This is a book that I have wanted to read since 2006. When I was in Nagpur in 2008, I purchased it from a road side second-hand book stall and the book stayed on my ‘to-read’ list for more than 5 years! I finally got down to reading it thanks to the
A superbly evocative and suspenseful debut that looks at old age, loneliness and dementia.
The Night Guest is hard to categorise – it’s both a taut thriller and an altogether close-to-home examination of dementia and loneliness, written with a wonderful sense of pacing and language. Although the main plot deals with an elderly lady accepting a stranger into her home and life, the most resonant parts for me come from a beautifully muddled blending of memories and reality. Like last year’s Norwegian by Night by Derek B. Miller, The Night Guest offers a compelling glimpse into the slow grip […]
The Falcon Cannot Hear the Falconer
Okay, wow. Wasn’t a good idea to finish this while sitting in a cafe. People think I’m barking. I’m not going to go in depth on this one for two reasons: a) If I were to do that I would spoil the hell out of anyone reading this, and b) the emotions are a little too raw for me to even want to. This book affected me. To sum it up (very) briefly, Tell the Wolves I’m Home is about June Elbus, a fourteen year-old […]
Jen K’s Review #11: The House Girl
This is another novel set up with the two timeline style that seems to be popular, especially for historical fiction. In this case, the past is 1852, and focuses on Josephine, a seventeen year old house slave at the Bell estate, who decides to run. The modern day piece follows Carolina “Lina” Sparrow, first year associate at a corporate law firm in New York. Her mother is dead, and her father is an artist that has finally found success. After 20 years of not talking about […]
Jen K’s Review 10: No One is Here Except All of Us
Less than two weeks into the New Year, and I’ve already discovered my first one star review. I’m actually surprised because halfway through I thought there were still enough redeeming qualities for two stars, but the more it went on, and the more I wanted it to end, the further my rating went down. I admit it doesn’t help the novel at all that I kept having to force myself to read a few chapters between books I actually wanted to read instead of reading […]
Jen K’s Review 9: The Soldier’s Song
I bought this book over two and half years ago while visiting the Dublin Writers Museum because of course I had to leave with at least one book by an Irish author, and Joyce is scary (I also participated in a Literary Pub Crawl of Dublin during that vacation though I think I preferred the one I did in Edinburgh). Anyway, for some reason I never quite got around to reading any of the books I bought on that trip, and I’m trying to both […]