I first read this Booker-prize-winning novel several years ago, and it's just as good as I remember it. I don't always agree with the Booker judges or those that select the Pulitzer winners; the Governor General's Award is usually a more reliable indicator of a book I will enjoy. But the Booker judges were on the mark with this story of one day in the life of four men. Ordinary men, working men, they have set this day apart to fulfill the last wish of their friend, Jack Dodds, to have his ashes scattered off the Pier at Margate.

Although each character gets his turn at narrating, most of the story is told by Ray, a part-time insurance clerk, part-time punter on the horses. Jack nicknamed him Lucky, back when they were both serving in Northern Africa in WWII. These days Ray is a lonely man, divorced, his only child living in Australia. He tends to make the same joke over and over when the men meet up in their local, The Coach and Horses.

Lenny also served in the war, as a gunner, but not with Jack and Ray. Hot-headed and nursing his grievances, Lenny brings an element of chaos to the day. Vic runs a funeral home, like his father and grand-father before him. He's a bit more level-headed than the others and the way he thinks about the pros and cons of his job are some of the best bits in the book. The final member of the group is Jack's son, Vince, who fell in love with cars and declined to join Dodds and Son, family butchers since 1903. He started small, restoring luxury cars and reselling them at a profit, and now has a good business going.

The missing person, aside from Jack whose ashes are along for the ride, is Jack's wife, Amy, who has declined to come in order to visit their daughter, June, in the institution where has spent her life. A meaningless gesture, the men agree, since June has never yet noticed Amy on her twice-weekly visits.

There is a bit of controversy around this book, because its concept and structure parallels that of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. However, the idea of using a death to reveal the lives and relationships of those left behind is a common one. Even structuring it around a journey to transport a body or ashes is not unique, unlike another recent controversy over taking the idea of a boy alone in a boat with a great cat from a novel by a relatively unknown writer. And Swift at least is the first to acknowledge Faulkner as one of his inspirations. Of course, structuring the story to take place in a single day harks back to Aristotle's unities and is perhaps most famously employed in modern literature in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Concept and structure are all well and good, but it's the writing itself that matters. And the writing here is brilliant. Bits of information are feathered in and presented at just the right time to add shading to the emerging picture of the past and the complex relationships between these men. It was only in this second reading that I could truly appreciate the craft behind these choices. If I were teaching creative writing, I would assign this book as an excellent example of how to bring in backstory and pacing.

Equally I would use it to teach about finding the right voice or voices to tell a story. The voices of the four men (and Jack in flashbacks) are truly individual, each one, pegged to their precarious footholds on the ladder of success. The language they use, their expressions, express their particular experience and their resentment or lack of it toward the others, especially those who've ascended higher. For example, Lenny says, when Amy stops by to pick up Lenny's daughter and declines to come inside, “Like it was because we lived in a prefab and they lived in bricks and mortar.” As the picture develops, emotions come to the fore, allowing the men who would normally talk about sports and what-all over a pint at the pub to connect on a deeper level, inevitably changing how they relate to each other. In some ways, it is Jack who emerges as the most interesting character, the intersection of this group, the vanishing point to whom they all refer.

What novel is your favorite Booker Prize winner?

“I have come to an unalterable decision—to go and live forever in Polynesia. Then I can end my days in peace and freedom, without thoughts of tomorrow and the eternal struggle against idiots.” Paul Gauguin, October 1874

Some years ago I went through a beachcomber phase. I was fascinated by a slew of books and films featuring men who had thrown off the bonds of civilisation and taken refuge on a South Seas island. Generally barefoot, with rolled up khaki trousers and a partially unbuttoned white shirt with its tails hanging out, they eked out a precarious existence trudging the beach looking for something salable surrendered by the sea. Unshaven and often drunk, you wouldn't think they'd seem attractive, much less like role models to me, but being the single mom of two energetic pre-teen boys, working two and sometimes three jobs, I savored the idea of escaping to an island paradise. I read books by Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Somerset Maugham. I plastered my home and office with pictures of beaches and palm trees. I left piles of seashells and driftwood on tables and desks. I went to the huge Gauguin exhibit at the National Gallery in Washington.

