SINGAPORE – In this week’s Book Box, The Straits Times looks at four books that unfold in unusually isolated environments. Buy the books at Amazon. These articles include affiliate links. When you buy through them, we may earn a small commission.
Call Me By Your Name author Andre Aciman tackles magic realism in newest Italian summer romance
Fans of Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name (2007) – which was made into a hit movie featuring actors Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer – will love the Italian-American writer’s newest novella.
Aciman returns to a triptych of obsessions in The Gentleman From Peru: summer, desire and Italy. A group of college friends are marooned at a lavish hotel on the Amalfi Coast and encounter a mysterious stranger who reveals his power of clairvoyance.
“Put it this way, it is not an accident that I frequently write about Italy,” says the 73-year-old over Zoom from his New York apartment, surrounded by three packed shelves of books in his background.
Book review: Rowan Beaird’s The Divorcees a transporting novel of female friendship on a ranch
In post-Great Depression United States, when divorces were taboo and most states had lengthy procedures for marital break-up, Nevada was one exception where six weeks spent in a divorce ranch could guarantee a new start for women.
Debut novelist Rowan Beaird sets her compelling The Divorcees in the fascinating world of women hoping to escape their unbearable marriages by staying six weeks at the Golden Yarrow, a divorce ranch in Reno, Nevada, where Mrs Lois Saunders hopes to leave her husband Lawrence to become Ms Lois Gorski.
Lois lies to her fellow ranch mates that her divorce was on the grounds of her husband’s impotence. To her lawyer, she states that her grounds for divorce is the broadly worded “extreme cruelty” – a boon for women in her situation, which she does not think is as desperate as the other girls’ at the Golden Yarrow.
Book review: Literary thriller The Sleepwalkers tracks breakdown of marriage via unreliable narrators
British author Scarlett Thomas turns a beautiful Greek island into a grim setting where marriages end and dark secrets are revealed.
Filled with unlikeable characters, The Sleepwalkers follows newly-wed couple Evelyn and Richard on their honeymoon after a chaotic wedding leaves them stressed and on edge.
But the promised relaxation turns into tension when hotel owner Isabella ignores Evelyn while flirting with Richard, who obstinately refuses to acknowledge the imbalanced treatment.
Thomas tells the tale through unreliable narrators, leaving the reader in a perpetual state of bemusement as to what is truly happening. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the novel is told through a series of incomplete letters, transcripts and notes as if the papers were damaged or lost.
Book review: Levitation For Beginners an empty prank with no real casualties
Reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis’ The Shards (2023), except transplanted to the 10- and 11-year-old demographic, Suzannah Dunn’s Levitation For Beginners promises murder and mystery in small-town England. Except this iteration contains hardly any tension, with the last 50 pages of the book – where the action suddenly escalates – abruptly appended on.
At the centre is 10-year-old Deborah, who intuits rather than fully comprehends the goings-on around her. She and her classmates eke out a peaceable, unexamined existence in the 1970s in their two-classroom Home Counties school, until the entry of glamorous Sarah-Jayne, speaking of vodka at 11 and boasting about buying a bra at a department store.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers April 13
Yeoh Jo-Ann’s second novel debuts at No. 1 on the fiction bestsellers list.
