Tag: contemporary fiction

Book Review – Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf

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About the Book

This is a love story. A story about growing old with grace.

Addie Moore and Louis Waters have been neighbours for years. Now they both live alone, their houses empty of family, their quiet nights solitary. Then one evening Addie pays Louis a visit.

Their brave adventures form the beating heart of Our Souls at Night.

Format: ebook (194 pages) Publisher: Picador
Publication date: 4th June 2015 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

Our Souls at Night was the February pick for the Waterstones Reading book club. It’s fair to say that some members struggled with the absence of quotation marks and found the book a little too slow-paced for their taste. ‘Monotonous’ was one word used, although I would disagree with that.

Addie’s unexpected suggestion that Louis spend his nights with her sets in train a relationship that progresses from quiet conversation about everyday topics to revealing exchanges about events in their lives. Lying side by side at night it’s almost like a confessional allowing them to disclose things they may not have shared before: regrets, feelings of guilt, things they should have done differently. It brings them both comfort.

‘So life hasn’t turned out right for either of us, not the way we expected, he said.
Except it feels good now, at this moment.
Better than I have reason to believe I deserve, he said.’

Gradually their relationship moves from simple companionship to something much deeper.

Our Souls at Night is a quiet, gentle book but no less emotionally powerful for that. I loved the way the author includes little details, such as Louis’s careful preparations for his nightly visits, that reveal so much about the characters.

I really loved Addie for her courage and her determination to ignore what others think about her relationship with Louis. It turns out small town America is not the most forgiving place when it comes to unconventional relationships but I loved Addie’s and Louis’s bold response to the gossipmongers. And when Addie’s grandson Jamie, a troubled child, comes to stay, Louis proves a natural, instinctively knowing how to draw the boy out and bolster his confidence.

I wasn’t alone in finding the behaviour of Gene, Addie’s son, reprehensible. Forcing her to choose between her relationship with Louis and continued contact with her grandson was horrid, if not downright cruel. Gene’s own experiences – a failing marriage, a failed business and spiralling debts – seemed to have made him capable of seeing only mercenary motives in Louis’s friendship with his mother. A bit rich, if you’ll pardon the pun, since it’s Gene who expects his mother to bail him out.

Although sad in some ways, I felt the conclusion of the book left open the possibility that all was not lost, just that it might have to happen in a different way.

I really enjoyed this tender story of love in later life. I was sad to learn that it was the author’s last novel and was published posthumously.

In three words: Intimate, emotional, perceptive

About the Author

Author Kent Haruf

Kent Haruf was born in eastern Colorado. He received his Bachelors of Arts in literature from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1965 and his Masters of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1973. For two years, he taught English in Turkey with the Peace Corps and his other jobs included a chicken farm in Colorado, a construction site in Wyoming, a rehabilitation hospital in Colorado, a hospital in Arizona, a library in Iowa, an alternative high school in Wisconsin, and universities in Nebraska and Illinois.

Haruf is the author of Plainsong, which received the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Maria Thomas Award in Fiction, and The New Yorker Book Award. Plainsong was also a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award. His novel, The Tie That Binds, received a Whiting Foundation Award and a special citation from the Pen/Hemingway Foundation. In 2006, Haruf was awarded the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. All of his novels are set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado. Holt is loosely based on Yuma, Colorado, an early residence of Haruf in the 1980s.

Haruf lived with his wife, Cathy, in Salida, Colorado, with their three daughters. He died of cancer on November 30, 2014. 

Book Review – How to be Brave by Louise Beech

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About the Book

Book cover of How to be Brave by Louise Beech

All the stories died that morning … until we found the one we’d always known.

When nine-year-old Rose is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, Natalie must use her imagination to keep her daughter alive. They begin dreaming about and seeing a man in a brown suit who feels hauntingly familiar, a man who has something for them.

Through the magic of storytelling, Natalie and Rose are transported to the Atlantic Ocean in 1943, to a lifeboat, where an ancestor survived for fifty days before being rescued.

Format: ebook (367 pages) Publisher: Orenda
Publication date: 30th July 2015 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

When I tell you How to be Brave is the seventh novel I’ve read by Louise Beech, I think you’ll get the message that I’m rather a fan of her books. (I also have two more of her novels, The Mountain in my Shoe and The Lion Tamer Who Lostm in my TBR pile.) The six books I’ve read – Maria in the Moon, Call Me Star Girl, I Am Dust, This Is How We Are Human and Nothing Else – may differ in subject matter but what they have in common is that they take the reader on an emotional journey. Sometimes that’s combined with an element of suspense or sometimes, as in the case of How to be Brave, with a touch of the supernatural.

How to be Brave, Louise Beech’s debut novel, draws on her own experiences and her own family history. When Natalie’s daughter, Rose, is diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, Natalie feels metaphorically lost at sea. With her husband away on active service, she has to face the challenge of managing her daughter’s chronic condition alone. Always protective of Rose, Natalie now finds herself having to do the last thing any parent would want to do, inflict pain on their child. We see Rose’s struggle too; the daily injections of insulin, the restrictions on what she can eat and the sense of being different from her schoolmates. No wonder Rose’s initial reaction is one of rebellion. With Natalie at her wit’s end, she falls back on Rose’s love of books as a way to distract her and to re-establish the bond they’ve always had.

Here’s where the magic starts because intertwined with the contemporary storyline is another set in the Second World War involving Natalie’s grandfather. In the author’s hands, the boundary between past and present is gossamer thin, with love and encouragement passing between the generations just when it’s needed most.

Like Rose, I was enthralled by the story of the struggle for survival of Natalie’s grandfather and his comrades. (If I’m honest, for me, this was the more powerful element of the book.) It’s harrowing at times but it’s also a story of courage, determination, sacrifice and comradeship that makes you marvel at the resilience of the human spirit. We know Natalie’s grandfather survives the ordeal but the fate of the others aboard the tiny vessel is never certain. I’ll admit some scenes moved me to tears. But, as Rose points out, it’s OK to be sad because that’s part of being brave.

In three words: Moving, emotional, magical
Try something similar: The Last Lifeboat by Hazel Gaynor

About the Author

Author Louise Beech

Louise’s debut novel, How to be Brave, was a Guardian Readers’ pick in 2015 and a top ten bestseller on Amazon. The Mountain in my Shoe was longlisted for the Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize 2016. The Sunday Mirror called Maria in the Moon ‘quirky, darkly comic, original and heartfelt’. It was also a Must Read in the Sunday Express and a Book of the Year at LoveReadingUK. The Lion Tamer Who Lost was described as ‘engrossing and captivating’ by the Daily Express. It also shortlisted for the RNA’s Romantic Novel of the Year and longlisted for the Polari Prize 2019. Call Me Star Girl hit number one on Kobo. It also longlisted for the Not The Booker Prize and won the Best magazine Big Book Award 2019. I Am Dust was a Top Six pick in Crime Monthly and a LoveReadingUK Monthly Pick. This Is How We Are Human was a Clare Mackintosh August Book of the Month 2021. Louise’s memoir, Daffodils, came out in audiobook in 2022, as well as her novel, Nothing Else. (Photo/bio: Goodreads author page)

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