I had always liked his paintings, not just the Tahitian ones with their intense colors and inscrutable figures, but also the early works from Brittany. I walked through room after room of paintings and carvings, dreaming of following in his footsteps. I was further intrigued to discover that when he arrived in Tahiti, finding that the indigenous culture had succumbed to colonial influences, he set about creating his own gods and devils, carving wooden idols, including them in his paintings. I admired his persistence, his refusal to give in.

However, I lost interest in the man when I discovered that he never saw his wife and five children again after he first left for Tahiti and did not provide them with any support. On the island, he took 13 and 14-year-old girls as wives and concubines right up to end of his life, which was even more despicable because he knew the syphilis that would eventually kill him was contagious.

Llosa's novel alternates between Gauguin's life in the South Seas from 1892 to 1903 and that of his grandmother, Flora Tristán, traveling through France in 1844. Hers was a new story for me: illegitimate daughter of a Peruvian aristocrat who died young and a Frenchwoman, she grew up in poverty. Flora's nightmarish difficulties escaping an abusive marriage combined with her concern for the working conditions of the poor to inspire a zeal to reform, not just French society, but the world. She traveled to Spain and London, where she worked “to show the world that, behind the facade of prosperity, luxury, and power, there lurked the most abject exploitation, the worst evils, and a suffering humanity enduring cruelties and abuse in order to make possible the dizzying wealth of a handful of aristocrats and industrialists.”

Both women and workers were society's victims, and she founded the Worker's Union to fight for the rights of both. We get descriptions of the horrible working conditions and the injustices women suffered. In her 1844 tour she went from town to town, giving speeches, meeting with workers, trying to found chapters of the Worker's Union. In doing so she gave up the only love she had known in her life, the only relationship that showed her what love could be, in order to devote herself to the cause.

The alternating stories made me think about the pursuit of paradise. Both Flora and Gauguin hurt themselves and others as they chase their obsessions. Both believe in the value of their work, Flora to protect the rights of women and workers and Paul to bring the vitality of an indigenous culture to a wan and artificial Western society. The line between self-indulgence and devotion to a cause can be blurred.

I found the style a bit odd at first. Llosa occasionally breaks out of the close third-person narrative to address his protagonists directly, often using the nicknames Florita and Koké. “You had to paint, Koké. The flicker deep inside that you hadn't felt for so long was there again, urging you on, galvanizing you, making you incandescent. Yes, yes, of course you must paint.” Eventually I became accustomed to it. I was more interested in Flora's story because it was new to me and less distasteful than Paul's. However, the author apparently felt the opposite; I think Paul's life is portrayed with more rich detail than that of his grandmother. Both are, to me, sad stories, showing the cost of trying to change the world. I admire single-mindedness and wish I had more of it, but in the end I'm glad I didn't abandon my children to go off and become a beachcomber.

In this novel, Schulman gives us two stories, told in alternating chapters. One takes place in 1899 and follows Jeremy, a young engineer from Maine who has been brought to British East Africa (now Kenya) to help build a railroad for the British. Specifically, his job is to oversee seven hundred men in building a bridge for the railroad over the Tsavo River. Plagued by insects, shivering with malaria, and terrified by the mysterious dangers in this new environment, Jeremy struggles to act like the man he is expected to be. The only one with a gun, he must provide meat for the workers, hunting animals different from anything he saw back in Maine. His only companions are a cold and supercilious British doctor and a native who acts as a guide.

The other story takes place in 2000. Max, an ethnobotanist is sent to Rwanda in search of a vine that promises to prevent heart disease. She joins a small research group in the mountains who are studying the gorillas. Max has Asperger's Syndrome and is apparently close to the non-functioning end of the spectrum. Her parents worked with her, going frame by frame through cartoons to help her recognize and remember the facial expressions that “normals” pick up without noticing. In ethnobotany, she has found work that she loves and can do. She loves plants more than animals and people, in part because they smell better—she relies heavily on her sense of smell since she can hardly bear even quick glances at people's faces—and because “plants are more interesting chemically . . . Her third, and perhaps most important, reason for loving plants was that their movements never scared her.”

They are both outsiders, doubly so. As a white man, Jeremy is forever outside the native culture while his secret, something he is afraid to reveal, isolates him from white culture. Max's Asperger's effectively prevents her from relating to others, including her parents whom she loves but cannot bear to look in the face or be touched by. In addition, the possible threat she poses to the gorillas makes the research group keep their distance. If she finds the vine, the pharmaceutical company will send in legions of people, driving the already endangered gorillas even higher up the mountains, into regions where they cannot survive.

