So, not too many books to share this week (relatively speaking anyway). For a while I was on a roll reading library books but things have slowed down considerable so I will have to start scanning my pile for the books I really, really want to read and note titles that I'll have to look for later. I hate doing that but I always think (wish) I can manage more than I can.
Erich Hackl's The Wedding in Auschwitz looks like an interesting read. The subtitle is "An Incident" and I swear I read somewhere that this is based on a true story of two people who were allowed to marry in the Auschwitz concentration camp. It's a Serpent's Tail book and they seem to have to have a very diverse list of books (I tend to do too much browsing on their website).
Winner of the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, not to mention several others, Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap is a "rumination on middle class life" when a man slaps a child (who isn't his) at a barbecue. The story is told from the different perspectives of the people who witness the event.
The Long Song by Andrea Levy is a historical novel set on a sugar plantation in Jamaica at the time of the island's slave rebellion. I'd really like to give Levy's work a try--the story sounds appealing even with the serious/dark subject matter.
The last two books are more crime/mystery novels. Eye of the Red Tsar by Sam Eastland revisits the massacre of the Romanov family and picks up a decade later as one man tries to discover the child thought to have survived. Reading Anna Karenina has given me a taste of Imperial Russia, and I wouldn't mind looking for more books with that setting.
Malla Nunn's A Beautiful Place to Die seems to have gotten loads of good reviews plus it was nominated for an Edgar Award. The setting is a border town between South Africa and Mozambique in the early 1950s. "It is a tale of murder, passion, corruption, and the corrosive double standard that defined an apartheid nation."
Library books are always a problem--too many good ones, not enough time and I never know just where to start!