The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken

A London Travelouge That Shows the Road Back from Grief and Loss

A writer travels to London to mourn/discover/bury her mother, dead now for 10 months. The author claims, with great frequency, that it’s not a memoir, no matter how much it seems like one. The lady doth protesteth…

The unnamed narrator is a modified version of the actual author, McCracken tells us in a fourth wall breaking aside to the reader. I read the book cold, with no previous knowledge of the author’s work or life, and was willing to believe her, but really hoping that this secondary narrator, the actual author popping up from time to time, was an unreliable narrator…and that she’d made it all up whole cloth because if she had, it’s pretty amazing worldbuilding. You’re on your own for finding the answer to that.

The protagonist, who may or may not be the hero of the book, if indeed such a thing even exists, is a writer in her late 50s whose mother has died almost a year before and has been taking care of all the details involved. What she isn’t is ready to close the lid on her mother’s life, and she’s gone to London, where they went together three years earlier, and wanders around the town, rabbit holes of recollection looming like open manhole covers on the streets they’d trod together.

It’s not a memoir, she asserts. No, it’s an exercise in self-indulgence and grieving. I say that like it’s a bad thing, but it’s not. The fictional author is out there processing grief in a melancholy travelogue of a city they shared as she looks for the mother of her memory in museums and theaters, both of which her mother had loved until at last she can accept that its time to open the collection of photos the realtor has sent her, showing a house far too neat, far too empty, and accept that her mother is gone.

Anyone who’s dealt with the decline of an aging relative will find this resonant, and as to whether it’s fact or fiction, as an instructor in a writing class tells the protagonist in the book, said, “If I know one thing, it’s that it doesn’t make any difference. Call it what you want.”

Living Memory by David Walton

Living Memory
by David Walton

Pages/Format: Kindle Unlimited 240 pages
Publication: October 18th 2022
ISBN: B09RW81ZRJ
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Publisher Information:

We always thought we were the first.

When paleontologists Samira and Kit uncover dinosaur skeletons in northern Thailand, they also find the remains of an ancient genetic technology that nations will kill to control. Catapulted into a web of murder and intrigue involving the Chinese Ministry of State Security, a powerful Asian crime syndicate, the CIA, and a beautiful Thai princess, Samira and Kit don’t know who they can trust. Torn apart by competing factions and stranded on opposite sides of the world, they race to discover the truth before the world goes to war. Can they bring the past to life before it kills them all?

Living Memory is the first book of a globe-spanning thriller series by the author of The Genius Plague.

“Walton has brought hard sci-fi roaring back to life.” —The Wall Street Journal

“The literary heir of Michael Crichton . . . David Walton consistently delivers exciting thrillers packed with likable characters and big ideas.” —Craig DiLouie, author of THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK

“David Walton is one of our very best writers of science-fiction thrillers.” —Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of Quantum Night

 

Abstract

When a team of paleontologists on a remote site in Thailand discovers what appears to be a fossiled graveyard 66 million years old, they don’t know it yet, but mankind’s place in the evolutionary order is about to be challenged. Amidst international tensions, two teams work to uncover the secrets the incredibly well-preserved dinosaur fossils hold, and their impacts on two civilizations separated by millions of years. Fast-paced action for dino-fiction fans, along with some thought-provoking ideas about interspecies communication and social dominance.

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Mav and Buzz – Two Heroes With Dfferent Paths


You know the square jaw, the steady gaze, the proud bearing. He stands alone, confident that he’s the best of the best, ready to do the job singlehanded because anyone else would slow him down. He’s a hero; heroes never quit, never fail, and never need a hand.

Tom Cruise’s Maverick and Disney’s Buzz Lightyear are cut from the same cloth, but the fictional fabric that makes up their movies is as different as night and day. Continue reading

All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay

All the Seas of the World
by Guy Gavriel Kay

Netgalley / GoodReads / Amazon

Returning triumphantly to the brilliantly evoked near-Renaissance world of A Brightness Long Ago and Children of Earth and Sky, international bestselling author Guy Gavriel Kay deploys his signature ‘quarter turn to the fantastic’ to tell a story of vengeance, power, and love.

On a dark night along a lonely stretch of coast a small ship sends two people ashore. Their purpose is assassination. They have been hired by two of the most dangerous men alive to alter the balance of power in the world. If they succeed, the consequences will affect the destinies of empires, and lives both great and small.

One of those arriving at that beach is a woman abducted by corsairs as a child and sold into years of servitude. Having escaped, she is trying to chart her own course—and is bent upon revenge. Another is a seafaring merchant who still remembers being exiled as a child with his family from their home, for their faith, a moment that never leaves him. In what follows, through a story both intimate and epic, unforgettable characters are immersed in the fierce and deadly struggles that define their time.

All the Seas of the World is a page-turning drama that also offers moving reflections on memory, fate, and the random events that can shape our lives—in the past, and today.

Diamond and the Eye

Diamond and the Eye (Peter Diamond #20)
by Peter Lovesey
Format: 336 pages, Hardcover
Published: October 12, 2021, by Soho Crime
ISBN: 9781641293129 (ISBN10: 1641293128)

CID chief Peter Diamond is back for his 20th caper solving mysteries in Bath, England. Diamond, for those of you who haven’t met him, is one of those classic slightly-offbeat British detectives, brilliant, hard to get close to, and a bit eccentric. He’s backed up by a small team of solid investigators; Ingeborg, the ex-journalist, the hardnosed Haliwell, the recent hire Jean Sharp, and the OCD-driven John Leaman, all of whom dutifully gather up grist for him to mill over. In Diamond and the Eye, however, he gets a hand from an outsider, Johhny Getz, Private Eye. Continue reading