Word: booker
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That is one of the questions that animates McEwan's eighth novel, Amsterdam (Doubleday; 193 pages; $21), the 1998 winner of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize. The composer in question is Clive Linley. He and his old friend Vernon Halliday, a newspaper editor, meet outside a London crematorium to say goodbye to Molly Lane, a glamorous and sexually generous woman dead in her late 40s of a painfully wasting disease. Each man had been her lover in earlier days, as had many others, including Julian Garmony, the Foreign Secretary, who is also present at the service. Linley and Halliday, unnerved...
Walker moved her business to Indianapolis in 1910, created the Madam C.J. Walker Hair Culturists Union of America and tirelessly traveled the U.S. giving lectures and demonstrations. Walker attracted the notice of the race's elite, despite the dubious regard in which they held hairdressers. She disrupted Booker T. Washington's National Negro Business League Convention in 1912 by demanding to be heard. "Surely you are not going to shut the door in my face," Walker shouted to Washington, who had ignored her for three days. "I have been trying to tell you what I am doing...
...Georgie completes an ambitious trilogy of novels that dissect great examples of human folly. But to say that Bainbridge--who is perhaps one of the best living novelists Americans don't know much about, and whose work, including this latest novel, has been shortlisted five times for the prestigious Booker Prize--writes historical fiction is like saying that Jane Austen wrote domestic comedies. These three novels, each around a mere 200 pages, are epics under a microscope, reducing the sweep of history to the random collisions of its human players...
...fair that the Diva Divine makes albums only as vacations from movies and motherhood, for her genius is as a singer-entertainer. Midler's vocal voltage and pristine song salesmanship are on display here in tunes by Leonard Cohen, Chuckii Booker, Carole King, Ben Folds--lots of fine folk. Her voice can ache with hard-won wisdom (on the first single, My One True Friend) or smile with the sweet clarity of her Honolulu youth (Gus Kahn's 1925 Ukulele Lady). Songs like Laughing Matters, I'm Beautiful and I'm Hip give the album the sassy intimacy...
Gunesekera's first novel, Reef, became a Booker Prize finalist in 1994, thanks to its meticulous evocation of the marketing of paradise (symbolized by a coral reef in Sri Lanka). His new one, The Sandglass (The New Press; 288 pages; $21.95), sweeps that theme up into an even ampler examination of how independent Sri Lanka devolved into bloody anarchy and its people got scattered around the globe. Its protagonist, essentially, is twilight, and its brief sections, following the hours of the day ("Late Morning," "Quarter to Five," "Darkness"), tell us, unequivocally, that time is running...