I reckon this is going to be my last Friday Finds for the year, as I’m back to Singapore next week (and won’t have that much computer access). And it’s a rather small post, as I have just one – ONE!  – find this week. I’ve been too busy trying to catch up with my reading before going home.

An Elegy for Easterly: Stories – Petina Gappah
(via Guardian Books)

I like what she said in the Guardian interview: “I think African countries have a lot in common. But we are also very different. I’m very happy to hang out with my friends from other African countries who are writers, but I don’t see myself as an African writer, because it comes with certain expectations of you.”

Synopsis:

Thanks to Guardian’s Books of the Year article, I made quite a few additions to my TBR list this week!

Tall Man: The Death of Doomadgee- Chloe Hooper (Colm Toibin’s pick)

In 2004 on Palm Island, an Aboriginal settlement in the “Deep North” of Australia, a thirty-six-year-old man named Cameron Doomadgee was arrested for swearing at a white police officer. Forty minutes later he was dead in the jailhouse. The police claimed he’d tripped on a step, but his liver was ruptured. The main suspect was Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley, a charismatic cop with long experience in Aboriginal communities and decorations for his work.

Chloe Hooper was asked to write about the case by the pro bono lawyer who represented Cameron Doomadgee’s family. He told her it would take a couple of weeks. She spent three years following Hurley’s trail to some of the wildest and most remote parts of Australia, exploring Aboriginal myths and history and the roots of brutal chaos in the Palm Island community. Her stunning account goes to the heart of a struggle for power, revenge, and justice. Told in luminous detail, Tall Man is as urgent as Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and The Executioner’s Song. It is the story of two worlds clashing — and a haunting moral puzzle that no reader will forget.

The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle – Sara Wheeler (Michael Palin’s pick)

Smashing through the Arctic Ocean with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, herding reindeer across the tundra with Lapps and shadowing the Trans-Alaskan pipeline with truckers, the author uncovers the beautiful, brutal reality of the Arctic.

The Music Room: A Memoir – William Fiennes (Geoff Dyer’s pick)

A bittersweet description of an ancient family house in an enchanted setting, and of growing up with a damaged brother.William Fiennes spent his childhood in a moated castle, the perfect environment for a child with a brimming imagination. It is a house alive with history, beauty, and mystery, but the young boy growing up in it is equally in awe of his brother Richard. Eleven years older and a magnetic presence, Richard suffers from severe epilepsy. His illness influences the rhythms of the family and the house’s internal life, and his story inspires a journey, interwoven with a loving recollection, toward an understanding of the mind.

This is a song of home, of an adored brother and the miracle of consciousness. The chill of dark historical places coexists with the warmth and chatter of the family kitchen; the surrounding landscapes are distinguished by ancient trees, secret haunts, the moat’s depths and temptations. Bursting with tender detail, The Music Room is a sensuous tribute to place, memory, and the permanence of love.

Travels with a Typewriter: A Reporter at Large – Michael Frayn (Observer writer Tim Adams’ pick)

‘All writers of fiction should be required by law to go out and do a bit of reporting from time to time, just to remind them how different the real world in front of their eyes is from the invented world behind them’. This is what Frayn did in mid-career, when he took up his old trade, journalism, and wrote a series of occasional articles for the “Observer” about some of the places in the world that interested him. He wanted to describe ‘not the extraordinary but the ordinary, the typical, the everyday’ and his accounts became the starting-point for some of the novels and plays he wrote later. From a kibbutz in Israel to summer rains in Japan, bicycles in Cambridge to Notting Hill at the end of the 1950s, they are glimpses of a world which sometimes seems tantalisingly familar, sometimes vanished forever.

