Eventide (Plainsong Series) by Kent Haruf

Hardback:

Abide with me:  fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens;  Lord, with me abide.
When other helpers fail, and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me. (Henry E Lyte)

Continuing the story he began in Plainsong (1999), Kent Haruf's fourth novel - albeit second novel in the Plainsong series - is every bit as rich in detail and atmosphere.  Written in precise yet poetic prose, and meticulously crafted, Eventide (2004) is infused with a glorious, understated beauty.

With Victoria Roubideaux now at college, the McPheron brothers are alone on their farm once again, yet struggling to settle back into old ways and routines;  Tom Guthrie and Maggie Jones, meanwhile, are finding their future together more assured, even while they are still finding their feet as a couple.

Alongside these familiar faces and places, however, are new characters and their stories:  Betty and Luther, who are struggling to keep their heads above water and their children Joy Rae and Richie out of care:  eleven-year-old DJ, who has spent much of his supposedly carefree childhood caring for his cantankerous grandfather Walter;  DJ's friend Dena, her mother and her sister, all of whom are trying to adjust to life and a home without the girls' father.

Eventide is a kind book in a cruel world.  It is honest, the people are real and you get the occasional measured workings of grace without it ever resorting to sentimentality and clichés.  Eloquent and evocative, Eventide paints a convincing, compelling picture of small-town life in Holt County, Colorado.

About the author:  Kent Haruf was born in eastern Colorado.  He received his Bachelors of Arts in literature from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1965 and his Masters of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1973.  For two years, he taught English in Turkey with the Peace Corps and his other jobs have included a chicken farm in Colorado, a construction site in Wyoming, a rehabilitation hospital in Colorado, a hospital in Arizona, a library in Iowa, an alternative high school in Wisconsin, and universities in Nebraska and Illinois.

Haruf is the author of Plainsong (1999), which received the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Maria Thomas Award in Fiction, and The New Yorker Book Award.  Plainsong was also a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award.  His novel, The Tie That Binds (1984), received a Whiting Foundation Award and a special citation from the Pen/Hemingway Foundation.  In 2006, Haruf was awarded the Dos Passos Prize for Literature.

All of his novels are set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado.  Holt is loosely based on Yuma, Colorado, an early residence of Haruf in the 1980s.

Haruf lived with his wife, Cathy, in Salida, Colorado, with their three daughters.  He died of cancer on 30 November 2014.

Rating:  5/5

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Cockroahes (Harry Hole Series) by Jo Nesbø

Paperback:  Harry is on a special mission.

Detective Harry Hole arrives in a steaming hot Bangkok.  The Norwegian ambassador has been found dead in a seedy motel room, and Harry has been sent to investigate.  It is clear that the Ambassador's family are hiding some secrets of their own, but few people are willing to talk.

But once he arrives Harry discovers that this case is about much more than one random murder. There is something else, something more pervasive, scrabbling around behind the scenes.  Or, put another way, for every cockroach you see in your hotel room, there are hundreds behind the walls.

He needs to solve a crime and avoid a scandal.

Surrounded by round-the-clock traffic noise, Harry wanders the streets of Bangkok lined with go-go bars, temples, opium dens, and tourist traps, trying to piece together the story of the ambassador’s death even though no one asked him to, and no one wants him to - not even Harry himself.

When Harry lays hands on some incriminating CCTV footage, things only get more complicated.  The man who gave him the tape goes missing, and Harry realises that failing to solve a murder case is by no means the only danger that faces the unwary.

But in an unfamiliar city, who can you trust?

Cockroaches (2013) is the second instalment in the beguiling Harry Hole thriller series.  Cockroaches is translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett.

About the author:  Born in 1960 in Oslo, Norway, Jo Nesbø graduated from the Norwegian School of Economics.  He went on to work as a freelance journalist and as a stockbroker in the finance sector.  His first Harry Hole crime novel was published in Norway in 1997 and was an instant bestseller, winning a best Nordic crime novel prize (an accolade shared with Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson).  The Harry Hole series has been a huge success, making bestseller lists throughout Europe - selling more than 9 million copies around the world.  He is the lead singer and songwriter for Norwegian rock band 'di Derre'.

