Four works of fiction, each a winner of a recent major book award:
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson, won the National Book Award. It's an epic evocation of Vietnam, an ambitious swirling novel that will eventually gather you up for the ride.
Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, is a post-apocalyptic novel that's painful to read from start to finish -- but an enormously rewarding meditation on what it means to be human, with the faintest glimmer of hope buried deep within.
The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai, is set in a corner of India in the 1980s. It won the National Book Critics Circle award (in addition to the Man Booker prize in 2006) for its tale of a family that must contend with world events.
This year's winner for the Man Booker, Britain's most prestigious literary prize, was The Gathering, by Irish writer Anne Enright, an intensely felt tale of a large family that gathers in Dublin after the death of a sibling.
written on Monday Jan 14, 2008
4 books, 4 prizes.
