Dec 17: Avaland needs a nudge for the holidays

Pictured:
The Imposter by Damon Galgut
Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan
Firewall by Henning Mankell
Dear Husband: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates (sorry, no cover yet, it's an ARC)

Again, I am asking for a nudge based on what looks interesting to you and why Reviews (or excerpts from) are below. I have read at least two or three novels from each of these authors, so I'm fairly confident that I'll enjoy these books but I thought it would be fun to let you choose from the very top of my TBR according to what intrigues you.

This is for my reading over the holidays. I have a few to finish up before then.

and here are the descriptions:

The Imposter In this bleak and thrilling novel, the fifth from Booker Prize–nominee Galgut, the author creates an antipastoral, postapartheid noir that centers around Adam Napier, a depressed poet who retreats to a rural South African town to write. Rather than write, Adam drinks and wallows in depression. The story accelerates once he meets Canning, a former schoolmate who regards Adam as a personal hero even though Adam cannot remember him. As it turns out, Canning is a wealthy businessman with a vendetta against his dead father: he plans to transform an idyllic game preserve his father owned into a golf course. While Canning facilitates business between corrupt politicians and shady businessmen, Adam sinks deeper into a moral quagmire and continues to fail as a poet. At the heart of this tightly wound novel is a story of betrayal—within an individual, among friends and neighbors and within a society. With Adam, Galgut has created a transcendent loser, a contemporary cousin to Bellow's magnificent Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day. from Publishers Weekly

Tender Morsels In her extraordinary and often dark first novel, award-winning story writer Lanagan (Red Spikes) creates two worlds: the first a preindustrial village that might have sprung from a Brueghel canvas, a place of victims and victimizers; the second a personal heaven granted to Liga Longfield, who has survived her father's molestations and a gang rape but, with one baby and pregnant again, cannot risk any further pain. As she raises her two daughters, placid Branza and fiery Urdda, she discovers that her universe is permeable: a dwarf or littlee man, in Lanagan's characteristically knotted parlance, slips in and out of her world in search of treasure; and a good-hearted youth also enters, magically transformed into a bear in the process. A less kind man-bear follows, and then a teenage Urdda, avid for a richer life with the vivid people, figures out how to pass through the border, too. Writing in thick, clotted prose that holds the reader to a slow pace, Lanagan explores the savage and the gentlest sides of human nature, and how they coexist. With suggestions of bestiality and sodomy, the novel demands maturity—but the challenging text will attract only an ambitious audience anyway. from Publishers Weekly.

Firewall In the sixth Kurt Wallander book to appear in English (One Step Behind, etc.), Mankell proves once again that spending time with a glum police inspector in chilly Sweden can be quite thrilling. In the small town of Ystad, a pair of seemingly random events take place within a matter of days: two teenage girls with no apparent motive brutally beat and stab a taxi driver to death, and a remarkably healthy man checks his bank balance at an ATM and then collapses dead on the sidewalk. After two more odd murders, Wallander becomes convinced that the incidents are all connected. The recurring clues demonstrating the vulnerability of society in the electronic age remain just outside of the Luddite inspector's understanding. But once he detects a conspiracy to collapse the world's financial infrastructure on a specific date, Wallander, whose position at work is already imperiled, ignores office politics and protocol to stop the would-be revolutionary. Although Wallander and his investigative team are forced to work at a dizzying speed, the pace of the book is just right, doling out new leads and intrigues right when they're needed. from Publishers Weekly.

Dear Husband The family ties that bind (and choke) are the overarching theme of Oates's grim but incisive collection. The title story takes the form of a rambling letter from an Andrea Yates–like mother after her infanticide is completed, detailing her belief that God has instructed her to drown her five little children who have not turned out right. A Princeton Idyll gives us a series of letters between a chipper children's author, granddaughter of a famous physicist, now deceased, and his sometimes sentimental, sometimes-bitter former maid; the result, in true Oatesian fashion, is dark family secrets and a good deal of denial. In Vigilante a son, struggling with his recovery from substance abuse, helps his unknowing mom by exacting revenge on his estranged dad. Special is told from the perspective of an elementary-school girl who moves toward desperate action watching her autistic older sister strain her parents' marriage and, worse, garner all their attention. Throughout the collection, Oates seamlessly enters the minds of disparate characters to find both the exalted and depraved aspects of real American families. from, what else? Publishers Weekly:-)

The Imposter sounds like fun.

Personally, I'd go with Firewall. Although it sounds interesting, I'm partly nominating it as a default. The other books sound waaaaay too bleak, grim, depressing, dark -- to use some of the words in the blurbs. Just not into grim at the moment.

but I am quite used to dark and grim:-) and you don't think Mankell is grim? the detective is often depressed.

