Antigone Books

MELISSA'S PICK

Eddie Russett is living in a world where color is everything -- which color and how well you see it determines your social status and your opportunities for employment.  The amount of "merits" you've accrued are also important, and individuals with negative merits are sent out on the night train for "Reboot", where their offensive ways are reformed.  However, as Eddie learns from Jane, a grey, things aren't always what they seem.  This book is exciting, original, and often funny.

TRUDY'S PICK 

This French mystery series, which features Commissaire Adamsberg  (a bumbling, forgetful, eccentric, often irritating, highly intuitive detective) and a cast of other quirky characters is smart, witty, and quite engaging.   I got hooked on Vargas’ series when I read Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand, which was the first of her mysteries translated into English.   However, this is actually the series debut.  So, if you haven’t started this series, this is the one to read first.  If you have read others in the series, this will help you understand her characters better.

DEBBIE'S PICK

My favorite short story collection of the year is Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro.

Too Much Happiness is a collection of ten short stories, each wonderful and as rich and nuanced as a novel.  They deal with a wide array of themes: paradox, the repercussions of impulse, regret, acts of horror and the complexity inherent in relationships.  Munro shines a flashlight on the human condition, but only enough to get you to think.  To be honest, there's not much happiness to be found in these stories but her raw look at the world makes this book a hauntingly memorable, worthwhile read.
    
"---...the collection delivers what she's renowned for: poignancy, flesh and blood characters and a style nothing short of elegant. (Publishers Weekly)

MITCH'S PICK

My favorite book of 2009 was a paperback original in this country (i. e. never came out in hardcover).

East of the Sun details the lives of three young women as they sail from London to India in search of a better future for themselves. Rose is going to India to marry a man she barely knows, Tor is her adventure-minded bridesmaid, and Viva, only slightly worldlier than the other two, is their chaperone.

This is a great historical novel with tons of color.  The author beautiful delineates an England which is by turns prim and decadent, and she portrays India, seen through the eyes of 1920’s Englishwomen, as both appalling and enthralling.    The author vividly describes situations in which women face the unknown – the unknown of a strange culture – the unknown of giving childbirth when one is completely unprepared.

Part of the fun of this novel is the knowledge that British-dominated India is soon to be a thing of the past.  Characters in the novel, set in 1928, refer to Gandhi as ‘a little troublemaker’ - and the reader knows that that within a generation he has succeeded in throwing the British out.

Highly recommended.

MOLLY'S PICK