1970 - (Lost Booker) Troubles, by J.G. Farrell

Troubles is the predecessor to The Siege of Krishnapur which won the Booker, and this one won the Faber Memorial Prize in 1970 (and posthumously, the Lost Booker Prize, one which has zero credibility with me because it was determined by popular vote).

Troubles is not as good as Krishnapur, but it's very good in parts. It's set in Ireland just after WW1 when the Troubles were just beginning. Major Bernard Archer goes to the ill-named and shabby Majestic Hotel (a symbol of the declining British Empire) to sort out an intemperate engagement but ends up falling in love with the place despite - or perhaps because of - its eccentricities. 

Angela conveniently dies of leukaemia, but it doesn't matter much because neither of them cared about each other anyway.   For the major, it's all a matter of behaving well, like an English gentleman should.  Just like Edward, the owner, whose eccentricity declines into madness as the IRA 'outrages' come closer to home, till he can't ignore them any more.

Why does the major 'take on' the Majestic?  It's falling to bits (and Farrell goes into overdrive with the farce, with hordes of cats and the vines taking over the bar).  Not unlike the Empire, it's a drain on the purse, but he has become fond of it.  He also falls in love with Sarah, who's really not very nice - but her characterisation isn't consistent, vacillating (due to a surprising lack of authorial control) between droll humorist to nasty cynic, an adventuress and a cripple playing for sympathy.  She deserves to end up with Bolton, though like the major, I don't like his violence towards her.  I guess she's a symbol of the violence the Empire doled out to the possessions it 'loved'.

Farrell does quite a god job of depicting both sides of a sordid story - though at times he overdoes the didacticism.  I can't quite visualise Edward's Oxford guests lecturing him on the need to look at the other fellow's point-of-view - it doesn't seem consistent with a gentlemanly background.   Having said that, one of the themes is the way young people don't subscribe to the old ways of behaving.  They're all a bit 'fast', quite rude, and not at all grateful.

Still, it's an entertaining book, except for the final atrocities, which are horrible.

I read and journalled this book 4/7/2003.  

1975: Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

It took less than a day to read this - 180 pages long and easy to read - but it's a rich and fruitful book. It comprises two stories in parallel: the tale of Olivia who abandons her British husband when she goes to India; and of her un-named relative who goes to Satipur some fifty years later to solve the mystery of what became of Olivia. She ends up becoming 'seduced' by India too.

Olivia is naive but adventurous, and she doesn't like the other British wives and their disdain for Indian religion and culture. She is bored by their vapid lifestyle, and she outrages 'society' by visiting the local Naweb, an impoverished rogue in league with the Dacoits (bandits). The Naweb seems to exert a strange magnetic influence on those around him, including Harry, Olivia's only discerning friend and the one who helps her out when things go awry.

In the process of discovering these scandals about her great-aunt , the narrator finds herself following in some of her footsteps. However, whereas during the British Raj Olivia was isolated from the 'real India' by class, caste and custom whatever her wishes may have been, in post-independence India her successor lives amongst Indians, and can make different decisions about how to live her life. Once again India is depicted as a place that attracts those interested in its 'spirituality' but the dropout Chid's distaste for life as a mendicant shows just how silly it is for affluent outsiders to hanker for a life of poverty and hardship.

The title shows that Jhabvala had no illusions about the reality of life for most Indians.

I finished reading and journalled this book on 13.10.05.

About this site

You may have noticed that this site has not been updated for a long time. We have not been able to find anyone willing to act as administrator so reluctantly The Complete Booker is no longer actively maintained. However there is such a wealth of material within the site that we didn't want to lose so the site is still live and you can read all the archived content.

J.G.'s Review - Wolf Hall (2009 Winner) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012 Winner) by Hilary Mantel

I spent a lot of time with Thomas Cromwell in July, and now that he's gone away, I miss him.

My quest to read all the Man Booker Prize winners led me to Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), both by Hilary Mantel. I'm not a big fan of historical novels in general, nor am I well-versed in the politics and romances of Henry VIII in 1520s England and Europe. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed these two books.

