The Most Compelling Books of 2022

Reprinted from auburnpub.com

It’s the time of year for the Most Compelling Books of 2022. These are books that I still think about even months after I finished reading them, books with unforgettable characters and writing that takes my breath away.

Barbara Kingsolver is a writer whose works I never miss, and her new novel, Demon Copperhead is her best one yet. She takes on a classic- Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield- and sets her story about an orphan boy in Appalachia, as she tackles the topics of addiction, poverty, the foster care system, and the beginnings of the opioid crisis. I am not the only reviewer to pick this as the best book of the year. 

I read a great deal of historical fiction, and Adriana Trigiani’s moving epic about the importance of family stories The Good Left Undone, takes the reader from WWII Italy, France, and Scotland as Matelda, the matriarch of the Cabrelli family, shares her mother’s long-lost love story with her children and granddaughter so that it will not be forgotten. Every detail here is perfect. 

 

Anthony Marra’s Mercury Pictures Presents is also an epic about a young Italian woman who flees WWII to Los Angeles where she ends up working in the motion picture industry. Marra’s characters are so well-drawn they feel real, and his story is engrossing. 

Melissa Fu’s Peach Blossom Spring is set in 1930s China as Japan’s aggression forces Meilin and her young son to flee their home. They become separated from their family and Meilin does anything she has to in order to keep her son safe. When he grows up, he moves to the United States but Meilin stays behind. It’s a powerful story of a mother’s sacrifice for her son.

John Searles’ superb suspense novel, Her Last Affair is set at an abandoned drive-in theater as a blind widow rents out a cabin to a mysterious man, and a married woman reconnects on Facebook with a high school boyfriend. How Sayles cleverly connects these three characters at the end had me gasping. 

Another book that connects its characters in a clever manner is Fiona Mozely’s  brilliant Hot Stew about a group of people who are affected when a developer decides to sell a building in Soho in London to put up luxury condos. The tenants, including two women who run a brothel there, band together to defeat his plan. 

Matt Cain’s charming The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle is the feel-good book of the year. Albert is a lonely postman facing retirement in a small English town. He decides to confide in his coworkers about his life and makes a friend in a young single mom on his route. This beautiful story restores your faith in humanity. 

Jennifer Close’s Marrying the Ketchups is a wonderful story about a family who owns an Irish family restaurant in a Chicago suburb. When the patriarch passes away suddenly, there is a void and a decision about who should run the restaurant- the cousin who has been doing most of the work or the daughter who returns home from New York? I love a good Irish family story and throw in a family business and I’m in. 

Another foodie-novel I liked is Natalie Caña’s romance A Proposal They Can’t Refuse about two grandfathers who play matchmaker with their grandchildren- Kamilah, who is trying to save her family’s Puerto Rican restaurant, and Liam, who runs his family’s brewery next door. I love the combination of food, family businesses, and hot romance in this enemies-to-lovers novel. 

I read two nonfiction books that are outstanding. Laura L. Engel’s heartbreaking You’ll Forget This Ever Happened is a memoir about her experience after becoming pregnant in high school in the 1960s. She was sent to a home for unwed mothers where she was forced to give up her baby and it scarred her for life. It’s a searing book. 

Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner was given unprecedented access as she wrote The Desperate Hours about the beginnings of the COVID pandemic in New York City as seen through the eyes of doctors, nurses, administrators, and patients on the front lines at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. It’s a harrowing story well-told. 

Three books I read in 2022 to look for in 2023- Amy Poeppels’ charming The Sweet Spot, Lauren Willig’s fantastic historical novel, Two Wars And A Wedding, 
 and Mary Beth Keane’s amazing novel The Half Moon. 

I wish you all a very happy holiday season.

Friday 5ive- July 8, 2022

Welcome to the Friday 5ive, a weekly-ish blog post featuring five things that caught my attention this week. It's hard to believe it's July already, summer is moving too quickly.

1) We like to go see the New York Yankees play at Yankee Stadium once a year, and this year we were invited to join someone in their Legends seats on the first base line right next to the Yankees dugout. The game started off rocky when the Oakland A's scored three runs in the top of the first, but the Yankees came back in the bottom of the first with an Aaron Judge  two-run homer. They went on to win the game, and I got a photo of Judge coming in from the outfield before the game. He is very tall.

