in the early 1930s and depicted Joe’s rise to a life of highly profitable illegal wheeling-and-dealing, always knowing that his career had built-in limitations. Being Irish by descent, he would never be fully entrusted with any of the Italian-run gangster operations around Tampa and Havana, abundant and colorful as they might be. Still, he could apply a semi-gentlemanly code of honor to even the notorious eruption that ended the book: rum rioting in 1933 that left Joe’s ranks of henchmen depleted and too much blood on Joe’s hands.  

World Gone By takes place in the early 1940’s. There is a war going on and Joe wants to take what profit from it he can. The book was summarized in Goodreads as follows:

Dennis Lehane, the New York Times bestselling author of The Given Day and Live by Night, returns with a psychologically and morally complex novel of blood, crime, passion, and vengeance, set in Cuba and Ybor City, Florida, during World War II, in which Joe Coughlin must confront the cost of his criminal past and present.

Ten years have passed since Joe Coughlin’s enemies killed his wife and destroyed his empire, and much has changed. Prohibition is dead, the world is at war again, and Joe’s son, Tomás, is growing up. Now, the former crime kingpin works as a consigliore to the Bartolo crime family, traveling between Tampa and Cuba, his wife’s homeland.

A master who moves in and out of the black, white, and Cuban underworlds, Joe effortlessly mixes with Tampa’s social elite, U.S. Naval intelligence, the Lansky-Luciano mob, and the mob-financed government of Fulgencio Batista. He has everything—money, power, a beautiful mistress, and anonymity.

But success cannot protect him from the dark truth of his past—and ultimately, the wages of a lifetime of sin will finally be paid in full.

Dennis Lehane vividly recreates the rise of the mob during a world at war, from a masterfully choreographed Ash Wednesday gun battle in the streets of Ybor City to a chilling, heartbreaking climax in a Cuban sugar cane field. Told with verve and skill, World Gone By is a superb work of historical fiction from one of “the most interesting and accomplished American novelists” (Washington Post) writing today.