David Bezmozgis' The Free World HarperCollins, 2011 The Krasnansky family is making their way out of Soviet Russia, travelling to Rome. Samuil, the patriarch, is annoyed by the tour guide's suggestion that the history of Western civilization could be plotted along the road that the bus is travelling. "Their history:
Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1983) Women's Press, 1984 Celie begins writing letters to God because the man who is married to her mother has said that's all who will listen, all who should be bothered with listening. (It's just wrong to call him her father, after he has raped
Nicholas Ruddock's The Parabolist Doubleday, 2010 It's ironic. One of the women in Nicholas Ruddock's novel is thinking about the heroines of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. "Look at all those passionate women, the ones in novels, the ones who wore their hearts on their sleeves," she says. "They all
Timothy Findley's Spadework (2001) This is an author who has been particularly important to me. In that peculiar way in which someone with whom you have had virtually no contact can affect you more than people with whom you have spent years of your life. So I delayed reading his
Louisa May Alcott's Jo's Boys (1886) For all that I remembered Jo as being another sort of character in Little Women, one passionate about writing and determined to be an author, there is, at least, a taste of that, finally, in Jo's Boys. The third chapter of this novel is
