Category: Fiction

The gruff widower Holland has two possessions he cherishes above all others:

his sprawling property of eucalyptus trees and his ravishingly beautiful daughter, Ellen.

When Ellen turns nineteen Holland makes an announcement: she may marry only the man who can correctly name the species of each of the hundreds of gum trees on his property.

Ellen is uninterested in the many suitors who arrive from around the world, until one afternoon she chances on a strange, handsome young man resting under a Coolibah tree. In the days that follow, he spins dozens of tales set in cities, deserts, and faraway countries. As the contest draws to a close, Ellen and the stranger’s meetings become more erotic, the stories more urgent. Murray Bail’s rich narrative is filled with unexpected wisdom about art, feminine beauty, landscape, and language.Eucalyptus is a shimmering love story that affirms the beguiling power of storytelling itself.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,  255 pages )

Sarton’s 19th novel echoes many earlier themes: the comfort of friendship; relationships between women; the precarious balance between union and solitude, the bond between people and their pets, and what it means to live an elegant life and achieve an elegant death. After the death of her companion of 30 years, 60-year-old Harriet Hatfield opens a bookstore for women in a changing, predominantly blue-collar neighborhood near Boston. Following a newspaper article in which she is labeled a lesbian, a word that very ladylike Harriet has never thought to use, she becomes the target of threats and abuse from an unknown assailant. As Harriet moves from the well-ordered life of a sheltered companion into the rougher, wider world, she begins to redefine herself. Sarton uses the bookstore as a backdrop against which to paint a series of predictable thumbnail sketches of women, but these portraits are pale and thin. Although there is a clarity to her unadorned prose, the richness of varied voices does not come through and emotions are many times too carefully circumscribed. Sarton’s mainstream, “proper” heroine counterbalances gay stereotypes, but the focus on issue rather than character diminishes the novel’s impact.

( Courtesy of Publishers Weekly,   hardcover 320 pages )

A luminous first novel, set in Greece, Scotland, Greenwich Village, and Long Island, that traces the members of a Scottish family as they confront the joys and longings, fulfillments and betrayals of love in all its guises.

In June of 1989 Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher and recent widower, travels to Greece, where he falls for a young American artist and reflects on the complicated truth about his marriage.

Six years later, again in June, Paul’s death draws his three grown sons and their families back to their ancestral home. Fenno, the eldest, a wry, introspective gay man, narrates the events of this unforeseen reunion. Far from his straitlaced expatriate life as a bookseller in Greenwich Village, Fenno is stunned by a series of revelations that threaten his carefully crafted defenses.

Four years farther on, in yet another June, a chance meeting on the Long Island shore brings Fenno together with Fern Olitsky, the artist who once captivated his father. Now pregnant, Fern must weigh her guilt about the past against her wishes for the future and decide what family means to her.

In prose rich with compassion and wit, Three Junes paints a haunting portrait of love’s redemptive powers.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,  353 pages )

I’ll Take You There tells the story of a young woman growing up in America during the 60s: going to university, falling in love, coming to terms with her relationship to her parents. At university she joins a sorority; in the sorority house the girls are busy becoming women together, discovering themselves and other people, becoming “sisters”. The narrator does not join in the fun. She becomes confirmed in her self-opinion as an irredeemable outsider, appalled by the predatory “heifer-sized” males, their faces “covered in smeared lipstick as if they’d been devouring raw meat”, and the girls, “exuding ‘personality’ like a lighthouse beacon flashing light”. She spends her time reading Kant, Spinoza, and Democritus, desperate for company and consolation.

She never reveals her proper name, but calls herself “Anellia”, or as one character puts it, “Annul-ia” – “She who is not”. She attempts to construct a personality for herself, but her attempts to get to know the truth about herself and others lead to disaster and she comes to believe that self-knowledge is an impossibility: “We never see ourselves, at all; we have no clear idea of ourselves; our mirror reflections reflect only what we wish to see, or can bear to see, or punish ourselves by seeing.”

First she leaves the sorority, after a pointless act of martyrdom which the other women revile, and then she falls in love with Vernor Matheius, a black graduate philosophy student with a face “crinkled and even mutilated by thinking”. Vernor is very probably a genius, but he has only two kinds of mood: “the Inspired and the Shitty”. He has cut himself off from other people, and from the burgeoning civil rights movement – “his home was in the mind”. She seeks to follow Vernor’s example, but this doesn’t work either, and after discovering uncomfortable truths about him, she is left once again to her own devices. In the end she saves herself through writing, but not before she’s faced the final truth about her own feckless father, who she had assumed was dead, and who is now in fact dying of cancer and seeking understanding.

The book is a creepily accurate portrait of Oates’s stock-in-trade, the sensitive young adult. Anyone who left their Christmas party early, disgusted by their own timidity and drunkenness, suffering perhaps from love’s “delirious lassitude of fever”, and who resolved over the new year to give up smoking, make a new start, maybe go travelling and live life to the full, will identify with the torments of Oates’s woman with no name. “This was my curse. I would bear it through my life. As if a wicked troll had baptized me, in infancy… unknowing; a flick of the troll’s fingers, poisonous water splashed on to my forehead. I baptize thee in the name of ceaseless yearning, ceaseless seeking and ceaseless dissatisfaction. Amen!” Sound familiar?

( Courtesy of The Guardian,  290 pages )

The Logans were an enchanting and admirable couple. Archie had snatched Liza from her own engagement party to someone else, wooed her, swept her off to his father in Scotland, and finally married her. Now bedded firmly into country life-three children, Archie the village doctor, Liza a teacher, everything comfortable, funny, affectionate,–they awaited the arrival of Archie’s father, the brilliant Sir Andrew Logan, a widower for over thirty years.

When his city-clean Rover stopped in the drive, Sir Andrew was not alone. Beside him was a golden lady in caramel suede, a warm, witty, desirable widow whom everyone–except Archie–adored at once. Archie saw his father’s mistress as the worm in the bud of his perfect life–a life that was to be wrenched apart before he and Liza could re-create their world.

( from the sleeve,   284 pages )

Matters of Chance is a glorious, aptivating novel about Morgan and Maude Shurtliff, who fall in love and marry in the years before World WarII. Unable to have children of their own, Morgan and Maude adopt twin girls. The four go home to their beautiful house in the country outside ofNew York City and begin to settle into what they hope will be a long and happy life. When the twins are still young, Morgan is called to serve inWorld War II, leaving Maude to raise her daughters alone. Jeannette Haien has rendered Morgan’s war experiences with astonishing detail, just as she has captured the American post-war era with a precision that is unrivaled in recent fiction.

( Courtesy of Harper Collins Publishers,   437 pages )