We have several proposed novels for a short study in mid-November, and we would like to ask your help choosing which to offer. Please take our quick survey to let us know what interests you. Alternatively, have a look at the proposed titles below and email us your thoughts at litsalon@gmail.com. We’ll keep the survey open until October 15. Thanks!
Anne Enright is an Irish novelist and short story writer whose novel The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize in 2007. This is a perceptive and psychological story of 9 siblings who come together for the funeral of their alcoholic brother who has committed suicide. No misery memoir, it is a wry exposure of complex family dynamics with a secret to be uncovered.
Novelist, short story writer and academic, Lorrie Moore has won several literary awards and her novel A Gate at the Stairs was shortlisted for the PEN Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize. This is a coming of age story about a young student who works as a nanny for a couple who are adopting a bi-racial child. Both comic and tragic, it is also about love and loneliness and the anxieties of the time, beautifully told.
Is this the perfect American novel? It has beautifully written form, content, plot, description, narrative, dialogue, characterisation and includes politics, class division, cultural observation, mystery, decadence, sex, murder, suicide, a surprise ending and last but not least, jazz.
Kate Chopin was a novelist and short story writer from Louisiana. The Awakening is the bold story of a wife and mother who falls in love with a younger man. Considered to be immoral and controversial at the time, it is a precursor of feminist writing, addressing emotional, psychological and sexual issues beyond the accepted gender role and mores of the time.