2) While traveling home from Florida on the 4th of July, and got to see the beginning of the Macy's Fireworks Spectacular as our car came down the FDR along the East River where they shoot off the fireworks. That was a pretty cool visual, like a scene from a rom-com movie. We finished watching the show from our balcony, which is also pretty cool.

3) Our friends came over for dinner one night in Florida and they brought over an appetizer tray with figs from their garden. It reminded us of the trip we all took to Italy a few years ago where we picked figs from the vineyard where we were staying. It was such a great memory, and the Florida figs were delicious.

4)  Everyone was talking about The Old Man on FX and since I'm a big Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow fan, we tuned in. It was a bit of a slow start for me, but now I'm all in. It's about a retired-in-hiding CIA agent played by Jeff Bridges who is being targeted by the US government for his involvement in Afghanistan years ago. John Lithgow plays an FBI agent who has a past with Bridges, and his loyalties are in question. Amy Brenneman unfortunately finds herself in the middle of it all. It's very cat-and-mouse, and the flashbacks can be confusing at first. But I did guess one plot twist early on, so that makes me proud. New episodes drop on Thursdays and it streams on Hulu the next day. 

5)  I got a lot of reading in last week. Linda Holmes Flying Solo takes the reader back to Calcasset, Maine, the setting for her wonderful novel Evvie Drakes Starts Over. Flying Solo introduces us to Laurie, a 40 year old woman who breaks off her engagement and returns home to clean out her beloved great-aunt's home. She reevaluates her future after going through her aunt's effects, and there's mystery involving a wooden duck decoy that goes missing and may or may not be the work of a famous artist, and hot librarian. It's a great beach read. (My review is here.) 

I continued my streak of reading moving memoirs with Zibby Owens' Bookends. Zibby is the host of the popular podcast Moms Don't Have Time To Read and she has become a big book influencer with a regular gig recommending books on Good Morning America. She talks about being painfully shy as a child, losing herself in reading and writing, her weight and self-esteem issues, things many women can relate to (even if most of us can't relate to her wealthy upbringing on the Upper East Side on New York City, a privilege she readily acknowledges.) Owens dealt with so much loss in life, losing her best friend in the North Tower on 9/11, her grandfather, her stepbrother, and a best friend from high school all in rapid succession. She also lost her mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law tragically at the beginning of COVID. What I most admire about Owens is her ability to pick herself up and move forward. She sees opportunity where many see obstacles, and has created a wonderful career uplifting authors and readers, and now herself. Her love affair with husband number two Kyle is a sweet surprise, and I liked how she protects the privacy of her children. Bookends is inspiring and honest, and her extensive Reading List at the end of the book is a treasure trove for readers like myself. 

One of my go-to authors is Anthony Marra. I loved his Constellations of Vital Phenomena (set in Chechnya during their war with Russia) and The Tsar of Love and Techno, (a collection of stories set in the USSR). He is a brilliant writer. His new novel, Mercury Pictures Presents tells two stories, one set in Italy during the rein of Mussolini, and the other in California during WWII. After Maria inadvertantly causes her defense lawyer father to be imprisoned in Italy for his subversive actions, she and her mother run away to California to live with relatives. Maria gets a job at Mercury Pictures where her talent leads  her to a job as an assistant to Artie Feldman, the head of the midsize film production company. We toggle back and forth between Maria's new life in California and her father's life as he becomes a tutor for young Nino, who has aspirations to become a war photographer. This magnificient book packs so much into it, Marra creates these worlds for the reader that feel like we are a part of the story instead of just reading it. I learned so much about the movie industry at that time and their ties to the war effort. It makes me want to dive deeper into this time period and read more. This is a deep, thoughtful, meaty book, one I'd love to start right over and reread. I think this might be his best one yet, and that is saying something. 

Have a safe, happy, healthy week.

The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra

The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra
Published by Penguin Random House ISBN 978-0-7704-3643-8
Hardcover, $25, 352 pages

Three years ago I read Anthony Marra's debut novel about people trapped in the Chechen war, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. I could not stop talking about it and recommended to anyone who would listen (and even those who wouldn't). I was thrilled when the critical accolades came in for Marra; he even won a National Book Critics' Circle Award. It is a brilliant book.