Mantel's portrayal of Thomas Cromwell stands out as a major factor in my enjoyment. Wolf Hall opens with a savage scene in which the teenaged Cromwell receives a beating from his father, but (fortunately for me, as I was not looking forward to any more scenes like that) the beating motivates Cromwell to leave home, launching him on the winding road of his political career. It's the first of many personal incidents that inform Cromwell's public life. Somehow, in Mantel's portrayal, Cromwell keeps a core of kindness and compassion for those closest to him, not to mention random strangers, while moving in the highest, most precarious, most vicious political circles. This humanity saves Cromwell from being just another political tool sans moral compass and these novels from being just another rehash of historical events.

Wolf Hall tells the story of Henry VIII's obsession with producing a male heir, an obsession with huge political, personal, and religious implications. Henry's insistence on annulling his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, freeing him to marry Anne Boleyn, creates ripples across England and across Europe. As Henry's advisor, Cardinal Wolsey, descends from favor, Cromwell's influence grows. It's a tribute to Cromwell's genius and subtlety that he's able to remain personally loyal to his mentor Wolsey while becoming one of Henry's most trusted counselors.

Bring Up the Bodies continues the saga. Henry has waited seven difficult years -- while his personal desires destabilize international alliances and destroy religious institutions -- to marry Boleyn. However, prize achieved, he becomes disenchanted with her rather quickly, due to the same qualities of wit and willfulness that he initially found irresistible. Even more importantly from a political perspective, she seems unable to produce a male heir. At Henry's request, Cromwell engineers Boleyn's fall, while Henry's fancy turns to Jane Seymour. Regardless of my modern-day disapproval of Henry's behavior and the power of monarchy, Mantel manages to leave me in awe of Cromwell's smooth political machinations. And he's just so darn likeable, even while using Henry's request to seek revenge upon Wolsey's enemies. Amidst the events of his political life, Cromwell's personal memories, motivations, and pleasures remain part of the story.

At times, Mantel compresses a lot of action and meaning into a few paragraphs. At other times, she draws an incident out at length, giving its implications time to sink in -- a very important skill when court intrigues are involved, as they often are. The result is a novel that breathes, expanding and contracting as the story unwinds. Domestic events in the Cromwell household intertwine with the historical record, adding contrast, richness, and depth. Mantel has a knack for making characters come alive.

My enjoyment of Mantel's storyline may have been enhanced by my relative ignorance of the details of Henry VIII's time. If I knew more about the chain of events or that era in general, perhaps I might have noticed something inaccurate. (There are certainly those who feel her work is a rehabilitation of Cromwell that he doesn't deserve.) However, Mantel is such a masterful writer, clearly in control of her craft, that I doubt she makes any significant errors. Her cultural references are effortlessly natural; she portrays the times without ever appearing to insert detail just for effect.

Others have remarked on one stylistic difficulty with Mantel's writing: her tendency to use an untethered "he," making the reading a bit difficult in places. "He" is almost always Cromwell himself, which blends first person and third person nicely when it gives the reader intimate access to his thoughts and feelings. But occasionally "he" is someone else in the  very next sentence -- and that brings you up short in a passage, requiring a pause to figure out who is speaking or being described. Mantel helps sometimes by saying "He, Cromwell," an effective if somewhat clumsy method of clarification. Overall, it's not a major sticking point. Over hundreds of pages, you get used to it.

Weeks after finishing these novels, I am still thinking about Cromwell. Fortunately Mantel plans to write another novel about the remainder of his life. Whether her sympathetic portrayal is accurate or not, it's been a long time since I enjoyed the company of such an intelligent, charming, kind, dangerous character. Meeting such a person in fiction is nothing but pleasurable. Although in real life I would run fast and far from Cromwell, I look forward to seeing him again on the page.

(Crossposted from Hotchpot Cafe, where books are always on the menu but aren't the only fare.)

Excerpt, from a meeting with Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, at Cromwell's home:

The door opens; it is Alice bringing in lights. "This is your daughter?"

Rather than explain his family, he says, "This is my lovely Alice. This is not your job, Alice?"

She bobs, a small genuflection to a churchman. "No, but Rafe and the others want to know what you are talking about so long. They are waiting to know if there will be a dispatch to the cardinal tonight. Jo is standing by with her needle and thread."

