A powerful man confronts his mortality.
Facing an unexpected diagnosis of terminal brain cancer, Spanish-born, Swiss-based private banker José María Álvarez must race against his dwindling time to settle the “unfinished business” of his thorny financial and personal lives. Born into the fifth generation of a family of bankers in Franco-era Spain, Álvarez has thrived for more than 75 years in a bubble of privilege whose native currencies are wealth and power, expertly honing his skills at deploying both, not least to satisfy his abundant material and emotional appetites. As he battles intense physical pain and lurches between moments of lucidity and vivid hallucinations that take him back to his teenage years—a time when family secrets and family tragedy merged to cast a shadow over the rest of his life—Álvarez also must face the equally shocking contemporary truths he’s concealed from his American wife, Lisa, who’s enjoyed the fruits of his business acumen without fully embracing the trappings of their rarified existence, and their three adult sons, returning from the United States to their parents’ elegant chalet to be present for their father’s final days. Álvarez’s passion for fly-fishing, borne at his domineering father’s side on the salmon-rich rivers of his native northern Spain, provides one of the novel’s dominant motifs as well as the occasion for some lush descriptive prose. Morais (Buddhaland Brooklyn, 2012, etc.) also skillfully draws on his background as a veteran Forbes and Barron’s financial journalist, most notably in the tension-filled account of a high-stakes negotiation that threatens the Álvarez family fortune after a much younger José must assume control upon his father’s premature death. Whether he’s untangling the strands of José’s dark inner world or offering a glimpse of a milieu where money serves as both lubricant and salve, Morais effectively reveals how heartbreakingly inadequate even vast resources can be in providing a bulwark against the assault of life’s most formidable challenges.
A meticulous unearthing of the painful contradictions in a privileged life.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-9382-8
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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A group of strangers who live near each other in London become fast friends after writing their deepest secrets in a shared notebook.
Julian Jessop, a septuagenarian artist, is bone-crushingly lonely when he starts “The Authenticity Project”—as he titles a slim green notebook—and begins its first handwritten entry questioning how well people know each other in his tiny corner of London. After 15 years on his own mourning the loss of his beloved wife, he begins the project with the aim that whoever finds the little volume when he leaves it in a cafe will share their true self with their own entry and then pass the volume on to a stranger. The second person to share their inner selves in the notebook’s pages is Monica, 37, owner of a failing cafe and a former corporate lawyer who desperately wants to have a baby. From there the story unfolds, as the volume travels to Thailand and back to London, seemingly destined to fall only into the hands of people—an alcoholic drug addict, an Australian tourist, a social media influencer/new mother, etc.—who already live clustered together geographically. This is a glossy tale where difficulties and addictions appear and are overcome, where lies are told and then forgiven, where love is sought and found, and where truths, once spoken, can set you free. Secondary characters, including an interracial gay couple, appear with their own nuanced parts in the story. The message is strong, urging readers to get off their smartphones and social media and live in the real, authentic world—no chain stores or brands allowed here—making friends and forming a real-life community and support network. And is that really a bad thing?
An enjoyable, cozy novel that touches on tough topics.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7861-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth/Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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