Taking readers on a tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has been dominated the century, demonstrate and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, and Marguerite Duras.
Category: Books
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The Hunter – Tana French
Book review, full book summary and synopsis for The Hunter by Tana French, a story about a man of disrepute coming back into town with a get-rich-quick scheme in this tense narrative about revenge, old grudges, and familial bonds.
Trey is a teenager living in the small mountain town of Ardnakelty in Ireland with her mother and younger siblings. When her long-absent degenerate father Johnny shows up back in town, everyone knows it means trouble.
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In The Woods – Tana French
It’s 1984 and three twelve-year-olds, best friends who live in Knocknaree, Ireland, are playing in the woods. By nightfall, two of them are missing and the last boy, Adam Ryan, is found, traumatized, in a tree with a sneaker filled with blood, gashes in his clothes and gaping holes where memories of that day’s events should be. Despite intensive investigation and media scrutiny, the case is never solved. Years later, the boy is now a homicide detective in Dublin, and a case from Knocknaree comes across his desk. A child’s body has been found in those same woods. As Detective Ryan proceeds to investigate, he is desperate to bring this killer to justice and perhaps to figure out what happened that day in 1984.
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Magpie Murders – Horowitz
Magpie Murders, by Anthony Horowitz, offers up a premise that’s almost sure to pique the interest of most lovers of classic mystery novels.
It’s a very Agatha Christie-esque mystery wrapped up in another mystery involving the publication of that manuscript. It’s an especially compelling setup for a mystery novel, since two mysteries means double the intrigue, and the prospect of seeing how the two novels will converge amps up the suspense.
Plot Summary
In this nested story, the interior mystery is a traditional mystery modeled after classic Agatha Christie novels. Atticus Pund, a famous detective, is called into a small English village on the behest of a woman whose fiance is a suspect in a murder. And, as is customary in these types of stories, Pund quickly discovers upon arriving at the small village that nearly everyone is a suspect. With his assistant by his side and with the help of the detective assigned to the case, he sets about unraveling the mystery.
This story, of course, is actually an unpublished manuscript written by a well-known mystery author, Arthur Conway. Conway is prickly and difficult, but that’s the least of the concerns from his editor, Susan Ryeland, because Conway ends up being found dead, having fallen — or perhaps having been pushed? — to his death before she finds out how his manuscript even ends. Susan Ryeland, then, sets off to investigate the death of her most popular author.