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Adult Fiction
Audiobook Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
- Release Date: September 9th 2014
- Audiobook Hours: 10 hours and 41 minutes
- Genre: Literary….Science Fiction ?
- Publisher: Random House Audio
I feel like three years ago you couldn’t trip anywhere in the book-sphere without falling into this book. Station Eleven is the fascinating and deeply haunting story of what happens after a flu epidemic kills 99% of the Earth’s population and infrastructure collapses.
Everything I knew about this book happens in the first 20 pages; An actor in a production of King Lear dies on stage in front of child actor Kirsten Raymonde. Jump cut to 20 years later where Kirsten is part of a traveling symphony, a theater troupe that performs Shakespeare in the small towns dotting the the desolate and often dangerous North American landscape.
I am seriously in awe of the narrative structure of this book. The novel moves back and forth through time, telling stories of people who were in the theater that night with Kirsten. Mandel effortlessly weaves her characters fates through and around each other. There is also kind of a twist, I’m not sure how soon you’re supposed to see it, but it took me by surprise.
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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- Release Date: February 1986
- Pages: 309
- Genre: Dystopian
- Publisher: Anchor Books
Back in 2014 I read Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and it ruined my vacation because nothing is better
on the lido deck then reading about child sex trafficking and chicken noobies ! I just figured I didn’t get Atwood. I left that book feeling bleh.
But I’ve had a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale for years and since it’s one in a list of zeitgeist-y books getting the TV/movie treatment (I’m looking at you The Dark Tower and American
Gods) I decided to give it a try, Also this is the only one that isn’t like . . .a thousand pages.
While I didn’t care for Oryxand Crake I could immediately see why The Handmaid’s Tale resonates with so many
people, especially now. There is a lot to unpack about feminism, women’s rightsand sexuality in the Dystopian (Utopian ?) Republic of Gilead where fertile womenare trained to become vessels of birth or, Handmaidens to wealthy older couples.
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Before The Fall by Noah Hawley
Release Date: 5/31/2016
Pages: 391 pages
Genre: Suspense
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Ten people step onto a plane. Eighteen minutes later the plane drops out of the sky leaving only two survivors.
And one of those survivors, artist Scott Burroughs, wasn’t supposed to be on there. Who is Scott and more importantly. . . why did a perfectly operational plane fall into the ocean?
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The Husband’s Secret and Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty
Only Daughter by Anna Snoekstra
- Release Date: September 20th 2016
- Pages: 288
- Genre: Psychological Thriller/Grip-lit
- Publisher: Mira (Harlequin)
After going missing for 12 years the Winters’ family only daughter, Rebecca, is back. Rebecca doesn’t remember where she’s been and her memories are fleeting mostly because the girl who returned isn’t Rebecca Winters. She’s an impostor simply looking to hide out. But somebody from the shadows is on to the deception and before this impostor is found out she will discover that Rebecca’s perfect suburban life was lie.
This Aussie thriller moves between time, following the exploits of the impostor in 2014 and the uneasy life of the real teenage Rebecca Winters a decade previous. Snoekstra sets the scene of an idyllic life with a disturbing underbelly and while the novel doesn’t have the same eerie pathos of a Gillian Flynn novel, you will find yourself flipping the pages to find out how this ends.
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