Rating:  5/5

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Childless (American Tragedy Trilogy) by Brian J Gail

Paperback:  This heart-pounding Catholic fiction adventure spanning forty years culminates in Childless (2011), the third and final novel in Brian J Gail's "American Tragedy Trilogy."

The reader is propelled from Manhattan boardrooms to European capitals to Middle East laboratories to Church chanceries and confessionals.

Step into these pages and follow Father John Sweeney and the families he serves as they struggle to live their Catholic faith in a world that grows more hostile with every turn of the page.

Gail throws back the veil on the architecture of the Life Sciences Revolution and its carefully planned milestones from the abortifacients pill to in-vitro fertilization to embryonic stem cell testing, and ultimately, to the very door of the Transhumanist project itself.

You will see something of your own soul in these characters as they struggle to survive the great apostasy and navigate their way to the Church's promised New Springtime.

The American Tragedy Trilogy is highly recommended to everyone, regardless of faiths or beliefs.

About the author:  Brian J Gail was a schoolboy baseball phenomenon recruited by Division One universities and scouted by Major League baseball teams;  he suffered a disabling shoulder injury early in his college career and was sent to the Philadelphia Phillies team doctor whose efforts to help him regain his exceptional pitching velocity were unsuccessful.

Fueled by a white hot competitive fire and magnetic rhetorical gifts, he rocketed to the top of the Madison Avenue advertising world in his mid-30s only to see his career derailed by a great moral business dilemma and a direct challenge to his Catholic faith.  A gifted entrepreneur and CEO, he provided strategic marketing counsel to elite Fortune 500 corporations and directed a variety of non-profit boards focused on assisting the underprivileged in Philadelphia.

Today, Brian J Gail is a critically acclaimed author, a Knight of the Immaculate, a co-founder of three catholic classical academies, a patent holder, and a highly sought after speaker on matters of faith and family.  Brian’s remarkable novel Fatherless (the first in the American Tragedy trilogy) is published by Emmaus Road Publishing and has become a powerful tool for catechesis.

Brian married his high school sweetheart, Joan Mary Kain, 40 years ago and they were blessed with seven children including two sets of identical twins and one set of “Irish twins.”  Brian has touched many lives with his optimism, humour, and unwavering Faith in Our Lady and the truths of the Catholic Church.  He and his lovely wife, Joan, divide their time between homes in Villanova, Pennsylvania and Jupiter Island, Florida.

Rating:  5/5

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Blood On The Page: A Murder, A Secret Trial, A Search For The Truth (True Crime) by Thomas Harding

Hardback:  In June 2006, police were called to number 9 Downshire Hill in Hampstead to investigate reports of unusual card activity.  The owner of the house, Allan Chappelow, was an award-winning photographer and biographer, an expert on George Bernard Shaw, and a notorious recluse, who had not been seen for several weeks.  Someone had recently accessed his bank accounts, and attempted to withdraw large amounts of money.

Inside the darkened house officers found piles of rubbish, trees growing through the floor, and, in what was once the living room, the body of Chappelow, battered to death, partially burned and buried under four feet of paper.

The man eventually convicted of his murder was a Chinese dissident named Wang Yam:  a man who claimed to be the grandson of one of Mao’s closest aides, and a key negotiator in the Tiananmen Square protests.  His trial was the first in modern British history to be held ‘in camera’:  closed, carefully controlled, secret.

Wang Yam has always protested his innocence.

Thomas Harding has spent the past two years investigating the case, interviewing key witnesses, the investigating officers, forensic experts, and the journalists who broke the story, and has unearthed shocking and revelatory new material on the killing, the victim and the supposed perpetrator.  It is a story that has been described in the press and by the leading detective as 'the greatest whodunnit’ of recent years:  an extraordinary tale of isolation, deception and brutal violence, stretching from the quiet streets of north London to the Palace of Westminster and beyond.

