B. Morrison's Blog, page 14

Sisters of Night and Fog, by Erika Robuck

This absorbing historical novel follows two real women who became French Resistance fighters during World War II. Violette Szabo and Virginia d’Albert-Lake both have a history with France. Violette was born there of a French mother and English father and grew up in England to become a strong-willed Cockney. Virginia is an American who, like Violette, falls in love with and marries a Frenchman.

From the start, we are caught up in the rumors of war, brought to life through the eyes of these two w...

Violeta, by Isabel Allende

I haven’t read all of Allende’s novels, but I’ve read a few and enjoyed most of them, so I was glad when my book club chose her most recent (2022) novel. It is the story of a life, written as a letter from Violeta, now 100 years old, to Camilo, whose identity only becomes clear as we get fairly far into the book.

She begins with her birth in 1920, the year when the influenza pandemic which began in 1918 in the battlefields of the Great War finally finds its way to her unnamed South American cou...

Paradise, by Abdulrazak Gurnah

In one of my writing classes, we were discussing Isak Dineson’s memoir Out of Africa with its haunting opening: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” She goes on to describe the beauty of the landscape: “There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet.” She gives us the burnt colors like pottery, the spice-scented grass, and “the crooked bare old thorn-trees,” ending with “Everything that you saw made for greatness and ...

Prelude to Foundation, Isaac Asimov

This is the first book in Asimov’s classic Foundation series, though he wrote it after five of the six novels in the series. It is meant to be a guide as well as a prequel. Asimov says he hadn’t planned for his first Foundation short story, published in 1942, to grow into a multi-volume series, so had decided a better introduction was needed.

Hari Seldon, a young mathematician, delivers a paper at a conference held in Trantor, capital of the empire, and thus comes to the attention of young Cleo...

The Bay of Angels, by Anita Brookner

What if you grew up reading fairy tales, all the ones I found in a corner of the little stone library near our house: the Blue Fairy Book, the Yellow, the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault? Perhaps like Zoë you would come to believe that someday a fairy godmother would come or a magic cloak be given, a prince, a slipper, so that you yourself need do nothing but hold yourself in readiness, be calm and pleasant and passive.

What if you lived with your widowed mother, a sad and solitary woman, with...

The Far Field, by Madhuri Vijay

“I am thirty years old and that is nothing.” It’s a great first sentence and resonates throughout the book, taking on new shades of meaning as Shalini tells us the story of what happened when she was twenty-four.

A privileged young woman, she lives in Bangalore in southern India. Her father is a successful businessman, freeing her to lead a life without purpose: drinking and clubbing, occasionally volunteering.

Like a few of my recent reads, this novel is set in motion by the death of the pro...

Undue Influence, by Anita Brookner

This third bookshop book, like the last one, starts with the death of the protagonist’s mother. However, no one is throwing Claire out of the London flat—the only home she’s known—and she’s already working in a bookshop. Still, her father having died some years previously, she’s now alone in the world.

Claire is a curiously passive person, though she doesn’t see herself that way. The bookshop where she works is owned by two elderly sisters, Muriel and Hester, but Claire doesn’t sell books. She’...

The Last Bookshop in London, by Madeline Martin

When Grace Bennett lost her mother, she lost almost everything. Her sole relative, an uncle, not only takes over her house but also dismisses her from her job at his store without a reference. She and her more adventurous friend Viv have always dreamed of going to London, so they set off, buoyed by the offer of lodgings with a friend of Grace’s mother.

It’s August, 1939.

Viv gets her dream job at Harrods, but timid Grace has no luck. Finally, the fond if bossy Mrs. Weatherford bullies the owner...

The Christmas Bookshop, by Jenny Colgan

I somehow ended up with three books in a row about a woman working in a bookshop, one that is floundering and perhaps about to go out of business.

One of the things I cover in my writing classes is how an idea alone is not a story. An idea such as the one above is too general; it needs to be expanded with details about the character, her situation, what she wants and why, what kind of trouble she’ll have getting it. Then the story begins to take shape.

These three vastly different books illu...

City of Friends, by Joanna Trollope

The premise for Trollope’s 20th novel interested me: four women, friends since university, now in their forties are successful in high-power careers, yet they are all struggling with work-life balance. The story begins with Stacey, a senior partner at a private equity firm, requesting flexible time in order to care for her mother who is suffering from dementia. Stacy, her husband, and her friends are confident she’ll get it given all she has done for the company. Instead she is fired.

Stacey fi...