There are other commonalities. Both are threatened by outside forces, Jeremy's group by a pair of man-eating lions, and Max's by rumours of a group of rebels, child-soldiers armed with assault rifles and high on qat. Both are given charms to help them survive.

They also both wrestle with questions that go to the heart of what it means to be human. Max struggles with the implications of revealing the vine, should she find it, to the pharmaceutical company. Jeremy is appalled by the working conditions and mortality rate among the workers. At first he tries to encourage and reward them, but finding that ineffectual is tempted to succumb to beating them and docking their food. He admires Otombe, his native guide, for his skills and self-assuredness. The book explores interesting questions. Do human needs always take priority over the needs of animals? What makes one man more valuable than another: his tools, his education, his skills, his skin color?

The book is beautifully researched. Schulman thoughtfully includes a list of books for further reading in her Afterword. I especially liked the small touches about the wildlife and customs, such as the flannel spine protector 19th century whites were sure they needed to strap on under their many layers of clothing. Some of my favorite parts are Max's interactions with the gorillas. The members of the research group coach her on how to be around them without startling or enraging them, but she finds her own way of being near them.

Another of my other favorite parts is when Max first comes to the research group. Surrounded by unfamiliar plants, she marks off an area of three square yards and, plant by plant, examines each one, identifying it with her botanical encyclopedia and memorizing its characteristics. I love the descriptions. The crushed leaf of the first plant smells of “spicy vanilla with the overtones of a used Band-Aid. The roots of this plant had a different aroma, subtle, close to microwaved water.” By learning what plants are common in this area, she will better recognise the one that is unusual.

Everyone in my book club enjoyed the book. Some of us found it a little slow-going at first, but we agreed that it sped up towards the end. My only quibble with it is the rather abrupt ending which seems to cut off the stories rather than resolve them. I liked learning about the habits of lions and gorillas. I liked Max and Jeremy and cared what happened to them. At the same time, I was—as always—outraged and saddened by the depredations inflicted by Europeans and Americans as they pillage Africa for its plants, minerals and people.

I was delighted to discover this journal at the AWP Conference a few years ago. Book reviews introduce me to books I otherwise would have missed and the ones longer than a few paragraphs, generally found in journals dedicated to reviews, often provide context and background that increase my appreciation of the book. However, as VIDA has been tracking in The Count, in most journals very few reviewers are women and very few books by women are reviewed. The numbers are startling. This conscious or unconscious bias effectively limits women's participation in our literary culture. Since the first Count in 2010, VIDA's annual count has influenced my decisions about what journals I buy and read. For example, in the three years tallied, the number of women reviewers and women writers reviewed in Harpers has actually gone down from a measly 18%/31% to a pathetic 9.7%/16.9%. I no longer subscribe to that magazine.

Women's Review of Books is entering its 30th year of publication. Amy Hoffman's editorial in this issue notes that “Disgracefully, even after forty years of the contemporary women's movement, feminist scholarship and critical analysis, and women's creative writing receive little more attention in the mainstream media in 2013 than they did in 1983.” She goes on to say that “WRB is just about the only place where you'll find long-form review-essays by expert, excellent writers that thoughtfully consider women's studies scholarship and analysis.” I agree. Every issue engages me and enlarges my understanding.

Among the pieces that stood out for me in this issue is “Women vs. Women”, a review by Kim Phillips-Fein of Battling Miss Bolsheviki: The Origins of Female Conservatism in the United States, by Kirsten Marie Delegard. She had me right from the start: “For those on the left, conservative women have long presented an enigma.” Indeed, I have been baffled by people supporting political parties that actively oppose their interests. Delegard's book traces women's support for the right wing beyond the supposedly backlash against the 1960s, to the 1920s when fear of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution mobilised women to oppose the women pushing for economic reform.

I learned more about the liberal reform groups of the 1920s where “Women activists pressed for public health measures and laws to protect children and working women. They created settlement houses and undertook philanthropic campaigns . . . They also became leaders in the peace movement that followed World War I, promoting such measures as outlawing the use of chemical weapons.” Conservative women associated these reformers with socialist radicals and “circulated stories about the terrors their sisters were experiencing in the new Soviet state.” They portrayed the women reformers as dupes of Bolshevist radical men and distributed blacklists of men, women and organizations “supposedly in league with communism”.

