The Husband's Secret

Just finished this new up-and-coming novel by Liane Moriatry. In preparation for the holiday weekend, I ordered eight of the most highly-promoted new books, and this one was a stellar read. I whipped through it in a day. This is a puzzle-box of a relationship novel, set in Australia, which is a refreshing change. A lot of their daily lives are the same, but some things are new and refreshing, including the reversal of seasons.

The story is told through the point of view of three women whose lives end up intertwining. Cecelia, housewife and mother of three, with an absentminded husband, is the one who first discoverers her husband's secret.

But there is also Tess, advertising executive with a small business founded by her, her husband, and her cousin Felicity, who had grown up with Tess as if they were sisters instead of cousins. Her husband also has a secret.

And then there is Rachel, a grandmother with a grandson who has brought her back to life after her son married, but who still aches, after twenty eight years, to the loss of her daughter. The death of Janie, all those years back, plays into the finale but not at all in the way one might believe. And the justice of the end is satisfying, yet in many ways, quite unjust.

Definitely worth a read, I can see this one becoming the season's new "Gone Girl".

Cloud Atlas

Okay, I have not seen the movie, but I did read the book.  Sometimes when you read a book, you submerge into the story -- most times, actually.  But occasionally you can't get away from reading the book as a writer, looking at the way the book was constructed rather than the story it tells.

So goes Cloud Atlas.  Six stories, five of them surrounding the sixth in a series of shells.  You get part of the oldest story first - probably in the early 1800s - on a ship somewhere on the route from Australia to Hawaii.  The story drops off in midsentence, and then we get a new story, early 1900s in Belgium.  Then another in the 1970s or so.  So it goes until the sixth story, which is far in the future in Hawaii again, and is told in full.  Finally we get the second half of story five, story four, story three, etc. 

If only they were better stories.

There are two connecting threads between the stories.  One is that one character is the same soul reincarnated in a different body and life.  The other is that each character reads about/sees a movie about/hears a story about the person in the story before his or hers.

And what does the title mean?  It took me a while to get it, but I think the point is that life is like clouds, and if you try to look at the atlas, it will be different every time you see it.

Okay.

Revisiting Old Friends - James Herriot

When I want to relax, I often pull one of my favorite books from the shelf and read it again.  I brought down James Herriot's "All Creatures Great and Small" the other day, and remember where I was in the early 1970s when the book was published (working at my first real job as a bookstore clerk).  The first book especially, was a breakthrough volume as few are anymore. 

The topic - stories of an English veterinarian in the pre-WWII era -  was wholesome and heartwarming, as well as fascinating.  It was a perfect gift and quickly became popular.  The author (whose name was not Herriot - he adopted the nom de plume because he was still in practice and it was not considered quite legitimate to advertise) had a winning style.  Several more books followed, finishing off the verse - All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Things Wise and Wonderful, and The Lord God Made Them All.

There were more stories to tell, so we also had All Living Things, and The Young James Herriot, and James Herriot's Dog Stories, and Cat Stories....  Some were better than others, as it became clear that many of the best stories had been told in the earlier volumes.  But for all that, the books are an excellent part of the permanent library and a revisit every three to five years is welcome.