Marra's second book is a collection of linked short stories, The Tsar of Love and Techno, set in the USSR. This collection covers a wider range of years and characters, and it is even more brilliant because of that.

Marra starts off strong with The Leopard, a story set in 1937 that drops the reader into an nearly improbable situation, yet one that happened everyday in the Soviet Union. Roman Markin works in the Department of Party Propaganda and Agitation. His job is to erase people who have been determined by the government to be traitors.

He literally erases them- painting over them in photos and paintings. Families are ordered to turn over any evidence that a loved one ever existed to be eliminated. Roman visits his sister-in-law to collect photos of his brother Vaska, her husband who was executed for his religious practices, and to warn her of the dangers of disobeying the government.

Roman also instructs his sister-in-law to take photographs of her son every year in case she is arrested and he is placed in an orphanage. This will make it easier to find him if she is ever released. That fact just floored me.

Roman continues his work daily erasing people from existence. But he began adding something too- he put his dead brother into every painting he censored. He put images of Vaska as a young boy, a teen, an adult, an older man. Every single image he worked on had Vaska in it to atone for Roman's guilt over his brother.

Others people we meet in the collection of stories include Galina, the beautiful granddaughter of a famous ballerina, who deserted her first love to become the wife of a wealthy oil oligarch.  We read of Kolya, her first love who became a soldier and drug dealer, and his brother Alexei who makes a mixtape for his brother to take into war with him.

A painting by a famous Russian artist of a pasture ties the stories together. Roman puts his brother into it, and Kolya ends up spending too much time in the actual pasture under unfortunate circumstances. Many of the characters in the story have a connection to this painting and it is a lifeline to some.

The writing in The Tsar of Love and Techno just stuns. Writing of how people turned their neighbors in to police for any suspected infraction, he says " Our city was small and whispers easily became verdict." That sentence conveys everything about life then and there in nine words.

Other examples are :

"The obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else."

"I said nothing, and as is often the case with men who possess more power than wisdom, he took my silence for affirmation."

"Wealth announces itself with what's easy to break and impossible to clean." (Talking about Galina's apartment filled with white carpets and expensive chairs and art.)

"To say he felt guilty would ascribe to ethical borders that were lines on a map of a country that no longer existed."

"Uncertainty recalibrated the moral compass to point toward survival."

It took me a week to read The Tsar of Love and Techno because I simply didn't want it to ever end. I would read a story, and then take time to appreciate the writing, the complexity of the story, and what life was like for these people under the Soviet regime.  What it took to survive, the choices people were forced to make when no good choice existed, just crushed me.

This is another masterpiece from Marra, one that proves that he is a force to be reckoned with in literature for a long time. I cannot do his book justice in this review, suffice it to say that The Tsar of Love and Techno knocked me out and is the best book I have read this year, possibly in two years. I give it my highest recommendation.

My review of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is here.

I met Anthony Marra at BEA last year and fangirled to him about A Constellation of Vital Phenemona. He was very gracious but he probably thought I was a little crazy.

Anthony Marra signing book sat BEA 2015

The Winner of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena Is...

techeditor! Congratulations, you've won a copy of Anthony Marra's amazing novel, A Constellation of  Vital Phenomena from the publisher, Hogarth.

My review of the book is here.

Keep reading for more upcoming contests, and Happy Memorial Day.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
Published by Hogarth ISBN 978-0-7704-3640-7
Hardcover, $26,  400 pages $26

Stories of people living in war-torn countries can be harrowing and emotional, especially when innocent civilians are the main characters. Chris Bohjalian's The Sandcastle Girls set during the genocide in Syria in 1915 is one such novel, made more poignant by the ongoing civil war there.  Anthony Marra's debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, covers the years 1994-2004, which encompasses two wars in Chechnya, as they fought the Russians for their freedom.

The title refers to the definition of life in The Medical Dictionary of the Union of Soviet Physicians.  Life: a constellation of vital phenomena- organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation. By that definition, this beautifully crafted novel is full of life.

