A subtle, graceful, intimate exploration of loss and disconnection.
A Libyan exile contemplates his time away from his troubled homeland.
Khaled Abd al Hady, the narrator of Matar’s third novel, moved to England for college in 1983, well aware of the risks of encountering people criticizing his homeland. Years earlier, on BBC Arabic World Service radio, he’d heard an allegorical short story by a young Libyan writer, Hosam Zowa, criticizing the Qaddafi regime; shortly after, the Arab announcer reading the story was assassinated. Still, at the prompting of a friend and classmate, Mustafa al Touny, he attends a protest at the Libyan embassy in London and is nearly killed by gunfire from inside the building. “Forever a marked man,” he can’t return home to his parents and sister in Benghazi or even share word of his injuries and their cause. As the years pass, Khaled settles into British life, finding and befriending Hosam as his friendship with Mustafa deepens; one running theme of the book is that friendship offers a space for honesty and affection that’s often foreclosed by family and country. Still, the mood is melancholy, and Matar captures it gorgeously: “It turns out it is possible to live without one’s family. All one has to do is to endure each day and gradually, minute by minute, brick by brick, time builds a wall.” Plotwise, the novel operates at a relatively low boil, and even passages on political and religious strife are delivered with a sinuous, Jamesian reserve. The Arab Spring of 2011 intensifies matters, prompting Khaled and his cohort to decide how much to engage in it. But even here, Matar is more philosophical than heated, exploring what sides of ourselves we deny for the sake of a cause. While some around Khaled engage in the revolution, he, like the book, is more restrained, echoing Hosam’s notion that “there is no salvation in war.”
A subtle, graceful, intimate exploration of loss and disconnection.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780812994841
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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