Suggestions: May 2007 Book of the Month.

[mehastings]

Suggest a book. Please include a description!

 

[unKeMPt]

I nominate Enduring Love by Ian McEwan.

Joe Rose has planned a postcard-perfect afternoon in the English countryside to celebrate his lover's return after six weeks in the States. To complete the picture, there's even a "helium balloon drifting dreamily across the wooded valley." But as Joe and Clarissa watch the balloon touch down, their idyll comes to an abrupt end. The pilot catches his leg in the anchor rope, while the only passenger, a boy, is too scared to jump down. As the wind whips into action, Joe and four other men rush to secure the basket. Mother Nature, however, isn't feeling very maternal. "A mighty fist socked the balloon in two rapid blows, one-two, the second more vicious than the first," and at once the rescuers are airborne. Joe manages to drop to the ground, as do most of his companions, but one man is lifted sky-high, only to fall to his death.

In itself, the accident would change the survivors' lives, filling them with an uneasy combination of shame, happiness, and endless self-reproach. (In one of the novel's many ironies, the balloon eventually lands safely, the boy unscathed.) But fate has far more unpleasant things in store for Joe. Meeting the eye of fellow rescuer Jed Parry, for example, turns out to be a very bad move. For Jed is instantly obsessed, making the first of many calls to Joe and Clarissa's London flat that very night. Soon he's openly shadowing Joe and writing him endless letters. (One insane epistle begins, "I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. I close my eyes and see you as you were last night in the rain, across the road from me, with the unspoken love between us as strong as steel cable.") Worst of all, Jed's version of love comes to seem a distortion of Joe's feelings for Clarissa.

Apart from the incessant stalking, it is the conditionals--the contingencies--that most frustrate Joe, a scientific journalist. If only he and Clarissa had gone straight home from the airport... If only the wind hadn't picked up... If only he had saved Jed's 29 messages in a single day... Ian McEwan has long been a poet of the arbitrary nightmare, his characters ineluctably swept up in others' fantasies, skidding into deepening violence, and--worst of all--becoming strangers to those who love them. Even his prose itself is a masterful and methodical exercise in defamiliarization. But Enduring Love and its underrated predecessor, Black Dogs, are also meditations on knowledge and perception as well as brilliant manipulations of our own expectations. By the novel's end, you will be surprisingly unafraid of hot-air balloons, but you won't be too keen on looking a stranger in the eye.

 

[missy]

May book

Hi, just wanted to endorse Enduring Love too. It is truly an incredible book written beautifully!

 

[-Carlos-]

The Heap

The Heap by H.P. Albarelli Jr.

A priest fleeing shadowy pursuers leaves behind a journal in a London flat. The journal contains the remarkable story of a group of street children who have established an egalitarian community in a rubbish dump and what happens after they make a startling discovery that could radically alter the course of history.

 

[Anamnesis]

My nomination: Vamped by David Sosnowski. Summary/review from Library Journal.

Marty is your average vampire, terribly bored with eternity. The thrill of the chase has vanished: the undead sip blood made from stem cells, owing to the rarity of living, breathing human beings. Enter little Isuzu Trooper Cassidy, a human orphan girl who gives the suicidally depressed Marty a new lease on his unlife. He wins her trust, planning to keep her for a later meal. What he doesn't foresee is that this feisty child is turning him from a predator into a protector. Eventually, Marty comes to think of himself as a single parent shielding his daughter from the clutches of his undead brethren. For her part, Isuzu calls him Dad and brings him all the joy and angst that defines parenthood. Full of wit and charm, Sosnowski's fast-paced second novel (after Rapture, about the secret life of angels) offers delightfully quirky characters and plenty of hilarious scenes. Narrator Marty's sardonic eye misses nothing. Recommended for popular fiction collections.

 

[claybugg]

I'll second AquaBlue's suggestion. Looks interesting.

 

[Maizara]

Queen of Dreams by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
From the inside flap:

In her most spellbinding novel yet, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni spins a fresh, enchanting story of transformation that is as lyrical as it is dramatic.

Rakhi, a young artist and divorced mother living in Berkeley, California, is struggling to keep her footing with her family and with a world in alarming transition. Her mother is a dream teller, born with the ability to share and interpret the dreams of others, to foresee and guide them through their fates. This gift of vision fascinates Rakhi but also isolates her from her mother's past in India and the dream world she inhabits, and she longs for something to bring them closer. Caught beneath the burden of her own painful secret, Rakhi's solace comes in the discovery, after her mother's death, of her dream journals, which begin to open the long-closed door to her past.

As Rakhi attempts to divine her identity, knowing little of India but drawn inexorably into a sometimes painful history she is only just discovering, her life is shaken by new horrors. In the wake of September 11, she and her friends must deal with dark new complexities about their acculturation. Haunted by nightmares beyond her imagination, she nevertheless finds unexpected blessings: the possibility of new love and understanding for her family.

"A dream is a telegram from the hidden world," Rakhi's mother writes in her journals. In lush and elegant prose, Divakaruni has crafted a vivid and enduring dream, one that reveals hidden truths about the world we live in, and from which readers will be reluctant to wake.