Saturday chronicles the events of February 15, 2003, through the eyes of Henry Perowne, a 48-year-old neurosurgeon living in London. Henry awakens inexplicably in the pre-dawn hours and mechanically heads to the window in time to see a bright object streaking through the sky. As it comes closer, it becomes evident that the object is a plane on fire, blazing towards Heathrow, and, with the post-9/11 consciousness that infuses the book, his mind leaps towards terrorism as an explanation. Because protests against the impending war with Iraq are being held in the city that day, issues of violence loom above the heads of the characters, and weave a quiet threat throughout the entire book. In this moment, Henry contemplates the reality and the fate of those on board, and the sudden alterations in life that will end it.

For the airplane is only a symbol of the chaos that can shatter the securities of life, just as Henry’s middle-class life and moral conscientousness put him forward as an everyman. We follow Henry through the course of his day–he snuggles with his beloved and loving wife, Rosalind, he drives to a squash match, getting into a minor car accident and altercation with a thug on the way, he competes fiercly in the squash game, and he visits his mother in her nursing home before finally returning to his own home for a family gathering. But the topic of the book itself is not these events, but the philosophy that surrounds daily life; we see this day largely through the thoughts that occur to Henry during the day, as he contemplates everything from the specifics of neurosurgery, to his opinions on the possibility of war in Iraq, to the sudden intrusion of violence into his own life.

Because Henry’s status as an ‘everyman’ comes not from his life, whose foundations are almost too idyllic to be accounted normal, but from his response to the world–at once desiring a greater connectivity and failing to break free of the kind of complacency that often inundates the modern middle-class. His two artistic children–his daughter is a poet and his son is a blues musician–make him aware of the limitations of his scientific intellect. Again, he is simultaneously aware of his deficiencies but stubborn in his distaste both for religious explanations or for artistic literature. Though he saves the lives of the people upon which he operates, he knows can only fathom the complexities of their brains, not their minds. He wishes for a “coherent world, everything fitting at last,” but what he discovers is disconnection as well as connection, and the collision of arbitrary forces and fate.

Read a review of this novel here; read a comprehensive listing of reviews at The Complete Review.

In Never Let Me Go, we are introduced to Hailsham, a private school in the English countryside, by Kathy H., a 31-year-old alumna of the institution. Kathy identifies herself as a “carer” only a few months shy of becoming a “donor,” an impending transition that makes her look back upon her years at Hailsham. In her reminiscences, we meet her two closest childhood friends, Ruth and Tommy D. All the characters are drawn with remarkable attention to detail, with mundane facts faithfully catalogued, and deepened with complexity. Kathy’s even-tempered skills of observation are as revealing about her own character as the recounting of Tommy’s firey spirit and Ruth’s imagination and willfulness. Her precise, documentary narration sets the tone for the novel, that neither questions nor explains the strange terms such as “donors,” “carers,” and “completion.”

It’s clear that the students at Hailsham are special: they are shunned by the outside world–the “normals”–as much as they are cultivated by their “guardians.” But why? Through the richly depicted characterizations, Kazuo Ishiguro reveals the truth of the characters’ destinies piece by piece. Just as the students are “told but not told” about their origins and their fates, the reader must make inferences to determine the truth, gathering clues from rumors and conversations. The perfect pitch of the narration combines with gradual discovery to make a masterpiece in obliqueness.

Relating the truth in full would undermine the excellence of the reading experience, but suffice it to say that Ishiguro is weighing ethics and the acceptance of evil in the same way he did in his classic Remains of the Day. Here, Ishiguro takes on the ethics of scientific advancement, but as the topic is never addressed directly, it falls a long way short of moralizing or didacticism. Though the dystopia that incrementally comes into view has elements in common with those in science fiction classics, the very human, very plausible world is at once more understated and more disarming. The reader is left to contemplate the implications alone, when the magnitude of this exceptionally written and astoundingly powerful work finally sink in.

Read a Village Voice review here; read a review at the Agony Column Book Reviews and Commentary here.

Action thriller writer James Rollins returns to the scene with his latest Sigma Force novel, Black Order. This time, we follow Sigma Force leaders Painter Crowe and Grayson Pierce across the globe as they try and track down descendants of the Third Reich’s Heinrich Himmler who have a device that uses quantum mechanics to breed a race of genetic Aryan supermen.