"Tell them I will write in my own hand, and we will send it tomorrow. Jo may go to bed."

"Oh, we are not going to bed. We are running Gregory's greyhounds up and down the hall and making a noise fit to wake the dead."

"I can see why you don't want to break off."

"Yes, it is excellent," Alice says. "We have the manners of scullery maids and no one will ever want to marry us. If our aunt Mercy had behaved like us when she was a girl, she would have been knocked round the head till she bled from the ears."

"Then we live in happy times," he says.

When she has gone, and the door is closed behind her, Cranmer says, "The children are not whipped?"

"We try to teach them by example, as Erasmus suggests, though we all like to race the dogs up and down and make a noise, so we are not doing very well in that regard." He does not know if he should smile; he has Gregory; he has Alice, and Johane and the child Jo, and in the corner of his eye, at the periphery of his vision, the little pale girl who spies on the Boleyns. He has hawks in his mews who move toward the sound of his voice. What has this man?

"I think of the king's advisers," Dr. Cranmer says. "The sort of men who are about him now."

And he has the cardinal, if the cardinal still thinks well of him after all that has passed.

Marie C. Reviews The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan. Published 2014 by Knopf. Literary Fiction.

This year's Man Booker Prize winner is a tough, tough read, but a very rewarding one. Australian novelist Richard Flanagan tells the fictional story of Dorrigo Evans, a doctor and survivor of the Japanese POW camp that built the Burma Railway between Bangkok and Rangoon in 1943. The railway was built using forced and slave labor; thousands of people died constructing it under unimaginable conditions. The novel documents the experiences of Dorrigo, several ordinary soldiers on the line including Darky Gardiner, a young man who tries to find the good in every day even when circumstances are at their bleakest.

And there always seems to be a new low. Flanagan gives us excruciating detail on the privations and suffering the men endured- the starvation, the long long miles of walking, the arduous work done without proper tools, the ever-increasing demands of the soldiers directing the work, and the brutal beatings and humiliations inflicted by the guards. He also gives his characters startling humanity, including the guards and taskmasters who regard suffering as a matter of course and the POWs as less than human, because they are prisoners, alive and not dead.

The cruelties of the Burma Railway have been documented in other books and films- The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Pierre Boulle's 1952 novel that became the famous David Lean film being the most famous example- but what The Narrow Road brings to mind for me is the more recent nonfiction Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand's recounting of the Louis Zamperini story, particularly his time as a POW in Japan. Zamperini was not invovled in the Burma Railway but Flanagan's story echoes some of the the same themes and particulars, especially the POWs' living conditions. Hillenbrand's book also explains in historical terms why the United States ceased prosecuting Japanese war criminals, which I found very helpful in understanding those parts of Flanagan's book in which the point of view shifts to the guards, particularly their post-war experiences.

Because he does try to tell the story of the railway from their perspective too, a choice I think is brave and challenging. Those passages were also hard to read, the rationalizing of torture and cruelty, and Flanagan, without justifying anything, I think is trying to talk about how someone can be capable of violence, and comfortable with it. I think he's trying to talk about how a culture of violence perpetuates itself, showing the whole life cycle of it, from earliest humiliation to its effects far downstream, on people on whom a hand was never laid.

In this book, those people are the women in Dorrigo's life, particularly his wife Ella and his many mistresses. Dorrigo marries Ella out of social expectation; he's deeply in love with his estranged uncle's young wife Amy, whom he believes has died while he was at war. He spends the rest of his life trying to bury his grief and his post-war trauma in affairs and in his public life. In his post-war life he becomes a kind of spokesman for the POWs on the railway and becomes a very well-known public figure. At some point, he has to reconcile all these parts of himself, find a way to move forward.

There is a beautiful, terrible poetry to The Narrow Road and I found the book very hard to put down. I would read short passages at a time, take breaks, come back, read more, come back. It's disturbing, sometimes terrifying, sometimes bleak and almost impossibly sad, and yet I didn't want it to end. Flanagan has written a wonderful and difficult book that I would recommend to just about anyone, a classic deserving of the recognition it's received.

Rating: BUY

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive this book for review.

Man Booker 2014 long list announced

The 13 novels long listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize were announced today and as always there were mixed reactions to the selection.