The Owl Killers – Karen Maitland (Critic Bidisha’s pick)

England, 1321. Deep in the heart of countryside lies an isolated village governed by a sinister regime of Owl Masters – theirs is a pagan world of terror and blackmail, where neighbour denounces neighbour and sin is punishable by murder. This dark status quo is disturbed by the arrival of a house of religious women, who establish a community outside the village. Why do their crops succeed when village crops fail; their cattle survive despite the plague? But petty jealousy turns deadly when the women give refuge to a young martyr. For she dies a gruesome death after spitting the sacramental host into flames that can’t burn it – what magic is this? Or is the martyr now a saint and the host a holy relic? Accusations of witchcraft and heresy run rife while the Owl Masters rain down hellfire and torment on the women, who must look to their faith to save them from the lengthening shadow of Evil … a shadow with predatory, terrifying talons.

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First-Century City – Anna Minton (Observer critic Rachel Cooke’s pick)

When the figures say crime is falling, why are we more frightened than ever? Could our towns and cities be creating fear and mistrust? More property is being built in Britain than at any time since the Second World War – but it’s owned by private corporations, designed for profit and watched over by CCTV. From the Docklands boom to cities such as Manchester, gated apartment developments, gleaming business districts and plazas have sprung up over the country. Has this ‘regeneration’ really made our lives better? This passionate and vivid polemic shows us the face of Britain today, revealing the untested urban planning that is transforming not only our cities, but the nature of public space, of citizenship and of trust. Anna Minton meets those who live and work in the new private spaces, those who’ve fought against them and those who are excluded from them, providing forceful evidence that physical barriers are leading to a divided nation. Yet there is another way. Offering some surprising solutions, Anna Minton argues for an alternative, continental approach that celebrates shared space. Ultimately “Ground Control” presents a better, happier future for our communities, and our society.

What did you add to your list this week?

Here’s what I added to my TBR list this week.

Lolly Willowes – Sylvia Townsend Warner (Via The Dewey Divas and The Dudes)

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first novel is an enduring, subversive, and lyrical portrait of spinsterhood in post-World War I Britain. Lolly is a single woman and after her father dies, she is moved, as a matter of course, to her brother’s house, where she meekly obliges to play caregiver to his children and housemaid to his wife. After 20 years of this life she moves to the rural village of Great Mop. She feels an affinity for the town, the countryside, and her new neighbors. She blossoms emotionally and spiritually, and as she does so, she discovers an important secret: She is a witch, as is everybody else who lives in Great Mop. A graceful read in the tradition of women’s fiction and magic realism.

Just Breathe Normally - Peggy Shumaker (Via The Millions)

Just Breathe Normally opens with a traumatic accident. Shattered perceptions and shards of narrative recount the events, from wreck through recovery and beyond. In lyric prose, the stories spiral back through generations to touch on questions of mortality and family, immigration and migration, legacies intended or inflicted.

A Kind of Intimacy – Jenn Ashworth (via Stuck In A Book)

Tracing the dark possibilities of best intentions gone awry, this darkly comic novel about a dysfunctional young woman’s life in the suburbs offers interesting psychological insights. Annie—morbidly obese and lonely—moves into a new home hoping for a clean slate but is convinced she has seen her next-door neighbor before. She embarks on a series of increasingly bizarre attempts to ingratiate herself with the boy next door, but wrong turns and snap judgments lead to a compelling and bloody climax.

 

Here’s what I added to my list of books I’d like to read this week.

My Abandonment by Peter Rock (via Three Guys One Book)

A thirteen-year-old girl and her father live in Forest Park, the enormous nature preserve in Portland, Oregon. There they inhabit an elaborate cave shelter, bathe in a nearby creek, store perishables at the water’s edge, use a makeshift septic system, tend a garden, even keep a library of sorts. Once a week, they go to the city to buy groceries and otherwise merge with the civilized world. But one small mistake allows a backcountry jogger to discover them, which derails their entire existence, ultimately provoking a deeper flight.
Inspired by a true story and told through the startlingly sincere voice of a young narrator, Caroline, Peter Rock’s My Abandonment is a riveting journey into life at the margins, and a mesmerizing tale of survival and hope.

