Reading Horizons: Episode 7

This is a debut novel which is based on a true story of a wealthy Jewish family who manage to get papers enabling to leave Berlin in 1949 to make a new home in Cuba. But as they approach Havana, they learn that the government has changed its mind and will deny admittance to all but a few of the passengers. The ship has to return to Europe with its passengers fearing for their lives.  Seventy years later a young girl in New York receives a package of letters from a great aunt in Cuba, a delivery that inspires Seven decades later in New York City, on her twelfth birthday, Anna Rosen receives a strange package from an unknown relative in Cuba, her great-aunt Hannah. Its contents inspire her to to travel to Havana to learn the truth about her family’s history.

Recently Finished

Missing Fay by Adam Thorpe

One of the best books I read last year was Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor which looks at the reactions of a community when a teenage girl goes missing on New Year’s Eve. Adam Thorpe’s novel is also an ensemble narrative that begins with a missing teenager but takes a slightly different path by focusing on six individuals who had a connection —sometime fleeting — with the missing girl. The book proved more enjoyable than I expected because Thorpe peppers it with symmetries of detail whose significance only becomes apparent when you reach the end. It’s the kind of book that you immediately want to re-read once you’ve got to the end, convinced that there were so many details that you missed the first time.

Reading next

It has to be The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. In my recent post about the 50th anniversary of the Booker Prize, I said I was going to mark the event by reading the remaining books from my list.

After that I might make a return visit to Louise Penny whose Chief Inspector Gamache series set in Canada, is my favourite detective crime reading. I feel I’ve neglected her of late.

---

Reading Horizons is linked to WWWednesday, a meme  hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words. It involves answering 3 questions:

The three Ws are: