Death of an Ordinary Man

by Glen Duncan (London: Scribner, 2004)

“He’d had glimpses of it, what the household had, the way the kids smelled after their baths, the reflexive ease of shared flesh and blood, the love and sex at the heart of the marriage like a furnace heating the whole place.”

When Death of an Ordinary Man starts, Nathan Clark, a retired history teacher and amateur archaeologist from Devonshire, has woken up dead. It is the day of his own funeral, and he is able to move unseen around his family and friends as they mourn, listening in on their conversations and even their thoughts. Nathan has no idea how or why he died and spends the rest of the book trying to work this out, while his wife Cheryl, father Frank, best friend Adrian and teenage children Luke and Gina attempt to come to terms with his death. As he goes back in time to crucial moments in his life, including the haunting disappearance of his youngest daughter Lois, Nathan’s memories become darker and more frightening – there are no angels in this afterlife, just a room in his house that he never knew was there, with a mysterious door he feels compelled to open. This is a sad, thoughtful work of literary fiction and a deeply moving portrait of family life.


Read a biographical essay written by the author in the New York Times here.

The Snapper

by Roddy Doyle (London: Martin Secker& Warburg, 1990)

“Sharon was pregnant and she’d just told her father that she thought she was. She’d told her mother earlier, before the dinner. –Oh –my Jaysis, said Jimmy Sr.”

The Snapper is the second book in Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown trilogy, about the poor working class Rabbitte family of Dublin. Twenty-year-old Sharon Rabbitte is pregnant, unmarried, working in the local grocery store and still living at home. She eventually works up the courage to tell her family and friends about the baby but keeps the father’s identity a secret – much to the consternation of her own father, Jimmy Senior, who becomes obsessed with identifying the culprit. Doyle tells the story almost entirely in dialogue, making for an endearingly authentic read with a strong sense of place, and the distinctive Irish slang he uses (eejit, jacks, buke) will make you laugh out loud. This is a warm, funny book about the impact of a surprise pregnancy on a loving family.

Find more Irish literature here then brush up on your Irish slang here.

Room

by Emma Donoghue (New York: Little, Brown, 2010)

“All our relatives, you’re related to them now too,” says Grandma. “What’s ours is yours.”

Room is narrated by five-year-old Jack, who has been kept in the same small space since the day he was born. Jack and his mother never go outside, and never see anybody except Old Nick, the man who keeps them prisoner, so they have come to rely on each other for everything. After an exhilarating escape from the confines of their old life, Jack and Ma must adjust to being Outside, and Jack has to accept that the strange new world – our modern environment – he now inhabits is safe and real. An original and suspenseful work of literature, Room is often disturbing but always compelling, a story that at its heart is about the strength of a mother’s devotion to her child.

Visit Jack and Ma’s Room here.

The Shipping News

by Annie Proulx (London: Fourth Estate, 1993)

“His earliest sense of self was as a distant figure: there in the foreground was his family; here, at the limit of the far view, was he. Until he was fourteen he cherished the idea that he had been given to the wrong family, that somewhere his real people, saddled with the changeling of the Quoyles, longed for him.”

Winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, The Shipping News tells the story of Quoyle, a newspaper journalist who returns to the old family home in Newfoundland after his unfaithful wife dies in a car accident. Taking his two small daughters and an elderly aunt with him, Quoyle begins his life again, finding unexpected happiness and redemption. Proulx’s striking use of language, evocative settings and quirky humour (Quoyle often thinks in newspaper headlines: Dog Farts Fell Family of Four) turn this tale of tragic characters into an uplifting celebration of family, friendship and people’s potential for change.

Listen to a radio interview with Annie Proulx here.

Man and Boy

by Tony Parsons (London: HarperCollins, 1999)

“I loved my wife and I loved our son. Together, the two of them made my world make sense. My life without them was unimaginable. I knew I was a lucky man. But I couldn’t help it, I just couldn’t help it – lately I found myself wondering when I had stopped being young.”

Harry Silver’s marriage ends just before his thirtieth birthday: his unhappy wife Gina leaves London for Japan and he is left to look after their four-year-old son Pat. Also finding himself suddenly unemployed, Harry must quickly get used to being a single parent and in doing so, becomes closer to his son and his own father that he has ever been before. But tragedy soon strikes at the heart of his family, and when Gina finally comes back for Pat, Harry has to make the hardest decision of his life. With its reflections on old-fashioned nuclear families and the guilt that comes with failing to provide your own children with that same stability, Man and Boy is a touching piece of domestic fiction, dealing with the complicated relationships that form after any divorce in an often amusing way.

Read an online interview with the author here.