Another article I relished is “Stranger to Nothing”, a review by Robin Becker of Vinculum, by Alice Friman. Becker helpfully provides an etymology for the unfamiliar title: “From the Latin verb vincre, Alice Friman takes the noun, vinculum, meaning a bond or tie, to suggest her collection's central trope: attachment.” The word also is used for “a ligament that limits movement” and a bar used in algebra to show that two or more terms represent a single term. In these poems metaphor and myth are infused with “a sharp humor”, an assessment backed by generous quotations from the book. Becker says, “To my eye and ear, Friman distinguishes herself from other contemporary poets by bringing a confident feminism and humor to her meditations. The sorrowful runs alongside the absurd; the living collide with the dead; the mythological clothes the mundane.”

I also got a kick out of “TV Heroines”, a review by Lori Rotskoff of Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture, by Katherine J. Lehman. Rotskoff describes “Lehman's impressively researched, analytically nuanced study” that provides context for all those single heroines portrayed by Marlo Thomas, Lynda Carter, Lindsay Wagner, the women on Charlie's Angels, etc. I especially appreciated the inclusion of police detective Christy Love, played by Teresa Graves. I look forward to reading the book and seeing Rotskoff's analysis of “both on-screen portrayals and behind-the-scenes creative strategies in relation to the social, economic, and political changes that transformed women's lives during these tumultuous decades.”

Overall, the journal does for me what Kate Clinton claims in “An Ode to Women's Review of Books on the Occasion of Her 30th Anniversary”: “Your reviews keep me up to speed on current scholarship, lead me to books I would have missed, and introduce me to women writers and thinkers whose long-form, patient, thoughtful parsing is a steady balm or annoying burr—but either way a pleasure in a short-format world.” What review journals do you enjoy?

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this collection of stories set in North Carolina. The various accents of the readers enhanced the verisimilitude of the characters and their environment. Rash was recommended to me by Jake when I visited Asheville recently to do a reading at the marvelous Firestorm Café and Books. Like many before me, I fell in love with the town and its plethora of interesting and active people. I also fell in love with the mountains, or rather renewed my old love affair with these quiet giants. Rash's stories illuminate the lives of people hidden away in these hollows and remote towns.

What makes these stories so powerful is the way he goes so deeply into the characters. While the plots often take surprising turns, you won't find slick tricks here, just good, strong story-telling. The folks who populate them are so thoroughly imagined and so carefully presented that I feel I know each and every one of them.

I was most delighted by “A Servant of History”, an account of an Englishman named Wilson, sent by the “English Folk Dance and Ballad Society” across the Atlantic to collect folksongs. Modeled on Cecil Sharp, the famous English song collector, Wilson's goal is to find unadulterated versions of English folksongs and ballads preserved in the isolated hollows of the Appalachians. In 1915 Sharp, met Olive Dame Campbell who had collected hundreds of Appalachian folksongs and ballads. He wrote in a “letter”: http://mustrad.org.uk/articles/sharp.htm, “Mrs. John C Campbell of Asheville, NC told me that the inhabitants of the Southern Appalachians were still singing the traditional songs and ballads which their English and Scottish ancestors had brought out with them at the time of their emigration.” In the story, Wilson is led to an elderly woman, Mrs. MacDonald, and he uses their common Scottish heritage—his mother is Scots—to persuade her to sing for him. Being a MacDonald myself, I knew what was coming but relished it all the same.

The stories range across the centuries. I was most touched by a story about two escaped slaves who stumble into a barn on an isolated farm for shelter during the night, the older one counseling the boy on how to approach the farmer in the morning. And by a story of a young man, having made it out of his dead-end town, returns from his freshman year at college to find his high school girlfriend using her chemistry skills in a meth lab.

I think the best story is the first one, “The Trusty”, about a prisoner trusted enough to be assigned the task of fetching water for a chain gang building a road. When he reaches the farmhouse, he asks the wary young woman for permission to draw from the well. They can see her much-older husband working in a far-off field. His slow seduction of her and what comes after gave me a frisson I feel all too rarely, that of a story well told. I look forward to reading more of Rash's work.

