Favorite Fiction, Part 2 -2022
I continue here with seven more of my 14 favorite novels I read in 2022. They will take you to Bangkok, Cyprus, London, and India, and touch on how a teenage tragedy can affect a family for a lifetime, Mexican immigration, Marcellus the clever octopus, and an incredibly creative story about a female taxi driver who picks up and delivers both the dead and alive. Just pick one and dive in—you won’t regret it! Happy reading--
Schwartz, Liese O’Halloran, What Could Be Saved? (2021). In 1972, Genevieve and Robert Preston are stationed in Bangkok and living an expat lifestyle with their three children in a beautiful walled home with servants, one filled with parties and dilettante pursuits. General discontent brings both parents to explore broader interests and their children are most often in the care of the servants—household staff, nannies, gardeners and drivers. In an unguarded moment, their son disappears. In 2019, Laura Preston, a reclusive, single, and childless artist living in Washington DC, is contacted by someone claiming to be her missing brother and Laura flies to Thailand to see if it can be true. What a story. Very engaging. https://www.lieseschwarz.com/
Shafak, Elif, The Island of Missing Trees (2021). Set in Cyprus in an earlier time, when Greeks and Turks were on the verge of civil war, this is in some ways a love story told in an unusual way. Kosta and Defne’s families would never accept one another. When they fell in love they had to meet in secret in the back room of a local tavern, The Happy Fig. A third prominent character, contributing to this book’s originality, is the beautiful fig tree that held a special position in the center of the tavern and, later, in a garden in London. The story moves back and forth between Kosta, Defne, and the fig trees perspectives in both Cyprus and London, plus that of the couple’s daughter in today’s world. Shafak writes beautifully and she handles this complicated plot with skill. As I read, I learned much that I did not know about Cyprus and its history and about trees. And I was confronted once again with how immigrants, especially those forced to leave the lands of their births, carry a part of their homeland forever in their hearts. https://www.elifsafak.com.tr/books
Shapiro, Dani, Signal Fires (2022). What a lovely book! Literary quality. A young doctor, his pregnant wife, and their small daughter move into their first house in a quiet suburban neighborhood. They will happily raise their children there until a night when the boy and girl are in their teens and take a late night drive that will shape and shadow the family for decades in myriad ways. Years later, the doctor does an emergency delivery on the kitchen floor of a neighbor’s home, and the birth of that baby boy will further impact all of their lives. This is a remarkable book about continuum, about past, present, and future interweaving endlessly. How all things are connected. How death may be nothing like anything we imagine. It’s a beautiful story—poignant, touched by love and tragedy, generating questions about life and the universe. Highly recommend. https://danishapiro.com/books/signal-fires/
Tobar, Héctor, The Barbarian Nurseries (2011). Fascinating and very detailed presentation of life as a privileged white family—a mother, father, two boys and a girl—contrasted with life as an illegal Mexican immigrant, their housekeeper. The storyline is basically that Araceli is the live-in maid for the Torres-Thompson household. Scott Torres made a ton of money in a business that eventually went south and now he’s under the gun, struggling to maintain his family’s very fancy lifestyle on the California coastline. Stress and excessive expenditures causes the couple to let their gardener and their nanny go, leaving Araceli to tend to all her responsibilities plus help with the children. When a series of misunderstandings lead to the two boys being left with her when neither parent shows up for four days and how her efforts to transport them to their grandfather’s house get misconstrued, how things work for those in different social classes becomes crystal clear. The setting is multiracial Los Angeles and Tobar does a phenomenal job of revealing the worlds within its boundaries and the roles politics and media play in them. It’s a long book with lots of details, but well worth the read! https://www.hectortobar.com/
Umrigar, Thrity, Honor (2022). Another engaging novel from Umrigar. I always enjoy them. Indian American journalist Smita is called back from a relaxing vacation to cover a story about a Hindu woman’s Muslim husband, who is set fire to by his wife’s brothers, killing him and scarring her in a horrible “honor” incident. It’s Smita’s first trip back to India since she and her family left the country following a mysterious incident when she was fourteen. Smita’s memories are so unpleasant that she’s never wanted to return but she is drawn into Meana’s (the widow of the murdered man) lawsuit against the brothers. Umrigar brings rural India to life with its many difficult traditional beliefs about the treatment of women and Smita is forced to come face to face with her own past as she tries to report Meana’s story. Really excellent. http://umrigar.com/
Van Pelt, Shelby, Remarkably Bright Creatures (2022). A remarkable debut novel. When Tova, a lonely widow, working the janitorial night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus as she makes her evening rounds, it is only the beginning of the journey they will take together, the friendship that will emerge. I do love octopuses and was delighted to find a novel that so creatively included one as a main character. There is magic and healing between these two and others that are included in the story as Tova, whose only son mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound 30 years earlier, finds answers and a path forward. https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/interview-author-shelby-van-pelt
Yejidé, Morowa, Creatures of Passage (2021). This amazing and richly imaginative novel was longlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction. This is in some ways a powerful ghost story set in Washington DC but focused on a population seldom featured in our country’s capitol. This eloquently written novel is peopled with those living close to the edge economically and emotionally, living with deep loss, roaming the dark side, and often haunted by what fate has delivered. Death is nearby, at times piercing the ongoing lives of those left behind. Yejidé has been mentioned alongside Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and as the reader sinks into the mysteries in the fog of a hidden DC, we see why and look forward to more from this masterful storyteller. https://www.morowayejide.com/