Sonja is a young surgeon who left Chechnya and her younger sister Natasha behind to study medicine in London. Natasha disappears, and ends up in the sex slave trade as she tried to escape the civil war in Chechnya. Sonja returns home to look for her sister.

Sonja works at Hospital #6, one the few buildings not bombed out during the first war. When Sonja saves the life of a man whose brother is a gangster, she is able to get supplies to keep the hospital running, along with two older nurses.

Natasha eventually comes home, completely traumatized by her experiences. It breaks Sonja's heart to see her sister, and she feels helpless and guilty about what happened to Natasha. After a long time, Natasha comes to work at the hospital too, helping women deliver their babies.

By the time the second war has begun, Ramzan, a young man from a nearby village has begun informing on his neighbors to the Russian soldiers. His father, Khassan, is devastated by his son's behavior and refuses to speak to him. Ramzan has informed on his friend Dokka, a man who has taken in many refugees as they make their way to the camps.

Dokka's home is burned down and he is taken away to the Landfill, a Dante's Inferno-like place where disappeared people wait to be questioned and tortured. Dokka's eight-year-old daughter Havaa has escaped, but the Russians want her too. Akhmed, another neighbor who is the village doctor, finds Havaa and hides her at the hospital.

The story shifts back and forth over the years, and we see how these character's lives are surprisingly entwined. The writing is beautiful, and the imagery Marra uses is stunning. This paragraph in particular is so vivid.

"No one wanted to risk moving the unexploded shells that lay scattered across the village, so the next morning Havaa's parents, among other villagers, pried toilet bowls from the rubble of collapsed houses and dragged them upside down and two by two gently set them over the unexploded shells. Havaa would never forget the sight. So many dozens of upside-down toilets bowls crowded the street that cars wouldn't pass for weeks, and in that time, she would occasionally hear the overdue explosions, the shrapnel ringing within the ceramic, but those bowls, the one decent legacy of the Soviet Union, never broke."

There are so many brilliant scenes in this book, and I learned so many things I wish no one had to know, like how people would sew their names and addresses inside their hems so that their bodies would be sent back to the families, and Havaa saving a frozen bug in her pocket so that she would have something to eat later.

As Akhmed watched the nurse emptying the pockets of dead people looking for ID cards, he thinks,

"It was a simple gesture, no more than a flick of her fingers, performed without malice or contempt, but with complete disinterest, and it cut through Akhmed like a fin through water. In her indifference he saw the truth of a world he didn't want to believe in, one in which a human being could be discarded as easily as pocket lint."

This novel took my breath away. Marra empathetically tells the story of these people, and how life has forced them to adapt to a situation not of their making, and he contrasts the horror with the tenderness of humanity. Reading this made me hope to not be so judgmental of others as we see things are not always what they appear to be here.

This is not a book you can read in one sitting. You read a little, close the book, contemplate and digest it, and then go back for more. I did not want it to end, yet felt an overwhelming need to know how the stories of these people finished. Quite simply, every human being should read this haunting, amazing book.

rating 5 of 5
Thanks to TLC Book Tours for providing a copy of the book. You can enter to win a copy of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena provided by the publisher by commenting below; be sure to leave your email address. A winner will be randomly chosen on May 24th.

Other stops on the tour:

Monday, May 6th:  An Excellent Library

Tuesday, May 7th:  Caribousmom

Wednesday, May 8th:  A Bookish Affair

Friday, May 10th:  Unabridged Chick

Monday, May 13th:  Book Hooked Blog

Tuesday, May 14th:  Broken Teepee

Wednesday, May 15th:  BookChickDi

Thursday, May 16th:  The Feminist Texican [Reads]

Friday, May 17th:  Peppermint Ph.D.

Monday, May 20th:  Patricia’s Wisdom

Tuesday, May 21st:  Speaking of Books

Wednesday, May 22nd:  Chaotic Compendiums

Thursday, May 23rd:  Knowing the Difference

Friday, May 24th:  The Relentless Reader

Tuesday, May 28th:  Book Chatter

Thursday, May 30th:  Books Speak Volumes

Monday, June 3rd:  Booklover Book Reviews

Wednesday, June 5th:  Rhapsody in Books

Thursday, June 6th:  Luxury Reading

Read an excerpt from A Constellation of Vital Phenomena here.