I'll nudge Firewall, which sounds intriguing to the extent that I think I'll look into the first Kurt Wallender book. I enjoy well-written gritty police procedurals. I'll denudge the Oates. I realize that I'm probably in the minority, but after reading one novel and several of her short stories, I just find her writing annoying.

Ooh, oof, Firewall for sure!! The Beeb have just finished screening a series of three shows (only three - I am bereft) based on Wallander novels, of which this was one.

I really really really wish that I'd read them first - Firewall was actually on my TBR list, but I watched the first episode they screened, which wasn't, and Kenneth Branagh was just so great and the cinematography was so gorgeous, that....

Anyway, you can't beat a good mystery (or is this a police procedural? Does it make it a police procedural if they have a pathologist? Ooh, more genre niceties to get to grips with) for Christmas reading.

So, um, I haven't read this..... but I'm still going to give it a big nudge, in the same sort of vicarious way that I am surreptitiously feeding my eldest son's tentative interest in becoming a writer :)

Lois - I'm not familiar with any of these books, so I was just going by the descriptions. I imagine a police murder mystery would probalby be grim too, but somehow it sounded the least grim of the bunch! Good luck with those! :-)

I too am not familiar with any of these particular books, although I know authors. With my own preferences, I think Dear Husband sounds the most interesting. I love stories in the form of correspondence (which is kind of weird, but oh well!).

Happy reading whichever you choose!

The Imposter summary sounds good! Plus, I like the cover. I'll nudge that one.

I'm going to suggest Tender Morsels, as you say you have read Lanagan before. She usually does such darkly imaginative short stories so I think it would be interesting to read a full novel. This is a book I'm intending to read in the near future, I loved Red Spikes. Of the others I'll softly nudge the Firewall as I'm a fan of detective novels though haven't got to Mankell's books yet.

>7 Nickelini:: I'm going to join Nickelini in nudging Firewall, for the same reasons. Those other books are just way too glum for me when it comes to reading over the holidays. Reading suspense / mystery would be fun, though.

I am not familiar with any of these books or authors but The Imposter sounds the most interesting to me.

Of the four books, I would read Firewall first.
--BJ

Definitely Tender Morsels, as I think she's a fine writer - a little like Carol Emshwiller, but with less of the milk of human kindness - but my nudge is of limited value as I have read no Galgut or Mankell and only a little of Joyce Carol Oates.

re: Firewall. Had the book been written today, the man would be checking his retirement account balance before dropping dead on the sidewalk.

>14 timjones: tim, when I saw you were the most recent post, I thought 'he went for the Lanagan' and, well, I was right:-)

I share theaelizabet's misgivings about Oates. She is so prolific and so inconsistent. One of her books has what is one of my all time favourite first lines of a book, namely "I was a child murderer". Great, great line, I think. But, having said that, I have not read her in years, and would not start again, based on that description. Firewall, possibly. Though I have read thousands of mysteries, I have not read Mankell yet, and will at some point. But I think my first choice would be the Galgut, based more on my positive feeling about his Good Doctor than this blurb.

Quite a grim group to spend time with during the holidays! I would nudge The Imposter by Damon Galgut.
Touchstones not working this morning.

Another denudge for Oates - I cannot enjoy her writing so trying another would be low priority.

I read The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut - good, not spectacular. I might get around to his new one if on my TBR - but not a priority.

Tender Morsels sounds so grim -"clotted prose!" "bestiality and sodomy". I guess I am not mature or ambitious enough for that one at the moment.

So the Mankell Firewall would be my first choice/nudge - although I am not a great fan of detective stories, I know he is a very good writer.

#15 - memo to self: from now on, always make the unexpected nudge!

BTW, I am 2/3 of the way through The Evening Land and enjoying it very much.

>19 timjones: excellent! will be happy to hear what you have to say about it. I think I also sent that book to jargoneer and citizenkelly.

Agreeing with Nickelini et al - I think Firewall is the only one I could bear, going strictly on descriptions provided. For holiday reading this seems a very grim lot!

Firewall is the only one that appeals to me; mostly I'm just stopping by to note that Oates scares me.

I mean, she's often very good and all, but she's often terrifying. And it's hard to predict in advance whether any particular Oates is 'don't-read-at-night' scary.

Thank you, all.

It seems that Firewall has won the nudge; followed by "The Imposter" (no touchstone) as runner-up. Quite possibly all four will be read but I'll start with the Mankell.

>22 AsYouKnow_Bob: Will let you know if this particular Oates is 'terrifying'.

NUDGING CLOSED NOW, THANKS. Happy Chanukah, Merry Christmas, Merry Winter Solistice, Happy New Year...etc. to all