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HOW TO MURDER A MAN

A historical thriller, courtesy of Irish novelist GÇbler (W9 & Other Lives, 1998, etc.), on the travails of a 19th-century land agent who runs afoul of a gang of Irish terrorists. The landlord’s lot may be a fairly easy one, but no one in his right mind would envy the rent collector. The hero of our tale is one Thomas French, appointed agent of the Beaton estate in County Monaghan in 1854. The Beatons are absentee landlords, Anglo-Irish Protestants who hardly ever leave Dublin and haven—t lived on the estate for generations. They have good cause: A secret society called the Ribbonmen has been repaying evictions with assassinations ever since the Beatons received the estate in the 17th century. The Ribbonmen inspire such fear that almost no rents have been collected on the estate for years, and the previous agent gave up even trying to put things in order. But French has some ideas. He decides to clear the air by forgiving tenants— arrears if they agree to accept passage to America and emigrate, thereby making room for more agreeable newcomers. The Ribbonmen don—t like this offer, however, suspecting that it’s a means of clearing the area of Catholics and solidifying British control. One of the gang’s ringleaders, Isaac Marron, convinces his cohorts to issue a —death warrant— for the agent, and in accordance with custom French is sent an anonymous warning. This also proves to be a mistake: French becomes all the more determined to carry out his plan now that he’s facing an outright rebellion. With his faithful assistant Micky Laffin—and no one else—at his side as he faces the outlaws, French acts more like a Colorado sheriff than a Monaghan estate agent, though perhaps that was the author’s intent. Formulaic and uninspired but, still, with enough atmosphere to satisfy Celtophiles of all stripes—provided they like westerns.

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-7145-3058-1

Page Count: 373

Publisher: Marion Boyars

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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THE NIGHTINGALE

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

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