THE ELEVENTH HOUR – Salman Rushdie

“If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well within the eleventh hour.”

That quote from the first story in Salman Rushdie’s new collection, The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories (Random House 2025), pretty much sums up the work as a whole; in these five stories, falling somewhere between short and novella length, Rushdie tackles growing old and death, particularly as it relates to those who tell stories.  The collection ends with “The Old Man in the Piazza,” closing with “our words fail us.”

Rushdie is a masterful storyteller whose words never fail. I don’t think it surprises anyone that I positively love the way he tells a story. The writing is always witty and sharp, distinctively Rushie; I just adore his chatty, narrative voice.  My favorite of the five is likely “Late,” which is a ghost story about an author whose secrets must be revealed before he can cross into the afterlife.   The longest of the collection is “The Musician of Kahani,” which highlights perfectly how Rushdie plays with words and the satirical wit he’s known for.  (The musician’s father abandons the family to make soup for the “Man in the Moon” – a fanatical cult leader. The musician calls him home with her playing. Upon realizing the magical powers of her sitar playing, she sets out on revenge.  Rushdie uses “best eaten cold” instead of “best served cold,” which admittedly threw me off; however, while “served” is more common, “eaten” came first, and I am going to overthink his use for days. ha)

It’s a great collection. My favorite Rushdie is The Moor’s Last Sigh, but this is the first Rushdie I’ve read in at least a decade, and it did not disappoint.

THE TRAVELERS – Regina Porter

“So, I followed her cue and became Guildenstern. I didn’t need to look at the lines to play the part. None of us did, except maybe Mom, who never learned the words ‘cause someone in the family had to be a spectator in the madness.”

It’s fitting that I picked up Regina Porter’s The Travelers (Hogarth 2019) when I did because Tom Stoppard just passed away on 11/29. What does Stoppard have to do with the novel? Everything. And nothing.  Stoppard’s play Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead features prominently in this fragmented novel of intersecting lives of two families, becoming almost a breathing entity for the reader as much as for Eddie (and his wife and children). Stoppard’s play, if you’re not familiar, tells the story of Hamlet from the POV of two minor characters who are awaiting their deaths.  The Travelers breathes main character energy into what most would consider minor characters, and I loved every minute of it.

James Samuel Vincent is an affluent big city attorney who can’t keep it in his pants. His relationship with his son, Rufus, becomes even more complicated when Rufus marries an African American woman, Claudia Christie. Claudie Christie’s mother, Agnes, married Eddie after a devastating racially charged encounter in Georgia. Eddie fought in Vietnam and has his own skeletons.  Other characters include Eloise, Agnes’s first love, Agnes’s firstborn, Adele, James Samuel Vincent’s second wife, and cousins and secret sons and neighbors. The lives of these two families, including extended family members, weave in and out of each other as we travel from the mid-fifties to the first year of Obama’s first term.

Porter is a playwright, and that’s apparent in this novel. The hints of that format are what make the final product so well done. I can understand why some people would say it’s too much – too many characters, too many plots, etc – but I found it genius and one of the best books I’ve read this year.

DAYS COME & GO – Hemley Boum

I took a “traveling” break for Booker season, but we’re back to “Tommi Reads the World” – we’re still in the C’s!!!

Country: Cameroon
Title: Days Come & Go
Author: Hemley Boum
Language: French
Translator: Nchanji Njamnsi
Publisher: Agence littéraire Astier-Pécher (2020), Two Lines Press (2022)


I was a bit bummed when my copy of Hemley Boum’s Days Come & Go arrived because while it was advertised as used, it was not advertised as an advanced reader’s copy. I can’t say if the book I read is how the translation was ultimately published, so I will not be sharing any quotes.

I initially thought this book would be about mothers and daughters – namely Anna and Abi. It opens with Anna dying of cancer and her daughter caring for her.  In hospice, Anna has decided to tell her story. She talks to the nurses, to her daughter, to the walls. The majority of the novel is that – Anna’s recollections of a history so tied to Cameroon that the country itself is a character even though Anna is breathing her last in Paris.  I was a bit surprised when the novel switched to Tina’s POV.  After Abi had left home for France, Anna ended up taking in Jenny, the daughter of her housekeeper. Jenny was the same age as Abi’s son, Max, and when he visited his grandmother, he became part of a group of friends that consisted of Jenny, Tina, and Ismael.  While Max is back home in France, Jenny, Tina and Ishmael join a militant terrorist faction. Under that regime, they end up at the Boko Haram camps, and none of their lives would ever be the same.  Tina tells their story.