The She-Devil in the Mirror by Horacio Castellanos Moya (via The Mookse and The Gripes)

Salvadorean society is shocked by the gruesome murder of a young upper-class woman, and no one more so than her best friend Laura. In her first-person solo narration, Laura rattles on and on about her disbelief and horror at the evils all around her—but who’s that in the mirror? Laura Rivera can’t believe what has happened. Her best friend has been killed in cold blood in the living room of her home, in front of her two young daughters! Nobody knows who pulled the trigger, but Laura will not rest easy until she finds out. Her dizzying, delirious, hilarious, and blood-curdling one-sided dialogue carries the reader on a rough and tumble ride through the social, political, economic, and sexual chaos of post-civil war San Salvador. A detective story of pulse-quickening suspense, The She-Devil in the Mirror is also a sober reminder that justice and truth are more often than not illusive. Castellanos Moya’s relentless, obsessive narrator—female, rich, paranoid, wonderfully perceptive, and, in the end, fabulously unreliable—paints with frivolous profundity a society in a state of collapse.

Bleak History by John Shirley (via The OLM Blog)

As far as Gabriel Bleak is concerned, talking to the dead is just another way of making a living. It gives him the competitive edge to survive as a bounty hunter, or “skip tracer,” in the psychic minefield known as New York City. Unfortunately, his gift also makes him a prime target. A top-secret division of Homeland Security has been monitoring the recent emergence of human supernaturals, with Gabriel Bleak being the strongest on record. If they control Gabriel, they’ll gain access to the Hidden — the entity-based energy field that connects all life on Earth. But Gabriel’s got other ideas. With a growing underground movement called the Shadow Community — and an uneasy alliance of spirits, elementals, and other beings — Gabriel’s about to face the greatest demonic uprising since the Dark Ages. But this time, history is not going to repeat itself. This time, the future is Bleak. Gabriel Bleak.

Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books (via The Elegant Variation)

What does a library say about the mind of its owner? How do books map the intellectual interests, curiosities, tastes, and personalities of their readers? What does the collecting of books have in common with the practice of architecture? Unpacking My Library provides an intimate look at the personal libraries of fourteen of the world’s leading architects, alongside conversations about the significance of books to their careers and lives.

Photographs of bookshelves—displaying well-loved and rare volumes, eclectic organizational schemes, and the individual touches that make a bookshelf one’s own—provide an evocative glimpse of their owner’s personal life. Each architect also presents a reading list of top ten influential titles, from architectural history to theory to fiction and nonfiction, that serves as a personal philosophy of literature and history, and advice on what every young architect, scholar, and lover of architecture should read.

An inspiring cross-section of notable libraries, this beautiful book celebrates the arts of reading and collecting.

Friday Finds is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading

 How about that? It’s already October! And my TBR list is no shorter, thanks to the many book blogs I read.

The Book Shopper: A Life in Review – Murray Browne (via Citizen Reader)

I love reading books about books and reading, and this sounds like a fun one.

In the almost limitless sea of books, here’s one that will make you laugh as it helps you find your way to books that you’ll want to read.
With witty poignancy, The Book Shopper: A Life in Review describes the inner world of the writer’s imagination and the outer world of disheveled used book stores and dusty basements whose shelves sag under the burden of too many books.
In The Book Shopper Murray Browne discusses practical matters:

• How to deal with cantankerous used book store owners.
• Which contemporary writers he likes and thinks have staying power.
• How to assess a used book store to determine if it measures up.
• How to decide when to unburden oneself of a portion of one’s inventory.

He also considers more personal matters:
• What reading means to him.
• The rewards of the life of the imagination.
• How he set about writing about his life.

Ten Sorry Tales – Mick Jackson (via Fleur Fisher)
Fleur Fisher’s blog always has such fun (and enviable) Library Loot.

Featuring undertakers, dark forests, resurrected butterflies and a singularly mean-spirited horse, the stories are nevertheless rooted in the realistic and all too recognisable world of retirement, loneliness and childhood boredom. By turns funny, scary and heartbreaking, they are always illuminating, and further evidence of one of the most original and brilliant imaginations in contemporary fiction.

