NEW BOOKS ABOUT ARTISTS

What is it about the lives of artists that fascinates us so much? Perhaps it’s the urge to know more about where the books, paintings, movies and music come from, the difficulty of figuring out, without more information, how much of what they create is from their actual lives and how much from their imaginations.  Perhaps it’s just that genius, in whatever form, seems so strange and so unusual that we just want to try to understand it better.  If you’re one of those people who find artists fascinating, you’re in luck, because we have some new and fascinating novels about artists here at the Field Library, waiting for you.

Dmitri Shostakovich, the famous Soviet composer, is the star and focus of Julian Barnes’ new book, The Noise of Time. Shostakovich, 30 years old in 1936 when the book starts, is in big trouble. Somehow he has come to the attention of Joseph Stalin, who has denounced Shostakovich’s latest opera.  In the Stalinist Soviet Union, such a denunciation could mean the composer is exiled to Siberia, his work is banned and destroyed, or even that he is killed. Shostakovich is worried about his future, of course, but also about the people he cares about.  He manages to escape disaster this time, but his life thereafter is forever warped by the shadow of Stalinism and the state Stalin created.  The Noise of Time doesn’t just illuminate Shostakovich’s life and art, but also shines a light on the evolution of the Soviet Union during this tumultuous period as well.  Julian Barnes’ last book, The Sense of an Ending, won the Man Booker prize, so this is a historical novel worth diving into.

Samuel Beckett is known for his absurdist plays, like Waiting for Godot, but as the book, A Country Road, a Tree, by Jo Baker, reveals, there was much more to him than merely a gifted writer.  Set during World War II, the book follows Beckett (unnamed in the book) from his native, and neutral, Ireland to Paris, where he finds himself in the heart of Europe’s fight for survival.  Here he meets James Joyce and other literary giants; he meets the French woman who will be the love of his life and his companion for the rest of his life; he joins the French Resistance in secret and narrowly escapes from the Gestapo.  He leaves occupied Paris for the countryside and then, after liberation, tries to rebuild his life in the rubble left by the war.  Even if you’ve never seen one of Beckett’s plays, you’ll find his life fascinating, and leave it to Jo Baker, whose last book, Longbourn, looked at the other side of Pride and Prejudice, to bring the past to vivid life.

 

YOUR CHOICE OF SCIENCE FICTION, NEW THIS SUMMER

No matter what your taste in science fiction is, we’ve got something new and interesting for you at the Field this summer.

If you’re the sort of person who likes science fiction which is set in the not unrecognizable future, which contains interesting characters (human and non-human) dealing with problems created by the new technologies of the future, then you should definitely check out Central Station by Lavie Tidhar.  It’s set in a future Tel Aviv (so right off you’re not in the ordinary New York/London/Paris or generic City settings of too many books), which is a space station where people come and go, heading for different parts of the galaxy.  The book has been compared to Blade Runner for its depiction of a wholly different world related to our present one, the effects of technology on the people who have to live with it, and the human problems that take on different shapes in that different future. Boris returns from Mars to be with his dying father — a man who is lost in The Conversation, a vast data stream that’s also a collective unconscious — and discovers that many other things have changed since he’s been off planet. His ex-lover is raising a child he helped genetically modify, a child who can tap into the data stream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is involved with a cyborg ex-soldier.  And a data vampire has followed Boris to earth despite the law.  Behind it all stand the Others, powerful aliens who control the Conversation and are nudging the world to irrevocable change. Tidhar, the author, has won numerous awards in Britain, and this book should delight people who love science fiction not only for its ideas but for its people.

If your science fiction tastes run more toward the classic space opera, you should check out Dark Run by Mike Brooks. It could be described as a caper story set in space: a ship whose crew has a somewhat flexible attitude toward interplanetary laws gets involved in one particular smuggling mission because the captain, Ichabod Drift, has essentially been blackmailed into taking this job.  Naturally, if you’re blackmailing someone into doing a job, that job is not an easy one, and half the fun of a caper is watching the crew working together as complications arise and the best laid plans run headlong into chaos. One of the unwritten rules of this ship is that nobody asks anyone else about his or her past, but you just know that sooner or later the captain’s past is going to be revealed to the crew and then they will have to decide what’s more important: getting mad at the captain for getting them into this mess, or finding a way to get back at their mysterious employer?  If you think the idea of the equivalent of Ocean’s Eleven in space is a fun one, then you’re definitely going to enjoy Dark Run.

Back in 1971, the great Arthur C. Clarke wrote an award-winning novella called A Meeting with Medusa, about a man who, in the course of exploring the planet Jupiter, received life-threatening injuries that were only healed by cybernetic surgery, turning him into something more than a man and also more than a machine.  Now, Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds have picked up the torch (so to speak) and written a sequel to that famous book.  The new book, The Medusa Chronicles, picks up where A Meeting with Medusa left off, taking the main character, Howard Falcon, into a new life where his extraordinary abilities are put to good use as a sort of ambassador between people of flesh and people of metal.  Over the course of 800 years (!!), Howard copes with the growing self-awareness of robots and humanity’s increasing reach through the galaxy, but he’s always drawn back to the mysteries of Jupiter which changed him so much in the first place.  For people who love science fiction with a long view of time and the universe, and for fans of Arthur C. Clarke’s work, The Medusa Chronicles is a must-read.

