Book Club – Cristina Sanders' blog

Alias Grace – book review

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

Wow. This is a hell of a book. Designed to throw you off balance and make you think, chapter after dense chapter of revelations that leave you uncomfortably challenging your assumptions and prejudices. Those weird Victorians and their strange ‘scientific’ beliefs – right on the cusp of modern thinking and at the same time waaay back in the Dark Ages. Well? Do you believe that sweet Grace Marks brutally murdered her master and the housekeeper?

The Correspondent – book review

The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans

Sybil is a retired judge’s clerk, slightly cranky and opinionated, but oh! so open to change, eventually. She likes to express herself in conversation by writing, and keeps up long dialogues with friends, colleagues, family and others through correspondence – mostly hand written letters, occasionally emails. There’s something wonderful about conversations by letter; the thoughtful choice of topic, the chance to think before speaking, and the opportunity to finish each train of thought without interruption. The whole book is made up of these missives to and from Sybil Van Antwerp, all pithy and interesting, gradually outlining a hole in the heart of her story. There’s a disintegrated family at the bones of all this, things lost between her daughter, her husband, her son.

Cloud Cuckoo Land – book review

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

It took me a couple of attempts to get into Cloud Cuckoo Land, and I feel no shame in giving up initially after the first few chapters because there are half a dozen seemingly unrelated stories going forward or backward in different times and vastly different locations. If you want a put-down-and-pick-up story, this is not the right book for now. I came back with more patience, reread from the start and was slowly hooked. It’s absolutely worth the effort, but…
I’ll explain.

The Loneliness of Sonia & Sunny – book review

The Lonliness of Sonia & Sunny, by Kiran Desai

The waiter brought them a parade of dishes: a mineral-smelling broth, a barely set delicate custard perfumed with chrysanthemum, bright roe that burst marine between their teeth, pickled autumn roots. How lovely. There is a lot about food in this story and if you enjoy Indian cooking you are in for a treat. There is a lot about a lot of things in Sonia & Sunny, so settle in for a long read. It is a very Indian story, and by that I mean in the fine tradition of introducing you, in great detail, to the long back stories of every member of every character’s extended family, with all the hints of corruption and family estrangements, overheard conversations and unanswered questions and the quirky personalities of all the uncles. The food is not only looked at, but smelled and tasted and each dish’s history is unravelled and the knowledge of who makes the best kebabs in the neighbourhood is shared, who taught them. Who stole the cook deserves a sub-plot all of its own. Perhaps it is impossible to write a short story about India. You can’t really dip in and get a feeling of the place. It’s full immersion or nothing.

So Late in the Day – book review

So Late in the Day, by Claire Keegan

Cathal is one of those blokes a friend might go out with and say, you know, he’s OK. He’s got a job, not bad looking. We meet Cathal looking out of his office window where the day is good: sunshine; birds; the smell of cut grass; “so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human upsets and the knowledge of how everything must end.” Cathal is writing rejection letters for bursary applicants. And there we have it, Keegan gives us the heads up that this is not a happily-ever-after. In this poignant novella, the fact that Cathal is not one of life’s winners is revealed through the world around him.

Always Home, Always Homesick

Always Home, Always Homesick, by Hannah Kent

Why fall in love with Iceland? Hannah Kent counts the ways. As a young Australian woman she picks up the default option of a Rotary exchange to Iceland, spends the first few months in a cold house with a cold family and an inhospitable frozen land, but after a while, both Hannah an Iceland thaw. She works hard to learn the language “my conversation has always been pockmarked with grammatical error and the foreigner’s manner of jamming in known vocabulary at the expense of clarity and precision”, makes some friends, and moves in with a new family who became her greatest support and friends for life. She falls in love with Iceland itself.

What We Can Know

What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan

For a writer of historical fiction, a researcher, a historiographer, this book concerns things that obsess me. The wonderful Ian McEwan, in What We Can Know addresses all these questions that I confront every day : Is it true? Is the source reliable? Who recorded this and what was their motive? What did they miss? What’s been misinterpreted? What aren’t they saying? What happened to the records? Can I assume that…?

Empathy – book review

Empathy, by Brian Walpert

Empathy, I think, is one of those words that is overused and misused. It’s often used to express feelings of compassion or pity, though is not the same thing at all. Empathy is not a matter of expressing how you, too, have strong emotions that are similar to another’s. It’s a vicarious thing, it’s about letting go of your feelings and experiencing those of another person. And empathy applies to more that just pity, as Bryan Walpert explores in his intriguing new book, Empathy.

1985 – book review

1985, by Dominic Hoey

I guess Dominic Hoey sets his street cred early on in this story by throwing in a couple of ‘cunts’, just in case readers mistake him for an IIML grad. That would be a mistake. You can’t study to write authenticity like this.

Hoey’s previous story, descriptively called Poor People With Money is about youngsters on the edge in Auckland, making bad choices and rocking the consequences on a wild ride to a village so small. It’s on my list of classics of the decade. Can he do it again?

A Different Kind of Power – book review

A Different Kind of Power, by Jacinda Ardern

I didn’t know political biographies could be like this. There’s not a nasty bone in its body. I haven’t read a book so uplifting for a long time but I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, Jacinda Ardern’s signature is kindness. No one was expecting she’d take the opportunity now she has left office and living overseas to get stuck into the dozens of goons she must have had to deal with on a daily basis.

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