Coincidentally, while I was reading Antonia Fraser's enchanting account of her marriage to Harold Pinter, in the car I was listening to the story of another marriage to a famous writer. The Paris Wife is Paula McLain's fictional treatment of Hemingway's first marriage, to Hadley Richardson. Like McLain, I'd been intrigued by a line in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, his account of Paris in the 1920s. I read it back in college, and the line has stayed with me all these years: “I wished I had died before I loved anyone but her.” So I set aside my objections to fictional treatments of real people and dove into this account written in Hadley's voice.

Hadley and Ernest met in 1920 and married the following year. This novel traces their courtship and marriage from Hadley's point of view, and then concentrates on the years in and around Paris as we watch her encounter with the wide world change her. Scott and Zelda, Gertrude and Alice, Sarah and Gerald flit through these pages. Ernest discovers Pamplona and begins writing the stories and novels that will bring him the fame he craves.

Much as I like Hemingway's writing, I've always found Hemingway the man disagreeable and faintly ridiculous. All that macho posturing seems rather silly and indicative of deep insecurity. Of course, all I have to base my opinions on are the accounts left by others, the reconstructions of biographers, and his own memoir. I recognise their unreliability, having been thoroughly shocked by Milan Kundera's Immortality into realising how easy it is to manipulate someone's image after his or her death.

This is the core of my dislike of novels that use real people as characters. The author's interpretation of the person's character and personality becomes reality, or at least an alternative reality, in the reader's mind. Privacy is one of the things I ponder—how new technology affects it, where our rights begin and end. My concern for the right of a person to control his/her public persona influenced me in writing my own memoir, making me careful to limit my use of other people's stories and to treat them as accurately and generously as possible.

McLain, too, from what I've been able to discover, devoted much research and imagination to presenting her characters and their emotions accurately and generously. I wish I had read the book rather than listened to it. I found the little-girl voice used for Hadley demeaning to the woman who had the strength to hold things together in difficult circumstances. But of course I don't know what Hadley's actual voice sounded like. I was outraged by some of the writing, too, especially the way Hadley accepted the blame for their marital difficulties—all her fault, according to Ernest, because she didn't turn a blind eye to his affair with her close friend. It probably did happen that way, but I found it outrageous nonetheless and was relieved when she finally stood up for herself.

Aside from that, I enjoyed the book. My research into McLain's process also turned up a biography I somehow missed when it first came out in 1992: Hadley by Gioia Diliberto. Diliberto had access to Hadley's own words via taped conversations between Hadley and Alice Sokoloff, a musician and writer who knew Hadley in the 1970s. I intend to look up this biography, which was reissued in 2011 as Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway's First Wife.

This surprisingly enjoyable memoir tells of Fraser's 33-year relationship with the playwright. She calls it a love story and, indeed, it is. Her first sighting of him is across a crowded room, though “it was lunchtime, not some enchanted evening, and we did not speak.” The enchantment comes later, when they do finally meet at a dinner party celebrating the first night of a play directed by her brother-in-law. She says they were “reckless” that night: both were married with children, he one and she six. Yet, as she relates, their connection stayed strong through the years until his death in 2008.

Although aware of the possibility that this could turn into a sob-fest or a soppy romance, I trusted my judgment of Fraser's earlier books, both her histories and her mysteries featuring Jemima Shore. She didn't let me down. Her amused and assured voice carries us through the years, describing the people and places they encounter, the causes they champion, and, of course, the books and plays they write. Made up of brief diary entries introduced by even briefer narratives, the book reads quickly and—even with all the bits and pieces—smoothly.

When I was 18 and wondering if there could be such a thing as a happy marriage, I read Pearl Buck's Portrait of a Marriage. The story of a painter and his sturdy, unbeautiful but restful wife stayed with me. Already an aspiring writer and knowing that I would always need my alone-time, I wondered what kind of relationship would work for me. At the time, the models available to me were the 1950s traditional wife who devotes her life to her husband's work and the emerging Second-Wave Women's Movement with its unlikely promise of mutual careers—even then, however, I questioned the eventually intractable problem of the Second Shift.

There was also what I could find in books, though so far none had satisfied me. I shivered at Faulkner's Wild Palms where when the two meet, she simply says, “‘Yes'” but then of course both are harshly punished for their temerity in going off together. I read novels of infidelity and divorce, of abuse and control.

