I did a cumulative post about the books I have read this year in mid-November. However, I wanted to highlight my favourite reads of the bunch in fiction and non fiction. (Minus my client’s work, of course.) They did not all come out this year, but many did. Get a taste of my interests below!
My favourite fiction reads
ANNABEL by Kathleen Winter
This is literary Canadian fiction at its finest and it had a fantastic reception in the UK. From House of Anansi’s website: “In 1968, into the beautiful, spare environment of remote coastal Labrador, a mysterious child is born: a baby who appears to be neither fully boy nor girl, but both at once. Haunting, sweeping in scope, and stylistically reminiscent of Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, Annabel is a compelling tale about one person’s struggle to discover the truth about their birth and self in a culture that shuns contradiction.” Twitter: @supremetronic
BIRDS OF PARADISE by Diana Abu-Jaber
After hearing about this book at BookExpo America in the spring I was eager for the rest of the reading community to catch up with my excitement. From Norton’s website: “In the tropical paradise that is Miami, Avis and Brian Muir are still haunted by the disappearance of their ineffably beautiful daughter, Felice, who ran away when she was thirteen. This multilayered novel about a family that comes apart at the seams-and finds its way together again-is totally involving and deeply satisfying, a glorious feast of a book.” Twitter: @dabujaber
NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro
This book changed the way I think about fiction, especially speculative fiction, and the film adaptation was fantastic. I was late coming to this one, but I’m forever changed. From Random House: “From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day comes a devastating new novel of innocence, knowledge, and loss. As children Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.”
STILTSVILLE by Susanna Daniel
This was my latest read and again, not sure why it took so long for me to get to it, but I love the way it made me think about family, unconditional love and the way love and life plays out over the decades. From HarperCollins: “Against a vivid South Florida background, Susanna Daniel’s Stiltsville offers a gripping, bittersweet portrait of a marriage—and a romance—that deepens over the course of three decades. Called “an elegantly crafted work of art and a great read” by Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife, Prep) Stiltsville is a stunningly assured debut novel sure to appeal to readers of Anita Shreve, Sue Miller, and Annie Dillard, or anyone enchanted by the sultry magic of Miami.” Twitter: @susannadaniel
THE MARRIAGE PLOT by Jeffery Eugenidies
I am new to Eugenidies as this was the first book of his I read (he wrote THE VIRGIN SUICIDES and MIDDLESEX). It is one of the best books of 2011 in my opinion. From Random House: “The triangle in this amazing and delicious novel about a generation beginning to grow up is age old, and completely fresh and surprising. With devastating wit, irony and an abiding understanding and love for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides resuscitates the original energies of the novel while creating a story so contemporary that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.” (more…)
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An agent’s job is changing as rapidly as the publishing industry itself. We’re carving out new territory for our authors and ourselves. The support we give our authors is more complex in recent times and if you didn’t think you needed an agent before you certainly need one now to help you with your online presence, digital strategy for ebooks and otherwise, negotiate tumultuous and evolving contracts, and all the traditional publishing problem solving.