All three women struggle with identity and belonging in a country that is rapidly changing. Anna struggles early on with wanting to be Anna instead of Bouissi. She straddles two worlds her entire life. Her daughter, Abi leaves Cameroon the moment she can, marrying a white man and making a home in France.  (Cameroon obtained its independence from France in 1960). And Tina ends up the third wife of one of the most powerful and dangerous leaders at a Boko Haram camp. 

I don’t want to ruin the novel, but trust me that it does all come together. While the storytelling becomes disjointed with Tina and the framework seems a bit forced toward the end, this was a captivating novel of a nation in turmoil and three generations of women who call it home.

MIGRATIONS – Charlotte McConaghy

“Sometimes I dream of them waiting in that tree for a girl who would never come, bringing gift after precious gift to lie unloved in the grass.”

Migrations (Flatiron Books 2020) was Charlotte McConaghy’s US debut, and it’s been on my shelf for years.  I read Once There Were Wolves and Wild Dark Shore before Migrations, and I was a bit surprised to see echoes of both in the debut work.  It’s not just the ecological thriller formula; the lighthouse and the wolves in Migration evolved into the subsequent works. Migrations is my least favorite of the three, but I’m not sure if it’s because she’s improving on that formula or you just remember the first time you see it and that novel holds a special place for you.

While not my favorite, that formula is a proven one, and I enjoy how she’s used it in three very different novels that are somehow still the same. Hard women with complicated relationships with mothers and/or motherhood and at least one dark secret. Harsh and wild climates. Environmental destruction and species loss. Violence on women perpetrated by men. Isolation. And they all end with a hint of hope.  These are extremely palatable and quick reads – perfect for book clubs.

Migrations sees Franny Stone tagging three Artic terns with trackers and convincing a rough and ready boat captain and his crew to take her aboard their fishing boat – they’ll follow the terns on what may very well be their final migration and the fishermen will be rewarded because the terns will lead them to the fish.  It’s a desperate journey for all aboard. As the boat follows the birds, Franny’s tortured personal history unfolds – a personal history that has driven her frantic efforts to find and follow the terns.

Much like the other two novels I’ve read, I enjoyed Migrations.  And yes, the thought of her crows waiting for her to come back had me beside myself.

TO THE MOON AND BACK – Eliana Ramage

“I wanted, more than anything, to be gone.”

When I read the synopsis of Eliana Ramage’s debut, To the Moon and Back (Avid Reader Press 2025), I was immediately sold.  A young woman, exploring her sexuality and identity, embarks on a three-decade long quest to become the first Native American female astronaut. (As a note – the first Indigenous woman to travel to space was Nicole Aunapu Mann in 2022.)  The novel centers primarily on Steph Harper from 1987 to 2017 (with an epilogue that jumps to 2027), but it does deviate into other women in her life.  The deviations into Della and eventually Kayla are ultimately why I think this novel is not as successful as it could be – it’s a bit of a chaotic jumbled mess.  If the focus had been on Steph, without POV switching, it would have been better structured and significantly stronger.  This may be my top disappointment of 2025.

When Steph is a child, her mother flees an abusive husband and settles in Cherokee Nation, hoping to reclaim a part of her identity. Whereas Steph’s younger sister, Kayla, readily adapts, Steph maintains an arm’s length approach to this part of her identity; the disconnect will trail behind her for decades.  Steph’s singular goal is to become an astronaut, and everything and everyone else comes second to that goal.

While in college, as far from Oklahoma as she could get, Steph meets Della. Della is a bit of a celebrity due to a legal battle as a child involving the Indian Welfare Act.  She is raised by her Mormon adoptive parents with one day a year spent with her father in Oklahoma.  She also sought to get as far away as she could so that she could more openly embrace an indigenous culture she’d been denied as a child.

Both Steph and Della struggle with their sexual identity and ultimately end up in a relationship that is marked by secrets.  Ramage gives Della a lot of page space in the novel before abruptly removing her – sending her on a journey we don’t see and only get a few sentences about toward the end.  It was jarring that a novel seemingly set up to be about two women, both with struggles surrounding parents and identity, suddenly becomes entirely about Steph’s singular journey and the overlap with her sister’s activism.