Many of the UK newspapers like the Daily Telegraph reflected on the number of novels by American authors who wouldn't have been eligible until the rule change for this year's prize.  Some commented also on the paucity of female authors (three out of the 13 titles).

Were there any surprises? The inclusion of Joy Ann Fowler, best known for the best selling Jane Austen Book Club  raised a few eyebrows as did David Nicholls's listing. None of the commentators said so specifically but reading between the lines the feeling was that these were rather 'light' to be considered for a premier book prize.

Inevitably there were comments on who had not been included - many of the big names were missing in fact. No Dave Eggers, no Ian McEwan, no Will Self and no Martin Amis. But of course the big surprise as The Independent, commented, was the absence from the list of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. She had been considered a cert for the long list having won the Pullitzer Prize with the novel in April.

Unless I was misreading the various articles, I didn't detect a lot of enthusiasm for this year's listing. No-one actually said it was a dull list but I didn't see any great buzz either. What people found disappointing was the shortage of representation by writers from Commonwealth countries which we have grown to see as a key feature of the Man Booker prize in the past. Only one Commonwealth writer actually made it to the list - the Narrow Road to the Deep North by the Australian writer Richard Flanagan. As Rebecca Jones, the BBC arts correspondent commented: "there are no Indian or African authors and that will raise eyebrows among those who feared writers from some Commonwealth countries might get squeezed out by the new rules."

What do you think of the list? Care to take a bet on which will win eventually?

The Longlist

Joshua Ferris	To Rise Again at a Decent Hour	American
Richard Flanagan	The Narrow Road to the Deep North	Australian
Karen Joy Fowler	We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves	American
Siri Hustvedt	The Blazing World	American
Howard Jacobson	J	British
Paul Kingsnorth	The Wake	British
David Mitchell	The Bone Clocks	British
Neel Mukherjee	The Lives of Others	British
David Nicholls	Us	British
Joseph O'Neill	The Dog	Irish/American
Richard Powers	Orfeo	American
Ali Smith	How to be Both	British
Niall Williams	History of the Rain	Irish

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton - 2013 winner

When Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries was declared the winner of the 2013 Man Booker prize, almost every article and review drew attention to  the fact it was the longest novel ever awarded the prize and Catton the youngest ever winner. Much was made too of the genre affinity between Catton's  work and that master of the sensation novel, Wilkie Collins. Most reviewers seemed to agree with the Booker judges who called it “extraordinary, luminous, vast,”. The only dissenting voices came from the panel convened by one of the UK tv channels the night before the award who admired Catton's technical virtuosity but didn't feel it was the best book of the year, and David Sexton in The London Evening Standard who argued that a stunning feat of construction didn't necessarily equate to a great book.

Having now read this 832-page tome, I find myself more in David Sexton's camp than that of the Booker judges.

That isn't to say I didn't enjoy the book. I did.  Catton really knows how to tell a good story (but then she'd have to be good at this in order to keep people engaged through such a lengthy book).  Her plot is intricately crafted and she manages the multiple story lines deftly, making you want to keep turning the page to find out what happens next in this tale of death, deception and doomed love set in New Zealand during the time of the gold rush.

The book opens on a stormy night as the young Scottish lawyer Walter Moody,  lands on the shores of Hokitika, a town hurriedly constructed to service prospectors seeking to make their fortune in the surrounding hills and rivers. Shaken by an incident on the boat he goes into the first hotel he comes across, badly in need of a restorative drink and a bed for the night. He finds himself in a room of 12 men who slowly begin to reveal their unease about some strange recent events in the town involving a whore, a dead hermit and a missing fortune. Together these 12 luminaries set about trying to get to the bottom of these events by piecing together the knowledge each of them holds. Although they are not constituted as a jury they do weigh up the evidence from each man's version of events and make judgements about some of the people involved.

Catton made much of the fact that she structured her novel on astrological movements, using a software programme to help her pinpoint the exact positioning of the stars corresponding with events in the book. Each chapter begins with an astrological chart indicating which characters are in ascendancy on the date in question. I tried to follow this but couldn't see much beyond the fact the chart indicated which characters would be the focal point of the chapter. It felt like an artifice that didn't add much to our understanding of the story.