Blood On The Page (2018) is an explosive and meticulous new work of non-fiction from an author working at the height of his powers. 

About the author:  Thomas Harding is an author and journalist who has written for the Financial Times, the Sunday Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, among other publications.  He co-founded a television station in Oxford, England, and for many years was an award-winning documentary maker.  He also ran a local newspaper in West Virginia, winning the West Virginia Association of Justice’s Journalist of the Year Award, before moving back to England in 2011, where he now lives with his family.

He is the author of Hanns and Rudolf, a Sunday Times bestseller and winner of the JQ-Wingate Prize; the internationally acclaimed Kadian Journal:  A Father’s Story;  and The House by the Lake, a Costa Biography Award and Orwell Prize nominee.

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A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Paperback:  When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they are broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition.  There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor;  JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world;  Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm;  and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.

Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride.

Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he will not only be unable to overcome - but that will define his life forever.

The 700-or-so pages of A Little Life (2015) that took Japanese-American author Hanya Yanagihara 18 months to write, open in a somewhat jaunty and recognisable manner:  introducing four bright young things as they graduate college, their sights trained on big New York City careers.  Christian Lorentzen, in the London Review of Books, wrote that the characters "seem like stereotypical middle-class strivers plucked out of 1950s cinema", and indeed they slip into these careers somewhat easily, becoming a successful actor, painter, architect and lawyer.  But soon the novel darkens, it jars and then it appals, becoming less about the four young men and more particularly about one of them:  the one who won’t tell of why he limps, why he doesn’t have relationships, why he cuts.  The one who won’t tell of his ugly childhood and why he fears he will never escape its horrors.

Yanagihara should be commended for creating a book that, despite being a shattering and difficult read, became a bestseller, was shortlisted for Man Booker Prize 2015, International IMPAC Dublin Literary Awards, Bailey's Womens Prize for Fiction, National Book Award for Fiction and won the Kirkus Prize in Fiction.

About the author:  Hanya Yanagihara is an American novelist and travel writer.  She grew up in Hawaii.  Following her graduation from the women's college Smith College in 1995, Yanagihara moved to New York and worked for several years as a publicist.  In 2007, Yanagihara began writing for Condé Nast Traveler where she became an editor before leaving in 2015 to become a deputy editor at the style magazine T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

Her first novel, The People in the Trees, based on the real-life case of the virologist Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, was praised as one of the best novels of 2013

Rating:  6/5

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Plainsong (Plainsong Series) by Kent Haruf

Paperback:  Plainsong (1999) - the first book in the quietly magnificent Plainsong series - is a heart-strong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver.

In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether.  A teenage girl - her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house - is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go.  And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they have ever known.

From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together - their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humour intact and resonant.  As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.

Utterly true to the rhythms and patterns of life, Plainsong explores the grace and hope of every human life and mankind's infinity capacity for love.  It is a novel to care about, believe in, and learn from.

About the author:  Kent Haruf was born in eastern Colorado.  He received his Bachelors of Arts in literature from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1965 and his Masters of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1973.  For two years, he taught English in Turkey with the Peace Corps and his other jobs have included a chicken farm in Colorado, a construction site in Wyoming, a rehabilitation hospital in Colorado, a hospital in Arizona, a library in Iowa, an alternative high school in Wisconsin, and universities in Nebraska and Illinois.

Haruf is the author of Plainsong (1999), which received the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Maria Thomas Award in Fiction, and The New Yorker Book Award.  Plainsong was also a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award.  His novel, The Tie That Binds (1984), received a Whiting Foundation Award and a special citation from the Pen/Hemingway Foundation.  In 2006, Haruf was awarded the Dos Passos Prize for Literature.

All of his novels are set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado.  Holt is loosely based on Yuma, Colorado, an early residence of Haruf in the 1980s.

Haruf lived with his wife, Cathy, in Salida, Colorado, with their three daughters.  He died of cancer on 30 November 2014.

Rating:  5/5

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