I wish I had read this book back then. I hadn't yet discovered the joy of real lives, the histories and biographies and autobiographies that, although certainly shaped into narratives and colored by what is omitted, provide other possibilities. Buck's couple became yet another example of a woman devoting her life to her husband and his art. In Fraser's memoir, I found the dream come true of two artists devoted to each other. I'm sure there must have been rocky bits, beyond what she relates, but obviously their connection remained strong.

There is much here to like: the inside look at the theatre scene, the famous and not-so-famous people they knew, the different perspective on familiar events. I was particularly delighted by the inclusion of a few of Pinter's poems. I hadn't realised he wrote poetry, too, though I should have. They are strong and tender and add a bit of his voice to this lovely book. I appreciate Fraser's courage in sharing this so-personal story with us; it is one I will treasure.

This new novel from the Nobel Prize-winner continues Gordimer's chronicle of the evolution of her native South Africa. Here in the U.S. we get very little news about other countries. As newspapers have restructured, dismantling their overseas desks, we are forced to go out on the internet to read foreign newspapers or turn to novels such as this one for details about what is going on.

Steve and Jabu met as activists during the Struggle and married despite misogyny laws. Now, in post-reconciliation South Africa, their interracial marriage is accepted, and both have found places within society's structure, Steve as a professor and Jabu as first a teacher and then a lawyer. With so many choices now available, they debate where to live, what schools are best for their children, how engaged they should continue to be in political activism.

While the couple maintains relationships, albeit sometimes strained, with their families and with new friends, their former comrades-in-arms continue to make up their primary community. The trust forged in guerilla combat carries more weight even than blood. The group gathers at one person's house or another for a suburban barbecue and endless discussion of their country's political doings. This is a country in the process of recreating itself, so arguments and false steps abound.

The aftermath of revolution is always a curious time. Will the rebels put down their guns and create a government? Will power-grabbing guerillas-turned-politicians forget their ideals? Or will a Terror ensue following by a Reaction?

In her race to transcribe the shifting tides of political thought and corrupt behavior in this brave, new world, Gordimer sacrifices her characters and their story. Dispensing with scenes that might slow and deepen the story, she tells us straight out what Steve and Jabu think and feel, briskly rapping out dialogue between the comrades that explicates the minutiae of the news. The result is a voice that is distant and impersonal, and characters who seem little more than puppets set up to exemplify the author's arguments.

Gordimer's prose has always been difficult but it is sometimes almost impenetrable here. Repetitive, rambling, weirdly punctuated: it could have used an editor's hand. I've enjoyed other books by Gordimer, but not this one. Despite my curiosity about how various cultures within the country are handling South Africa's transition and my prior familiarity with at least the broad strokes of its government's changes, the endless political discussions—mostly in the form of expository dialogue—bored me. The arguments could have used more story around them to support and personalise them, as Steinbeck did in The Grapes of Wrath, using the story of the Joads to bring home to the reader the unjust treatment of the Okies. Steve and Jabu's story is too thin, too lightly sketched to serve that function here.

No Time Like the Present raises important and interesting questions. As an historical document, this book is invaluable. As a novel, though, not so much. What stories of Gordimer's have you liked?

A young boy—only eleven—is sent alone by ship from Colombo to London where he will join the mother he hasn't seen in four or five years. He is nominally supervised by a woman his uncle knows, but since she is in First Class he rarely sees her. For his meals he is seated at the Cat's Table, the one farthest away from the Captain's Table and clearly reserved for the least important passengers. There he meets two other boys his age, Ramadhin and Cassius, who will become his constant companions on the voyage, and a handful of peculiar adults: a botanist, a down-and-out pianist, a silent tailor, and a woman who keeps pigeons in the pockets of her jacket.

Another person at the Cat's Table is Mr. Nevil, a retired ship dismantler, a gentle man who lets the boys pester him for details about the structure of ships. He tells them of how in a month they could make a ship disappear, pulling apart walls, carefully gathering everything that could be reused and burning the remainder. He says, “'. . . in a breaker's yard you discover anything can have a new life, be reborn as part of a car or railway carriage, or a shovel blade. You take that older life and you link it to a stranger.'”

Similarly, the boy, now grown, is dismantling the experience of this once-in-a-lifetime voyage, unpacking the past, discovering new meanings, linking it to the rest of his life. Although the narrator is named Michael and shares some biographical details with the author, Ondaatje says in an end note that this story is fiction, not a memoir.