The novel is great in concept but fails in execution because it’s doing too much and not enough all at the same time.

BIG KISS, BYE-BYE – Claire-Louise Bennett

“And the days, I write the days in green, and the things I need, the things I need – I write those in green too.”

As I prepare for next year’s Booker season, let me go ahead and say that Claire-Louise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye (Riverhead 2025) stands alone at this point in time on my “want to see this listed” list.  I’ve never read Bennett before, but it reminded me of the things I like about Patricia Lockwood – a modern madness of storytelling that also seems kissed with Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

The ”story” is one of memories – of past loves and past moments.  Sometimes the novel is in first person, but sometimes our unnamed narrator, an author, switches to third, viewing a situation from a protective distance. It jumps and hiccups and skips and cries, looping back and over itself, moments repeated (though memory may have changed by the subsequent retelling).

It’s framed with a relationship with an older man, Xavier, but it’s laced with the relationship with a different older man when she’s much younger.  A minor. An English professor.   A man who shows back up to be remembered in the life of someone with a bit of fame and renown now. The hold these men still have over her – the ways they’ve marked her life – carries the pages forward.  (The serial killer is a flash in the pan, a memory of panic.)

As for me, I don’t think this is a “break up” novel.  Perhaps I’m a bit morose today, but I think it’s a dying woman counting her days by remembering her past and needing more time, more green, while waiting for that last kiss goodbye.

MINOR BLACK FIGURES – Brandon Taylor

I’m making an effort to read more Booker-eligible books prior to the longlist announcement  – up today is Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures.  (Riverhead 2025)  Taylor was previously shortlisted for the Booker in 2020 with Real Life.  At that time, I was only reading selected works from the list, and I did  not read Real Life; I typically don’t enjoy academia lit fic.  I don’t enjoy (typically) novels about unmoored extremely smart/creative young adults trying to find their identity.  And therein lies the reasons  I didn’t enjoy Minor Black Figures. Taylor is a talented author and the story is compelling, but the story of a talented artist trying to find his voice/identity in New York post-Covid does nothing for me.

The novel follows Wyeth, a 31-year-old gay Black artist who works at a gallery and as a restorer to pay the bills. He’s had some fame but has struggled with what he wants to say and what folks want him to say and what folks think he is saying with his art. He doesn’t want to be grifter, and he feels a bit like that is what art highlighting the Black Lives Matter and other political movements becomes. (This concept of a creative questioning the role of his/her voice in a struggle shows up in multiple listed books from this year’s Booker prize – notably Endling and The Loneliness of  Sonia & Sunny.) I do not like Wyeth.

Wyeth meets Keating, a former seminarian who is also struggling with his identity and faith. Keating is white – a blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty who scratches an itch Wyeth hadn’t entertained in a bit.  Between the conversations with vapid friends and the burgeoning relationship with Keating, Wyeth is working to restore several lithographs – the art of Dell Woods, a “minor black figure,” found in a desk.  His work trying to restore the lithographs and find Dell annoyed me so much because it was the more fascinating part of the novel yet Wyeth had zero concept of how to search for a person using the plethora of records available?!?!  (I wanted more about Dell and Genie – that’s the book I’d have loved.)

I like how Taylor tells a story, I just don’t much care for the plot or characters.  And that’s where I can appreciate that this is a really good novel with excellent points to ponder regarding identity, faith, art, and politics (eg. is a Black artist a Black artist if they don’t paint a Black subject?), and also say it’s not my favorite.

THE SISTERS – Jonas Hassen Khemiri

Booker season may be over, but the awards season continues! I’m not doing the entire NBA longlist for fiction, but I’m hitting a bit of them. Up this week is Jonas Hassen Khemeiri’s The Sisters. (Farrar 2025) It’s fitting I read the 638-page chunker during Booker week as this family saga fits beautifully with that longlist, showcasing many of the same themes of emigration, storytelling, mental health, and family. I’d have readily accepted this on Booker longlist, so I’m glad it’s a National Book Award finalist.

This is one that begs a reread, but unfortunately that’s not something I see happening any time soon. I’d love to dive a bit more into Jonas the character vs. Jonas the author and the general reliability of his narration. (Spoiler. I don’t think he’s reliable, we learn straight away that he likes to lie, but that’s part of what makes the framework successful.) 

