The Girl on the Train: A Novel, by Paula Hawkins. January 2015. 326pp.
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, January 2015: Rachel takes the same
commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track,
flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal
that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their
deck. She’s even started to feel like she knows them. “Jess and
Jason,” she calls them. Their life—as she sees it—is perfect. Not
unlike the life she recently lost. And then she sees something
shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s
enough. Now everything’s changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel
offers what she knows to the police, and becomes inextricably entwined
in what happens next, as well as in the lives of everyone involved.
Has she done more harm than good? Compulsively readable, The Girl on
the Train is an emotionally immersive, Hitchcockian thriller and an
electrifying debut.
San Miguel: A Novel, by T.C. Boyle. 2012. 367pp
On a tiny, desolate, windswept island off the coast of Southern
California, two families, one in the 1880s and one in the 1930s, come
to start new lives and pursue dreams of self-reliance and freedom.
Their extraordinary stories, full of struggle and hope, are the
subject of T. C. Boyle’s haunting new novel. Rendered in Boyle’s
accomplished, assured voice, with great period detail and utterly
memorable characters, this is a moving and dramatic work from one of
America’s most talented and inventive storytellers.
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. 2010. 288pp
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, PEN/Faulkner Award
Finalist, A New York Times Book Review Best Book. Bennie is an aging
former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate,
troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly
reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other
characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on
every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling, exhilarating
novel of self-destruction and redemption.
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. 1995. 384pp.
This fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, captured in
Daisy's vivacious yet reflective voice, has been winning over readers
since its publication in 1995, when it won the Pulitzer Prize. After a
youth marked by sudden death and loss, Daisy escapes into
conventionality as a middle-class wife and mother. Years later she
becomes a successful garden columnist and experiences the kind of
awakening that thousands of her contemporaries in mid-century yearned
for but missed in alcoholism, marital infidelity and bridge clubs. The
events of Daisy's life, however, are less compelling than her rich,
vividly described inner life--from her memories of her adoptive mother
to her awareness of impending death. Shields' sensuous prose and her
deft characterizations make this, her sixth novel, her most successful
yet.
Fever: A Novel by Mary Beth Keane. 2013. 401pp.
Mary Beth Keane, named one of the 5 Under 35 by the National Book
Foundation, has written a spectacularly bold and intriguing novel
about the woman known as “Typhoid Mary,” the first person in America
identified as a healthy carrier of Typhoid Fever. On the eve of the
twentieth century, Mary Mallon emigrated from Ireland at age fifteen
to make her way in New York City. Brave, headstrong, and dreaming of
being a cook, she fought to climb up from the lowest rung of the
domestic-service ladder. Canny and enterprising, she worked her way to
the kitchen, and discovered in herself the true talent of a chef.
Sought after by New York aristocracy, and with an independence rare
for a woman of the time, she seemed to have achieved the life she’d
aimed for when she arrived in Castle Garden. Then one determined
“medical engineer” noticed that she left a trail of disease wherever
she cooked, and identified her as an “asymptomatic carrier” of Typhoid
Fever. With this seemingly preposterous theory, he made Mallon a
hunted woman. The Department of Health sent Mallon to North Brother
Island, where she was kept in isolation from 1907 to 1910, then
released under the condition that she never work as a cook again. Yet
for Mary—proud of her former status and passionate about cooking—the
alternatives were abhorrent. She defied the edict. Bringing
early-twentieth-century New York alive—the neighborhoods, the bars,
the park carved out of upper Manhattan, the boat traffic, the mansions
and sweatshops and emerging skyscrapers—Fever is an ambitious
retelling of a forgotten life. In the imagination of Mary Beth Keane,
Mary Mallon becomes a fiercely compelling, dramatic, vexing,
sympathetic, uncompromising, and unforgettable heroine.