Duncton Wood (The Duncton Chronicles, 1) – William Horwood (via Farm Lane Books)
Jackie at Farm Lane Books recently listed her favourite books, and if I had to make a top 10 list, I would definitely also have Blindness and His Dark Materials Trilogy on my list! (And I also loved A Fine Balance, Fingersmith and Ghostwritten). Thus I’m quite sure I’ll enjoy the others on her list, like this one.

Enter the magical, colourful, poignant world of Bracken and Rebecca, Mandrake the tyrant, Boswell the scribe, Hulver, Comfrey… and all the other moles of Duncton Wood. Set deep in the English countryside, this enchanting story tells of an ancient community losing its soul – but saved by courage and love.

Breathe the Sky: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Amelia Earhart – Chandra Prasad (via A Work In Progress)

Amelia Earhart disappeared from the world’s radar in the 1930s, but she has not been forgotten. Breathe the Sky is a fresh and provocative portrait of the legendary pilot whose courage and charisma have dazzled millions. It is also the first novel to reveal the dark side of Earhart’s fame-and the dangerous, madcap course of her final voyage. Venturing where history and biography have not, Breathe the Sky takes the reader on Earhart’s last expedition along the equatorial line, through wild storms, across endless desert and jungle, and over shark-infested waters. With stark, nimble prose, Prasad brings Earhart to life once more, securing her place in the pantheon of great explorers, while inspiring risk and adventure in readers.

Moloka’i – Alan Brennert (via A Life In Books)

This richly imagined novel, set in Hawaii more than a century ago, is an extraordinary epic of a little-known time and place—and a deeply moving testament to the resiliency of the human spirit.
Rachel Kalama, a spirited seven-year-old Hawaiian girl, dreams of visiting far-off lands like her father, a merchant seaman. Then one day a rose-colored mark appears on her skin, and those dreams are stolen from her. Taken from her home and family, Rachel is sent to Kalaupapa, the quarantined leprosy settlement on the island of Moloka’i. Here her life is supposed to end—but instead she discovers it is only just beginning.

Friday Finds is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading

I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir – Jennifer Finley Boylan (via A Striped Armchair)

From the bestselling author of She’s Not There comes another buoyant, unforgettable memoir—I’m Looking Through You is about growing up in a haunted house…and making peace with the ghosts that dwell in our hearts.

For Jennifer Boylan, creaking stairs, fleeting images in the mirror, and the remote whisper of human voices were everyday events in the Pennsylvania house in which she grew up in the 1970s. But these weren’t the only specters beneath the roof of the mansion known as the “Coffin House.” Jenny herself—born James—lived in a haunted body, and both her mysterious, diffident father and her wild, unpredictable sister would soon become ghosts to Jenny as well.

I’m Looking Through You is an engagingly candid investigation of what it means to be “haunted.” Looking back on the spirits who invaded her family home, Boylan launches a full investigation with the help of a group of earnest, if questionable, ghostbusters. Boylan also examines the ways we find connections between the people we once were and the people we become. With wit and eloquence, Boylan shows us how love, forgiveness, and humor help us find peace—with our ghosts, with our loved ones, and with the uncanny boundaries, real and imagined, between men and women.

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street – Hilary Mantel (via Reading Matters)

When Frances Shore moves to Saudi Arabia, she settles in a nondescript sublet, sure that common sense and an open mind will serve her well with her Muslim neighbors. But in the dim, airless flat, Frances spends lonely days writing in her diary, hearing the sounds of sobs through the pipes from the floor above, and seeing the flitting shadows of men on the stairwell. It’s all in her imagination, she’s told by her neighbors; the upstairs flat is empty, no one uses the roof. But Frances knows otherwise, and day by day, her sense of foreboding grows even as her sense of herself begins to disintegrate.