 

COME TO THE BEACH — VIA THE FIELD LIBRARY

So maybe you’re planning to go to the beach this summer and relax, or maybe you just can’t make it this year, try as you might. Whether you’re physically going to the beach or not, you can still enjoy the whole summer beach experience (vicariously) by diving into these new beach reads on the shelves at the Field Library, authors you can count on to give you everything but the sand between your toes.

Mary Kay Andrews is known for her summer books combining a great sense of place with intriguing characters in complicated situations.  Her latest, The Weekenders, is that kind of book. Riley Griggs is waiting for her husband to show up on the Friday ferry to Belle Isle, North Carolina, where they have a vacation home, but to her surprise, she is served with foreclosure papers on the house.  Not only that, but her husband does not show up and she has no idea where he is or what’s happened to him. She turns to her friends on the island, but they have secrets and problems of their own, and she needs to uncover the mysteries of the island and the husband she may not know as well as she thinks she does, as the clock ticks down.

All Summer Long, by Dorothea Benton Frank, takes us back to her favorite area, the Carolina Lowcountry, where so many of her books are set, to introduce readers to Olivia Ritchie, a prominent New York interior designer and her husband, Nick Seymour, an English professor. They are traveling one summer with Olivia’s billionaire clients and considering their own move from New York to Charleston, South Carolina.  Nick is looking forward to changing their lives, slowing things down, but Olivia is not sure she’s ready to make the change, and over the course of the summer they’re changed by their experiences and the whose lives they glimpse.

Nantucket, Massachusetts, is the scene of Nancy Thayer’s new book, The Island House.  Courtney Hendricks is not an islander by birth, but since college she’s been vacationing on Nantucket with her then roommate, Robin, and Robin’s larger-than life family.  At 29, Courtney is a college professor in the midwest, returning for one tumultuous summer to share Robin’s family’s adventures and woes, but also to make a big decision about where her heart and her future lie. A family saga with a rich, full cast of characters, love, secrets and the beauty of Nantucket: what’s not to like?

The suicide of a famous chef, Deacon Rowe, is the event that brings all the characters in Here’s to Us, by Elin Hilderbrand, together on Nantucket Island, but don’t let that discourage you: the book is a warm celebration of life and love, as his first wife and childhood sweetheart, Laurel, brings his whole messy and extended family of ex wives and estranged children together to say goodbye to the man they all loved, in their own ways, and to make sense of his life and his death. Three women start off as rivals for a place in Deacon’s life but end up finding common ground and friendship in the aftermath.

Come to the beach at the Field, whether you’re going to an actual beach or not.

SUMMER THRILLERS AT THE FIELD

Summertime means more time for reading, and especially for reading thrillers, the kinds of books that keep you reading late into the night because you HAVE to know what happened.  Fortunately we have a slew of new thrillers for you at the Field this month.

Sophie Hannah’s new thriller, A Game for All The Family, starts in a deceptively simple way: Justine, our main character, is a married woman with a young daughter, who’s moving, with her family, to a quiet house in Devon, England, to get away from all the stress of her previous job, which nearly killed her.  Of course, as anyone who reads thrillers or watches horror movies knows, it’s just when you think you’re leaving your stresses behind and settling down into a nice comfortable new home that you fall into the worst, most horrifying, dangers of all, and so this gentle beginning draws us into a dark, scary place.  First Justine notices some disturbing changes in her 14 year old daughter, Ellen, changes which Justine’s husband fails to see.  Then Justine starts getting calls from someone who purports to know her, but who doesn’t tell Justine who she is or where they supposedly knew each other from. Then there’s trouble at Ellen’s school, and things just start to snowball until Justine has to outsmart an opponent she doesn’t know and find out the truth in order to protect her daughter and save her own life. If you like twisty thrillers with surprising endings, give A Game For All The Family a try.

There’s something fascinating about survival stories, where characters are placed in deadly situations and have to find some way to survive.  In Before the Fall by Noah Hawley, a number of people are on a private plane flying from Martha’s Vineyard when the plane crashes.  There are only two survivors: a destitute artist and a four year old boy, whose family was all killed in the crash. The book alternates between the story of the crash and the struggle of the two survivors and the backstories of the other eight passengers on the plane, and it seems less and less of an accident and more and more as if the plane crash was planned, but by whom and for what purpose?  

Another classic thriller plot involves discovering that the people you thought you knew are very different from who you thought they were. That plot illuminates Forgive Me, by Daniel Palmer. Angie DeRose, the protagonist, is working as a private investigator at the beginning of the book, searching for endangered runaways. Her own childhood was idyllic and happy, as far as she knows. But then her mother dies suddenly, and among the mementoes in her parents’ attic is a picture of a little girl Angie doesn’t recognize.  On the back of the picture is a code and the words “Forgive me”, in her mother’s handwriting. Her father claims to know nothing about the picture or about any of the other questionable things Angie finds.  Wondering whether she has a sister she doesn’t know about, Angie enlists the help of a U.S. Marshall who works with her agency to try to find out what happened to the little girl in the picture.  What she doesn’t realize is that there are people who know those secrets and are willing to do anything, even kill, to keep them secret.