B. Morrison's Blog, page 47

The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway

It seems a good moment to be reminded of those who retain their integrity even in the worst of times. Like Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book, this novel is based on a true story of courage and honor during the siege of Sarajevo.

Galloway’s novel is based on the actions of Vedran Smailović, a former cellist in the Sarajevo String Quartet, who during the siege played among the ruins, especially the Albinoni piece, and at funerals, even though funerals were often targeted by snipers. Unsurp...

The Lord of the Rushie River, by Cicely Mary Barker

When in need of comfort, I often turn to beloved books. In a recent article on the great writer’s website Writer Unboxed, author Juliet Marillier described some of her favorite and most treasured books, her keeper books. This picture book was the very first one she named. It is by the author of the Flower Fairy books, which I have long adored.

This story opens with Susan’s father, the Sailor, bidding her goodbye as he heads to sea again. In her sadness, she is comforted by a family of swans...

The Door, by Magda Szabó

I have been thinking a lot about doors this week, what doors are closing, what doors are opening. It is a time of great change for me personally, for my country, for the world.

Szabó’s brilliant novel opens with a recurring nightmare of desperately trying to force a door open; there is someone inside who needs saving. Yet she cannot even call for help; she has no voice.

The narrator of this first-person story is a Hungarian writer, also named Magda. She and her husband, also a writer, have n...

A Cup of Tea, by Amy Ephron

I once read a novel where a man enters a room and the woman there, who has never seen him before, just says, “Yes.” And she goes with him, even though she is married and has two children. I was at a susceptible age, young and a bit cynical, and wondered how that could even be possible, to recognise someone in that first moment.

I found out later that it was indeed possible, though I couldn’t explain how. Perhaps it was the circumstances; perhaps the way he looked or the sound of his voice, t...

I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

I must have been ten or eleven when I first read this novel of an eccentric English family living in a house attached to and using a corner of a partially ruined castle. I didn’t remember anything except that I’d loved it despite my initial disappointment that it wasn’t about King Arthur or magical doings—I’d come to it from The Once and Future King and somehow thought it was going to be similar.

Yet I only had to read the first sentence for the whole story to come flooding back to me, plus...

Professor Harriman’s Steam Air-Ship, by Terese Svoboda

The poems in this new collection by Terese Svoboda get to the heart of what it means to be human. I wrote a woman at first, but I think their truths transcend gender. Allusive, often playful, they are deeply moving.

Take the first poem, “Whose Little Airplane Are You?” With light but deft touches, she conjures a mother speaking of apricots and clouds and planes, as though in answer to the question What was it like when I was a baby? She apologises for all she had not apprehended then. Yet th...

The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I remember this book from my childhood. It was on a top shelf in the study, a small room lined with bookcases. Aside from the many-volumed encyclopedia and my grandfather’s law books, most of the shelves were filled with my father’s medical books. We children would pull them down when we wanted to scare ourselves and each other with the photos of rare diseases. So when I saw this book with the title in large letters on the spine, above my reach, I assumed it was another medical book, describ...

The Japanese Lover, by Isabel Allende

Allende’s new novel takes place primarily in Lark House, a fictional nursing home in California, where strong-willed Alma Belasco has established herself. She’s left the family mansion where she has lived ever since being sent out of Poland at the beginning of World War II, first with her aunt and uncle and then with her husband. Now she has entrusted it along with her philanthropic organisation to her bewildered son and daughter-in-law, who cannot fathom why a healthy woman would abandon he...

The Dogs of Riga, by Henning Mankell

I came to the corporate world from teaching where even the most cynical and disillusioned co-worker started from a place of caring about the children. When I started working in the corporate world, however, I quickly realised that there were two sorts of people there: those who cared only about getting ahead and those who cared about the work itself. Inspector Kurt Wallander is one of the latter.

Here, Wallander investigates the case of two dead men washed ashore in a life raft. Apparently i...

The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern

Judging by reader reviews, this is a book you love or hate. It is the story of a circus, one that “arrives without warning” and whose tents and even the ground around them are black and white. No other color intrudes.

I should have been warned right there.

The point of view is third-person omniscient, meaning that the story is told from the perspective of a distant and unnamed consciousness who knows everything that goes on in people’s hearts. Thus we enter the minds of no less than fifteen...