Live a Little by Howard Jacobson

Live a Little: A Novel by Howard Jacobson --- 290 pages.

A bitterly funny story about the complexities of nonagenarian love by Jacobson, previous winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2010, often compared to the American writer Philip Roth.

James Walton, in the New York Review of Books even quoted Roth to describe the experience of reading Jacobson: 

"In Roth’s The Counterlife (1986), Nathan Zuckerman’s brother, Henry, complains that “reading Nathan’s books always exhausted him, as though he were having a very long argument with someone who wouldn’t go away”—which is precisely the effect that Jacobson seeks as well. “Any book worth reading,” Jacobson has said with his customary taste for hyperbole, “will have you arguing with it by the bottom of page one.”

As many times as I put the book down, though, I always picked it back up again. An unlikely Scheherazade meets a melancholy Prince in the twilight of their lives.

Click HERE to read the review in the New York Review of Books.

Click HERE to read the *review in Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review from BookPage.

Click HERE to read the review from The Guardian US Edition.

The Blood Strand by Chris Ould

The Blood Strand: A Faroes Novel by Chris Ould --- 435 pages

The first in a trio of crime novels by British author Chris Ould set in the Faroes Islands, an archipelago located about 200 miles north/northwest of Scotland, between Norway and Iceland. The Faroes today are part of Denmark. The population of about 80,000 people speak Faroese, a language descended from Old Norse. The islands are spectacularly scenic, and provide a brooding atmosphere for Ould's tale.

His mother took Jan Reyna away from his home in the Faroe Islands as a very young child, and then committed suicide, leaving Jan to be raised by her sister and her sister's husband in England.  Not surprisingly then Reyna thinks of himself as British, not Faroese. He doesn't speak the language, even though his aunt and uncle speak it.  Now a grown man and a homicide detective, Reyna knows almost nothing about his father, but has many unanswered questions about his mother. When he finally decides to return to the islands Reyna discovers that his estranged father has just suffered a major stroke under suspicious circumstances. He meets the Faroese police inspector investigating the case, Hjalti Hentze, and gradually becomes involved, only to finds himself learning more about his long-lost family’s secrets than he may want to know.

For fans of Nordic Noir and police procedurals, this is the start of a great series.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus.

Click HERE to read the review from blogcritics.org

The Stories We Tell by Patti Callahan Henry

         The Stories We Tell by Patti Callahan Henry, 288 pages

Eve and Cooper Morrison are Savannah's power couple. They're on every artistic board and deeply involved in the community. She owns and operates a letterpress studio specializing in the handmade; he runs a digital magazine featuring all things southern gentlemen. The perfect juxtaposition of the old and the new, Eve and Cooper are the beautiful people. The lucky ones. And they have the wealth and name that comes from being part of an old Georgia family. 
But things may not be as good as they seem. 
Eve's sister, Willa, is staying with the family until she gets "back on her feet." Their daughter, Gwen, is all adolescent rebellion. And Cooper thinks Eve works too much. Still, the Morrison marriage is strong. After twenty-one years together, Eve and Cooper know each other. They count on each other. They know what to expect. But when Cooper and Willa are involved in a car accident, the questions surrounding the event bring the family close to breaking point. Sifting between the stories―what Cooper says, what Willa remembers, what the evidence indicates―Eve has to find out what really happened. And what she's going to do about it.

I enjoy stories of complicated, dysfunctional families dynamics and this did not fail in that aspect. Good read!

Hercule Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie --- 272 pages

A reissue, with a new title, of Christie's 1938 mystery, previously published as Murder for Christmas and A Holiday for Murder.

A family reluctantly gathers for Christmas in response to the summons of the patriarch, Simeon Lee, whose disdain for his offspring is only matched by their loathing for him. Can anyone really be surprised when the old man is found murdered in a locked room with a fortune in uncut diamonds missing from the safe?

The old man's valet, who has a dubious past, is suspected but able to produce a watertight alibi. The local police, represented by Superintendent Sugden, are stymied, but fortunately the Chief Constable for the County, Colonel Johnson, has a house guest for the holidays who is happy to assist. Enter the redoubtable Hercule Poirot.

This is vintage Christie: a locked room, a family at odds, a fortune at stake, and every suspect with disreputable secrets they are anxious to hide.  The investigation unfolds over seven days, and concludes with Poirot, in typical style, gathering all the suspects together to reconstruct the crime  and reveal the murderer.

Under The Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan

Under The Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan - 496 pages

Under The Wide and Starry Sky was a memorizing book. After extensive research, Horan wrote a historical and biographical fiction novel about the relationship between Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife, Fanny Van De Grift Osbourne. They met in 1870s France and Louis, as he in known to family and friends, quickly becomes smitten with the then married Fanny. Over the course of several years, the relationship grows and Fanny files for divorce and the new couple settles in Europe. During this time, we see how Fanny cares for the often ill Louis. After realizing the the sea air strengthened Louis' fragile health they opt to travel the South Seas, eventually settling in Samoa. Throughout the novel, we gain an understanding of Stevenson's writing habits. Excerpts from Stevenson's works and family letters make occasional appearances.

Overall, I was thrilled with this novel. While it provided wonderful descriptions of the Stevenson family adventures, it was the relationships that took the forefront.

The copy I read was an ACR.  The current release date is 1/21/14 (this has been changed at least once).

The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell

The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell --- 164 pages

This is a small gem of a book, based upon a true event, a dance hall fire that devastated the town of West Plain MO in 1929, in which a number of the town's young people perished, and the cause of the fire has never been satisfactorily explained in all the years since.

Woodrell's family has been resident in the area for many years, and his grandmother did indeed work as a maid for a prominent family there at the time of the fire. However Woodrell is not writing a true crime story, but using the event as the starting point for his own tale of the furies unleashed by passion, betrayal, madness and remorse, as unrelenting as any tragedy of Euripedes or Shakespeare.

Click HERE to watch an interview with the author.