Initially the story is told in the form of a nested narrative where the 12 men tell their stories to Moody, in the hope he can make sense of their complex and multifaceted tales. This moves to straight forward narration of specific events but then at the end Catton loops right back to the beginning with some short chapters (some just two or three paragraphs long) which reveal the backstory and fill in the missing elements.  Along the way we get plenty of melodramatic episodes with a shipwreck, a murder trial and a seance.

All the elements are there for a darn good read. And yet, for all its technical prowess, there was something missing from this book. It was difficult at first to pin down what that missing element was but eventually it dawned on me that what I was lacking was any sense in which the novel illuminated the human condition. Outside the plot there wasn't much else of substance, all was really smoke and mirrors and the characters just faded out rather than came more sharply into view the more we heard them speak. There was little that caused me to pause and reflect, in short there was little evidence of the emotional or philosophical weight that I expect from a Booker prize winner.

And that's really my issue.  The Luminaries IS a really enjoyable, well crafted novel and is one of the best of its kind I have read in many years. But it's not up to the gold standard that the Booker should represent. How the judges chose this over Jim Crace's Harvest is just baffling.

Unexploded by Alison Macleod - 2013 Longlist

Eight months after Britain declares war on German, the people of Brighton anxiously prepare for a rumoured Nazi invasion. The town's piers are dismantled and barbed wire goes up on the beach. Soon vegetable seedlings will replace the flower displays in the parks and the lights of the fun fair will be dimmed. Already the racecourse has been transformed into an internment camp for whose people deemed to be 'suspicious'.  such as Otto Gottlieb, a German-Jewish artist whose work featured in the Nazi exhibition of "degenerate art".

In the Beaumont household, the preparations ignite underlying tensions. Geoffrey Beaumont is a banker charged with a secret mission to secure the future of the country's currency by removing it to an undisclosed location, leaving his wife Evelyn and eight year old son alone to face the invaders. The only preparations he makes on their behalf involve a stack of cash and an envelope containing two cyanide pills buried  in the garden, a contingency plan that in Evelyn's eyes, amounts to a betrayal. The resulting tension between them escalates when Evelyn takes more than a close interest in Otto Gottleib and questions the treatment of the internees at the camp.

It's easy to see why Unexploded was long-listed for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. Macleod delivers a very persuadable sense of the period, rich in detail and atmosphere. Even though so much has been written about the lives of ordinary people at this point in Britain's history; the anxiety of an unknown enemy, the constant rumours, the day to day trials of food shortages, the narrative often has a fresh feel.  In one extended passage she describes how it would feel to be on the receiving end of a bomb attack.

You are lifted from your bed even before you hear the blast..... You wake, unable to understand why heaps of gravel and brick dust are being shovelled over you at speed. You stumble outside for air, but even here the day is thick with dust, soot and - you can't make sense of it - a blizzard of feathers.

The immediacy of the present-tense approach coupled with her use of imagery made this one of the most memorable passages in the book for me.

I also enjoyed her characterisation of the Beaumont's son Phillip. As an only child his loneliness leads him to become friends with boys who would not be out of place in Lord of the Flies, to hide in corners listening illicitly to the radio, and to betrayal. Where the adults are simply frightened by the prospect of Hitler's arrival, Philip's reaction is more complex. It starts as a game, an amusing diversion, but then things happen that although he doesn't comprehend fully, he still recognises as disturbing and wrong.

His story is suggestive of a theme in the novel about the way the war acts as a catalyst, igniting elements that have until now lain idle such as the incompatibility between Evelyn and her husband and the anti-Semitic attitudes held by sections of the British population. In essence this is a novel that shows a society at a turning point:

Change was creeping under the door and through the windows of their home, persistent as gas … It was gathering over the house in spite of the purity of the day's rinsed blue sky. It was spiralling down the flue. At night as they slept, it would settle over their hearts.

A good story; well-written prose; lots of simmering tension, strong characterisation and meticulous attention to detail: it would be hard to find much about this book not to enjoy.

EndNotes

Unexploded was published by Hamish Hamilton in 2013.

