It has often been written that a good novel can take you on a journey. If that is the case, then One Hundred Bottles is a vivacious drunken stagger around 1990s Havana. It is a place of extraordinary energy combined with terrifying shadows, captured beautifully by Ena Lucía Portela, in her first book to be translated into English.
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Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful is a powerful examination of sisterhood examined through a set of short, short stories with a persistent sinister undertone. The winner of Wales Book of the Year 2009, Deborah Kay Davies writes unflinchingly about the enmity and ultimately, the common bond that forever links Grace and Tamar.
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Most of us know the disorientation of travel to a country with a different language and customs. The simplest daily activities can become so difficult—where will we eat? How do we look for the bathroom? Reading Renee Gladman's intriguing novella Event Factory redoubles that feeling, in the story of a traveler whose experiences and behavior have an unusual orientation to everyday logic.
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Put the words Vietnam War and Canada in a sentence together and, for Americans of a certain age—particularly men—you conjure specific memories of the early 1970s. I remember those days as quite carefree: wondering about my chances of a date and thankful I could pass for 18 in the local bar. Yet, is my memory reliable?
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Lemon is not your average teenager—she hates parties and other social functions, spends her time volunteering in the children's cancer ward of the hospital, reads constantly, and criticizes everyone and everything. Pegged by publishers as a modern Catcher in the Rye for girls, Lemon is hilarious, heart-breaking, crude, and hands down one of the best books I have read this year.
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