Weekend picks for book lovers
What should you read this weekend? Paste BN's picks for book lovers include Someone, the new novel by Alice McDermott, and Amanda Lindhout's searing memoir of being held captive in Somalia.
Someone by Alice McDermott; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 232 pp.; fiction
In each of her six previous novels, including Charming Billy and At Weddings and Wakes, Alice McDermott has revealed herself to be a master of the deceptively simple.
Seven years after the publication of After This comes her latest novel, Someone. It is the story of an ordinary life, filled with extraordinary moments of love and loss.
Someone skips around in time and place to chart the life of Marie, an Irish-Catholic girl growing up in Brooklyn with her pensive older brother, Gabe, a father who drinks too much (and who will die young) and a mother trying to keep her family stable.
The novel sweeps through the milestones of Marie's life — suffering the death of a young neighbor, which will haunt her for decades; experiencing first love at the age of 17, and her first job (oddly enough, in a funeral parlor); a happy marriage (though not to her first love, Walter, who breaks her heart); pregnancy, motherhood (with four children), old age, illness, and widowhood.
Paste BN says *** ½ out of four. "Filled with subtle insights and abundant empathy and grace."
A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett; Scribner, 384 pp.; non-fiction
Lindhout, at the time an aspiring journalist, tells the story of her 480-day captivity in Somali at the hands of teenage kidnappers who beat, raped and starved her before a ransom was paid.
Paste BN says ****. "Harrowing, beautifully written …Lindhout has created a brave, compassionate and inspiring triumph."
Wilson by A. Scott Berg; Putnam, 743 pp.; non-fiction
The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Maxwell Perkins and Charles Lindbergh takes on the life of Woodrow Wilson, America's 28th president.
Paste BN says ****. "It has taken nearly a century for someone with Berg's own, somewhat Wilsonian drive to take the full measure of this singular president."
The Girl You Left Behind by Jojo Moyes; Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, 369 pp.; fiction
A painting of a young woman in love is so compelling, it captivates a German commandant in World War I and sets off a legal battle over its rightful owner nearly a century later.
Paste BN says *** ½ out of four. "Moyes writes delicious plots, with characters so clearly imagined they leap off the pages in high-definition prose."
The Returned by Jason Mott; Harlequin MIRA, 352 pp.; fiction
Debut novel centers on an aging couple dealing with the resurrection of their 8-year-old boy nearly 50 years after he drowned in a river, one of many among the dead to "return."
Paste BN says *** ½. "Leave it to a poet to bring beauty and soul to the well-trodden undead genre…an impressive debut novel."