The novel is divided into seven books. The first book is the longest and marks “one year” the last book is the shortest and marks “one minute.” The pacing (and urgency) of the novel increases with each book as time passes. 

The book covers 2000-2035 in the lives of the three Mikkola sisters. They are half-Tunisian and half-Swedish, just like Jonas.  Jonas becomes obsessed with them when they move into his town as children.  Their mother, a former lover of Jonas’s dad, is a carpet seller who never stays in one place too long. But Jonas remembers them and their curse long after their apartment is left empty with no forwarding address, and he thinks about them whenever disaster strikes.

This is Khemiri’s first novel written in English. We get some of the struggles with that through Jonas, and that’s part of what makes this novel unreliable and wholly authentic. I’m not going to discuss the plot because this is one that needs to unfold painfully slowly before it steamrolls forward, but I really enjoyed reading this novel.

A GUARDIAN AND A THIEF – Megha Majumdar

“Hope for the future was no shy bloom but a blood-maddened creature, fanged and toothed, with its own knowledge of history’s hostilities and the cages of the present.”

Next up on my NBA reading list is Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf 2025). This slim novel packs a powerful punch, each word a balled fist of intent and despair. The writing is beautiful without being pompous, and the multi-faceted characters reveal themselves in a prism of contradicting colors without ringing hollow or over the top. Despite it being well done and palatable (book clubs will love it), this is one story my heart couldn’t have handled if it was even one page longer – as is that ending stings.

The novel is set in the near future in Kolkata, where climate change has rendered the town nearly unrecognizable. Famine and floods have overwhelmed the country, and many have turned to the city for survival; it is bursting at the seams. Children are starving. Meanwhile, the sole remaining billionaire observes the devastation from a floating hexagon, occasionally donating food (never enough) to those in need (everyone).

Ma, the former manager of the homeless shelter, is preparing to go to America. Her husband is already there, and immigration has approved her, her two-year daughter, and her father to join him. The novel takes the reader through their last seven days before the flight is to depart as the city descends into a starved madness around them.

It’s a novel about what a parent will do when their child is starving, how the communities we build look out of each other, and how there is a bit of both guardian and thief in us all.

Read this book.

SHADOW TICKET – Thomas Pynchon

“Cheese – wait, cheese… has feelings, you say? You mean like… emotions?”

“Long-time spiritual truth in Wisconsin. Thousands of secretly devout cheezatarians…”

“Secretly?”

“Only waiting for our moment. We have to be careful, don’t we… wouldn’t want to go through all that Christian-and-Romans business again, would we?”

I once had a shirt that read “I am Thomas Pynchon.” I’m pretty sure I stole it from some guy, but I have seemingly lost track of it as well. I need another one in my life because people don’t talk about Pynchon enough.  Every so often a grainy photo shows up allegedly of the author, but Pynchon is never in the spotlight.  He has long held the policy that his works should speak for themselves, and he has furiously guarded his privacy. I wanted him to get longlisted for the Booker, but the requirements of the nominees directly conflict with his longstanding pattern and practice of not doing appearances and interviews.  At 88 years old, his recent novel,  Shadow Ticket (Penguin Press 2025) is likely his last chance – maybe he’ll come out of the shadows for it.

V. was Pynchon’s debut novel and my favorite – and that satirical, postmodernm wtf am I reading voice is still the same.  Shadow Ticket is the third of his “detective” novels. It’s set in 1932 Milwaukee – smack dab in the Great Depression with the Nazis beginning their rise – and follows a private detective named Hicks who has been tasked with finding the heiress to a Wisconsin cheese fortune. (An heiress he’s a bit familiar with already.)  The “ticket” will see him drugged and tossed on a transoceanic liner, eventually ending up in Hungary. There’s a sub marine hanging out in Lake Michigan, a missing Al Capone of Cheese, crooked cops, a Statute of Liberty made of Jell-O to welcome immigrants, radioactive cheese, would-be assassins masquerading as Santa’s elves, and fascists on the cusp of a war that would change the world as Hicks knows it.

“Somebody better sell you a ticket on the next train out forever,” his once girl April croons on the album he loses. But this job is Hicks’s ticket out. And there’s something about the novel that reads like a goodbye.

The satire, the absurd, the pop culture references, the writing in general … Shadow Ticket is Pynchon.  And it does speak for itself.

Read this book.