Alison MacLeod is a professor of contemporary fiction at the University of Chichester in the UK. Raised in Canada she has lived in England since the 1980s. This is her  third novel.

This review is crossposted from BookerTalk.com

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, by Eve Harris - 2013 Longlist

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, by Eve Harris. Published by Black Cat Press 2014.

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman came out in Great Britain last year and was longlisted for last year's Booker Prize. Don't worry though- this is no stuffy "literary" book, although it is well-written, delightful and addictive reading.

Set in the present-day London neighborhood of Golders Green amid its Orthodox Jewish community, the story centers on a 19-year-old young woman named Chani who is about to get married to Baruch, a 20-year-old she barely knows.  As the book opens she's preparing for the nuptials- getting dressed, getting nervous, and he's doing the same. The opening pages capture their anxiety as they shoulder tradition, the expectations of their families and their own innocence, and author Eve Harris conjures this mood so beautifully that these first few pages are what stay most in my mind.

From here Harris shifts perspective to the Rebbetzin, whose husband is the lead rabbi of this particular community. By extension she herself is an important community leader; women come to her for advice and it falls to her to take young Chani to the mikvah, or ritual bath, before her wedding day because Chani's mother is busy with her large brood (Chani is one of eleven children). But the Rebbetzin is deeply conflicted, having grown up secular and then come to Orthodoxy as a young woman when her then-boyfriend committed to a traditional Jewish life. The Rebbetzin has played her role well, admirably even, but now, in midlife and after suffering a traumatic miscarriage, she isn't so sure anymore. Harris takes us through her life's story and into her future.

We get to know Chani and Baruch's families, and see how they interact. Baruch spies Chani at a party and asks to meet her; his mother, a wealthy social-climber, isn't happy that a poor girl has attracted her precious son's attention and schemes to undermine the blossoming relationship. Chani, for her part, isn't sure she even likes Baruch but she knows she has to get married and he seems nice enough so she goes along with it. Ironically it's Baruch's mother's resistance that gets Chani to dig in her heels.

I'm telling you a lot about what happens, so I'll stop. The book isn't perfect; some of the conversations struck me as unrealistic but overall I think The Marrying of Chani Kaufman is a charming and absorbing novel with great characters and a winning couple at its center. I don't think it comes down as very negative about Orthodox life though there are characters who find frustration as their lot. There are also those who will find a way to make it work. The key to happiness, Harris seems to say, is rational balance and finding a partner with whom you can build happiness and satisfaction. Conflict only brings alienation. The book is very heavy on the details of Orthodox ritual and is clear and accessible enough to be a good read for someone interested in learning about that. If you're new to the subject I hope you won't be put off and miss out on this great read.

Skios by Michael Frayn - 2012 Longlist

Skios, by Michael Frayn. Published 2013 by Picador.

So, what got my attention about Skios was two things. First, it was longlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Second, its author wrote the very silly play "Noises Off."

Skios, by Michael Frayn. Published in the US 2013 by Picador. Longlisted in 2012.

So, what got my attention about Skios was two things. First, it was longlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Second, its author wrote the very silly play "Noises Off."

This is a very silly book.

The plot hangs on a thin premise that some readers won't be able to buy into. Stuffy academic Dr. Norman Wilfred is making his way to the private Greek island of Skios for an international jet-setter's weekend conference. His is to be the keynote address and his presence is a big draw for the wealthy donors to an NGO. He's an older guy, kind of set in his ways and whose charisma owes more to habit than to actual charm. Enter Oliver Fox, an English playboy. Oliver Fox and Wilfred Owen, through circumstances I won't go into, end up with their identities switched. And then the fun really begins.

Stuck in the middle is hapless Nikki Hook, in charge of organizing the weekend. She is a bundle of nerves and anxiety and nearly becomes unhinged as events take their course. Other characters have significant roles to play but basically the book comes down to waiting to see what's going to happen when the ruse is finally up.

All I can say is, if you can put your brain on hold and just go along for the ride, Skios is a fun book. It's definitely a beach book- it reads fast and it's got an undeniable air of frivolity. Some reviewers think it asks deep questions about the meaning of identity; I don't know about that. It's also a great book to read this winter if you live in New England- you'll be feeling that Greek sunshine coming right through the page.