This is a story that you can read lightly, chuckling over the boys' adventures and mourning their frayed innocence, or you can pay closer attention. The book is dense, as one person in my book club said, with motifs and themes that all tie together. There are secret wounds—literally: a scar on a belly, a weak heart—and impaired senses: a blind girl, a man who cannot speak. There are certain moments when a touch, perhaps on a shoulder in the moonlight, reveals everything. There are people who are controlled by others: the mysterious prisoner in chains, Michael's cousin Emily in thrall to her lover, a young girl subject to her father's needs. The three boys each feel the need to protect “others seemingly less secure than ourselves”.

Above all, or perhaps beneath all, lie the hidden things: the spy rumored to be on board incognito, the magician producing lost items with a flourish, the mysterious nighttime conversations the boys overhear. After a terrible storm, Michael says, “What we had witnessed was only what had been above the sea. Now something shook itself free and came into my mind. It was not only the things we could see that had no safety. There was the underneath.” Later Emily tells of a time when a wealthy American for whom she worked in Italy took her elbow and “walked me down the hall until we were in the grand Rotunda, where a sixty-foot tapestry hung. He lifted a corner and held it up so I could look at the underside, where the colors were suddenly brilliant and forceful. ‘This is where the power is, you see. Always. The underneath.'”

Ondaatje's books always reward close attention. This one, too, is a masterpiece worth reading and rereading. It is a Boy's Own adventure of knives and dogs and mischief, and at the same time a coming-of-age story. Memories are dismantled and reused; the mysterious motives and knotted hearts of adults are unwound; and the secret scars of childhood laid bare. Read it. Then read it again.

This fantasy novel is the story of young Jack who was born on the coldest night of the year, so cold that his heart is frozen. To save his life, the midwife, Dr. Madeleine, who is also a mechanical genius and suspected witch, grafts on a cuckoo clock to act as his heart. The clock dismays would-be adoptive parents, so the orphaned Jack continues to live with Dr. Madeleine and her entourage in 1800's Edinburgh. Dr. Madeleine warns him that strong emotions may damage his fragile heart; above all, he must not fall in love.

But of course he does. On his tenth birthday he encounters Miss Acacia, a street singer with a glorious voice and poor vision. Despite her propensity for bumping into things, she too recognises the connection between them. However, the two children are separated, and the novel becomes Jack's quest to find Miss Acacia again. This quest sends him to school, over Dr. Madeleine's misgivings, where he encounters a bully who takes delight in torturing the small boy. Eventually he sets out across Europe for Andalusia where he believes Miss Acacia to be living. Along the way he encounters Méliès, a magician and clock-tender, who joins Jack. In Andalusia, he finds her performing at the Extraordinarium, a sort of ongoing carnival.

With such a whimsical start I had high hopes for this novel. I listened to the audio version, read by Jim Dale, my favorite reader, with his evocative voice and strong characterisations, so the book had everything going for it. However, I became bored rather quickly by the focus on Jack and his increasingly unattractive emotions. As his behavior deteriorated, I became fed up with him and wished for some other storylines. Malzieu has wonderfully inventive side characters, including Madeleine and Méliès, two prostitutes and a man who have also been the recipients of Madeleine's wizardry—Arthur plays When the Saints on his metallic spine—and the brusque owner of the Extraordinarium. I wish the author had made more use of these side characters, both for their intrinsic interest and to give some relief from Jack's complaints.

First published in French as La Mécanique du cœur (The Mechanic of the Heart), it has also seen light as an illustrated novel and a concept album, La Mécanique du cœur, by the French rock band, Dionysos—Mathias Malzieu is their lead singer—and is soon to be released as an animated feature film. Although it sounds as though it should be appropriate for YA or adults, the rather obvious sexual imagery makes it more of an adult fairy tale.

There are some lovely images and ingenious descriptions, as well as of course the marvelous core image of the clock-heart, but I found the book disappointing. Aside from my increasing dislike for Jack, the love story that propels the plot never seemed real to me, perhaps because Miss Acacia, described in Jack's first-person narration, is never presented as more than a pretty picture; we don't learn anything about her as a person. Although it may seem odd to say about what is, after all, a fairy tale, the ending seemed far-fetched to me—even in fantasies, I look for internal consistency—and somewhat clumsy. Yet the material is so promising! Perhaps it is better served by its incarnation as an album or illustrated novel. I will also look for the film, which is due to be released in October, 2013.