Picks from October 2007
Stay by Nicola Griffith
About the author:
Nicola Griffith is a native of Leeds, England. At eighteen she moved to Hull, where she taught women's self-defense to groups as diverse as the Equal Opportunities Training Unit and the Union of Catholic Mothers. She was the lead singer/songwriter for the all-woman band, Jane's Plane. Griffith is the author of Ammonite (1993), Slow River (1995) The Blue Place (1995) and Always (2007). She lives in Seattle with her partner, writer Kelley Eskridge. http://nicolagriffith.comRead more...
About the book:
Stay is Griffith's second novel featuring six-foot tall; ice-blue eyed Aud Torvingen, a Norwegian expat living in Atlanta. Now a detective, Aud is a former cop and martial artist. Tough and emotionally complicated, she's a classic noir hero.Disintegrating with grief and guilt over the violent death of her lover, the last thing a grieving Aud wants is another case. Against her better judgment she agrees to track down an old friend's runaway fiancÈe--and finds herself up against both a sociopath so artful that the law can't touch him, and the terrible specters of loss and guilt.
Hood by Emma Donoghue
About the author:
Emma Donoghue is an award-winning Irish writer who lives in Canada. She is the author of many novels, including Stir-Fry, Passions Between Women, Kissing the Witch, Slammerkin, Landing and Life Mask.Born in Dublin, Ireland, on 24 October 1969, Emma is the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue. She attended Catholic convent schools in Dublin, apart from one year in New York at the age of ten. In 1990 she earned a first-class honours B.A. in English and French from University College Dublin, and in 1997 a Ph.D. (on the concept of friendship between men and women in eighteenth-century English fiction) from the University of Cambridge. Since the age of 23, Donoghue has earned her living as a full-time writer. After years of commuting between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 she settled in London, Ontario, where she lives with her lover and their son. http://emmadonoghue.com
About the book:
Hood is a tale of love between two Catholic women in Dublin, Ireland--a country in which homosexuality still largely dares not speak its name openly. Cara's sudden death at 30 leaves bereaved Penelope (Pen) shocked, grieving, reliving their 14-year relationship, which Donoghue covers in a series of overlapping flashbacks, from the time the two met in convent school in the late seventies to the early nineties, when they lived together in Cara's father's home. Funeral preparations and post burial returns to "normalcy" alternate with Pen's recollections of the moody, tempestuous Cara. These memories include screamingly good sex muffled from Cara's father's ears; Cara's repeated forays into other women's and men's beds; day-to-day routines the two shared, including Cara's maddening habit of asking life's larger questions as they drift to sleep at night.
Though mapping the trajectory of Pen's grief seems Donoghue's primary aim, she also explores issues untouched by death: Will Pen bed Cara's sexy older sister, Kate, who's flown home from America for the funeral? Will Pen find the courage to come out to her mother and to Cara's father?
Although some may find it slow, others will consider this love story that well conveys the complexities and nuances of intimate relationships stately and elegiac.
Ashes & Dust in the City of Angelsñ a 5 part series (Hellblazer #170-174) contained in the graphic novel Highwater by Brian Azzarello
About the author:
Brian Azzarello (born in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American comic book writer. He came to prominence with 100 Bullets, published by DC Comics' mature-audience imprint Vertigo. His run of Vertigo's Hellblazer series (#146-174) was controversial. He has also worked on Batman. In 2005, Azzarello began a new creator-owned series, the western Loveless. Azzarello is married to fellow comic-book writer and illustrator Jill Thompson.About the book:
"Ashes & Dust" is the second of two stories in the graphic novel, Highwater. Cynical sorcerer John Constantine is working his way across the States, exposing the country's seamy underbelly while seeking the person who framed him for murder. In the first, Constantine contacts the widow of the man he supposedly killed only to find her involved with white supremacists. The second opens in an S and M club, with L.A. police investigating what they believe is Constantine's charred corpse. John Constantine is believed to have been murdered in an SM sex club he used to frequent with his gay lover.
The story has a little bit of everything: murder, gangsters, sex games, confession, a priest, obsession, gay sex, guilt, a love story, suicide and more...
To read the plot synopsis go here - http://www.insanerantings.com/hell/comics/ongoing/hb170.html