Shutter Island – Dennis Lehane (via My Tragic Right Hip)

The year is 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new ­partner, Chuck Aule, have come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Multiple-murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this barren island, despite having been kept in a locked cell under constant surveillance. As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on them, a strange case takes on even darker, more sinister shades—with hints of radical experimentation, horrifying surgeries, and lethal countermoves made in the cause of a covert shadow war. No one is going to escape Shutter Island unscathed, because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is remotely what it seems.

Friday Finds is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading

I’ve got a nice variety of finds this Friday.

English Passengers – Matthew Kneale (Via The Millions)
I remember hearing of this book a few years ago, but it never enticed me. This review though makes me want to read it.

Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician – Daniel Wallace (Via Citizen Reader)

Johnny Hiro – Fred Chao (Via Largehearted Boy)

Friday Finds is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading

Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Matsuki Mockett (via Largehearted Boy)

Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived by Penelope Lively (via Indextrious Reader)

Yes, Yes, Cherries: Stories by Mary Otis (via The Hipster Book Club)

Friday Finds is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading

The problem with reading blogs is that I can’t help adding more and more books to my TBR pile.

Hungry: A Mother and Daughter Fight Anorexia by Sheila Himmel (via Book Addiction)

Unbeknownst to food critic Sheila Himmel – as she reviewed exotic cuisines from bistro to brasserie — her daughter, Lisa, was at home starving herself. Before Sheila fully grasped what was happening, her fourteen-year-old with a thirst for life and a palate for the flavors of Vietnam and Afghanistan was replaced by a weight-obsessed, antisocial, hundred pound nineteen-year-old. From anorexia to bulimia and back again—many times—the Himmels feared for Lisa’s life as her disorder took its toll on her physical and emotional well-being.
Hungry is the first memoir to connect eating disorders with a food-obsessed culture in a very personal way, following the stumbles, the heartbreaks, and even the funny moments as a mother-daughter relationship—and an entire family—struggles toward healing.

The Longshot by Katie Kitamura (via Baby Got Books)

Cal and his trainer, Riley, are on their way to Mexico for a make-or-break rematch with legendary fighter Rivera. Four years ago, Cal became the only mixed martial arts fighter to take Rivera the distance — but the fight nearly ended him. Only Riley, who has been at his side for the last ten years, knows how much that fight changed things for Cal. And only Riley really knows what’s now at stake, for both of them.
Katie Kitamura’s brilliant and stirring debut novel follows Cal and Riley through the three fraught days leading up to this momentous match, as each privately begins to doubt that Cal can win. As the tension builds toward the final electrifying scene, the looming fight becomes every challenge each of us has ever taken on, no matter how uncertain the outcome.
In hypnotic, pared-down prose, The Longshot offers a striking portrait of two men striving to stay true to themselves and each other in the only way they know how.

The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction by Samuel R. Delany (via Omnivoracious)

This ground-breaking work of criticism by master of science fiction Samuel R. Delany was first published in 1977 and has long been out of print. The edition is significantly revised and updated. Delany was one of the first writers to eloquently speak for the power of science fiction’s language, not just its gadgets and its landscapes. He believes that science fiction, like poetry, is something that we must learn how to read. To that end, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw contains close, insightful textual analyses of writers such as Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. LeGuin, Roger Zelazny, Joanna Russ and others. Some of his most famous essays are here, including About 5,750 Words and To Read The Dispossessed. This book will be useful to any student of science fiction and is a must-have for Delany fans.

The Pied Piper by Nevil Shute (via Leafing Through Life)

It is the summer of 1940 and in Europe the time of Blitzkreig. John Howard, a 70-year-old Englishman vacationing in France, cuts shorts his tour and heads for home. He agrees to take two children with him.
But war closes in. Trains fail, roads clog with refugees. And if things were not difficult enough, other children join in Howard’s little band. At last they reach the coast and find not deliverance but desperation. The old Englishman’s greatest test lies ahead of him.