Middlesex

by Jeffrey Eugenides (London: Bloomsbury, 2002)

“You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there’s it’s only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you’re time-travelling. In this life we grow backwards.”

A big, bold, hilarious saga that won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Middlesex follows three generations of the Stephanides family from 1920s Greece to Detroit in the swinging 60s to contemporary Berlin. The narrator of this epic tale is Calliope, whose grandparents’ unusual union meant that she was born a girl but, thanks to a rare genetic mutation, grows into a man – Cal, now 41, is recording his/her life story for science and posterity. Superbly detailed descriptions of people and places make them feel incredibly real and specific, but the themes explored by this imaginative book (race, war, religion, sexuality, gender, the immigrant experience) are universal.

Read an interview with Jeffrey Eugenides by Jonathan Safran Foer here.

Gilead

by Marilynne Robinson (New York: Farrar, Strouss and Giroux, 2004)

“You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.”

Set in a small town in Iowa in 1956, and taking the form of dairy entries to his young son, Gilead tells the story of Reverend John Ames, a preacher in his 70s who knows he doesn’t have long to live. Ames mixes tales of everyday life, memories, and reflections about God with the history of his father and grandfather, both also preachers, during the American Civil War and WWI. Although slow-paced, this is a powerful book, revealing the old man’s deep religious beliefs and profound love for his family through simple prose and gentle humour.  Deserving winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.



Listen to an excerpt from the audiobook here.

Last Orders

by Graham Swift (London: Picador, 1996)

“I see him scratch his neck and reset his cap. I see him light up a snout, dicky chest or no dicky chest, and breathe out the first drag, bottom lip jutting, then rub his chin with the tip of his thumb, cigarette between his fingers, then run the ball of his thumb across his forehead, and I know I do all those things, without helping it, the same gestures, the same motions.”

Three men, friends since WWII, have gathered in their local pub to carry out the final wishes of Jack Dodds, a London butcher who requested that his ashes be scattered into the sea. Jack’s adopted son Vince drives Ray, Vic and Lenny to the pier at Margate and as they travel, we learn their history. Each chapter, some just a page or two long, is narrated by a different person in the form of an interior monologue but Ray also talks us through the men’s road trip and so becomes the centre of consciousness in the book. Years of friendship and resentments lie behind every comment made and as the book progresses, we learn why none of their wives came along. Winner of the 1996 Booker Prize, Last Orders makes wonderful use of English working-class slang (snouts, daffs, aint) and tells the story of four families through an interwoven series of conversations, shifting between times and tenses, memories and revelations.

Watch a trailer for the film adaptation of Last Orders here.

The Help

by Kathryn Stockett (New York: Amy Einhorn Books, 2009)

“I am afraid I have told too little. Not just that life was so much worse for many black women working in the homes in Mississippi, but also that there was so much more love between white families and black domestics than I had the ink or the time to portray.”

Kathryn Stockett’s debut novel looks at the relationships between white women and their African-American maids in early 1960s Mississippi. The story is narrated in turn by Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, a young university graduate who has returned to her hometown to find a job as a  journalist; Aibileen Clark, a maid and nanny employed by one of Skeeter’s good friends; and Minny Jackson, Aibileen’s best friend who keeps losing jobs as a maid because of her sass. All three women must work to complete interviews for a secret book about the lives of “the help” and their role within the  families that employ them as the atmosphere of dangerous racial intolerance in Jackson heats up around them. Stockett uses plenty of convincing Southern vernacular (Law, sho’ nuff, y’all) to convey a strong sense of time and place, and the tone of this piece of historical fiction remains optimistic despite its serious themes.

Visit Kathryn Stockett’s official website here.

March

by Geraldine Brooks (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005)

“Her face weary but smiling. I felt the grip of her will like a gaff plunged deep in me: she had been determined to see this day. She would have me back in the boat, she would keep this craft, our family, afloat, together, not matter how damaged my state, or her own, no matter how uncertain the seas.”

Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, March retells Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel Little Women from the point of view of the girls' absent father, an abolitionist chaplain whose conscience forces him to leave his family in New England to serve in the American Civil War. Captain March’s journey spans several decades and covers, through flashbacks, time spent in the South before the war and his subsequent courtship of his beloved Marmee, as well as the brutality and injustices he witnesses both on and off the battlefield in 1862. The second part of this historical love story is told by Marmee herself, who nurses March back to health in Washington then brings him home, where he must reconnect with his daughters who have no idea what he has been through. The misunderstandings and sacrifices that characterise the March’s married life are described in affecting detail, and Brooks’ use of contemporary letters and journals as source material lends a sense of real period accuracy.

Click here find out more about American Civil War in literature.