In Nepal, a mystifying plague is destroying a small mountain village and monastery and a Nazi swastika is found on a cave wall. In Denmark, someone is killing to get a hold of rare historical documents connected to Victorian scientists. In South Africa, a mythological beast is apparently alive and well, and preying on wildlife. Somehow, all these stories are interconnected as Crowe and Pierce, working separately continents away from each other, come together in a race to the discovery of one of humankind: the origins of life itself.

With each offering, Rollins only garners more praise for his ability to create an exciting, suspenseful thriller that poses intelligent and well-crafted questions beyond your typical logic-wanting action-adventure fare. Rollins novels are fast-paced and imaginative, weaving you into the action with fleshed-out characters and fascinating scientific and historical facts.

Read a review of Black Order at Six Impossible Things.

Linda Fairstein eighth novel, Death Dance, brings back New York City sex crimes assistant DA Alexandra Cooper, with her friends, crime scene investigators Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, time trying to solve the case of a murdered dancer with the Royal Ballet, who had enough of a diva attitude to foster a whole slew of suspects including her agent and Broadway producer and all-around scumbag Joe Berk. Combine this with a rape subplot and a terrifying Turkish doctor who drugs his victims before filming himself raping them, and Death Dance proves to be a thrilling tour de force with a dramatic, engrossing climax.

Read a review of Death Dance here.

Oskar Schell, the hero and chief narrator of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is an amateur inventor, a Shakespearean actor, an astrophysicist, a jewelry designer, a tamborine player, a pacifist and a Francophile. He is also nine years old. Oskar’s journey begins when he finds a mysterious key labeled “Black” belonging to his father, who was killed in the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11. Oskar’s adulation for his late father combined with his innocent logic spurrs him to discover the background of the key by tracking down each person named Black in the New York City telephone book–all 262 of them. The result is a hilarious, touching, and epic search throughout all five boroughs of New York from Central Park to Coney Island to Harlem, with a patchwork assortment of characters, from a retired journalist who keeps a card catalogue of everyone he meets, to a tour guide who never leaves the Empire State Building.

Through the prism of Oskar’s precocious verbosity, Foer takes on the catastrophe and upheaval of recent American history. He puts it partially in context by addressing the broader scope of political trauma, interweaving the stories of Oskar’s grandparents, whose lives and homes were devastated in the firebombing of Dresden during WWII, and including an at once amusing and apalling sequence in which Oskar discusses the Hiroshima bombing for show-and-tell. In all of these respects, Foer follows up his brilliant and bestselling Everything Is Illuminated, filling the book with the kind of lingustic fireworks of distincitive voices that have distinguished him as an author. He also gilds the text with photographs, colored highlights, text overwritten to the point of illegibility, and a flip book. Above all, Foer demonstrates that contemporary malaise will not induce him to ignore the themes that have shaped human life as long as it has existed; his meditation on life and loss does not shy from addressing truth and beauty, death and love.

Read a review by John Updike here; read the New York Times review here.

Following her successes with novels illustrating the human-animal connection in her books Riding Lesson and Flying Changes, dealing with horses and horsemanship, Gruen brings in a new flavor with a take on life in the circus. The story is told through the lens of 93-year-old Jacob Jankowski, currently residing in an assisted living community, querulous about the limitations of age but still possessed of all of his mental faculties. A visiting circus nearby causes Jacob to revisit his past, when he belonged to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth.

In a flashback of seventy years, 23-year-old Jacob finds himself penniless after both of his parents are killed in a car crash. After failing to sit for his veterinary exams at Cornell university, he is truly set adrift in the morass of poverty sweeping the country during the Great Depression. When he hops a train belonging to the Benzini Brothers’ show, he finagles his veterinary training into a position caring for the circus animals. Jacob grows to care for Marlena, the equestrian star performer–and unfortunately also the wife of one of the circus’s owners. August, Marlena’s husband, is abusive of both Marlena and the animals for which Jacob cares, while the other co-owner, Uncle Al, is devoted solely to business with a ruthless unconcern for any of the circus’s employees or animals. Jacob must navigate his way through this gritty world of sleazy entertainment while trying to keep safe all that becomes dear to him.

Though Gruen’s prose is often marked as only servicable, her characters are human and the story itself blends fictional memoir, adventure, romance, and mystery for an exciting read. She has clearly done substantial research on both travelling circuses of the earlier part of the century and on Depression-era America, lending the book historical interest as well. Historical buffs and romance fans alike will find a fun summer read in this novel.

Read a review here.

Read an interview with Sara Gruen here.