THE BOOK OF RECORDS – Madeleine Thien

“It is late and, in these hours, the Book of Records always takes on a new form. The train continues, a sound that blurs into the tide of water against the shore.”

“The boy turned the page of his book. ‘I’m counting the hours until we get to the ocean. My mother and aunt sent me ahead but I wish I could turn around and go back. There’s something important I forgot to tell them.”

Current installment of Tommi Reads the World – we are now in the C’s!!!

Country: Canada
Title: The Book of Records
Author: Madeleine Thien
Language: English
Translator: n/a
Publisher: W.W. Norton 2025

In my attempt to “get a jump” on the Booker Prize longlist (which will be announced Tuesday), I’ve made predictions and read several of my own and other predictions. Of those, I am almost 99.9% sure Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records (W.W. Norton 2025) will be listed.  I’m also pretty convinced, without even seeing the list, that it will win. When I talk about books oozing with Booker type, this novel is what I mean. Was it my favorite of those I’ve read recently? Absolutely not. Do I think it deserves a reread, at a slower pace?  Yeah, I do.  The art of storytelling, the formation of this novel, the building pieces that make it what it is, that is where this novel soars.  It’s smart, but it makes you work for it. 

While reading the novel, I found myself staring at my copy of A Wrinkle in Time, a book I devoured as a 6th grader from a quartet I devoured a few years back. The two Madeleines seem to have a bit in common; in many respects, I’d say this is the beloved childhood classic for adults.

The nuts and bolts of the novel are a young girl and her father arrive at a port that is purgatory – a place where the water that crashes into the land is a different body of water depending on who you ask. They, along with others, wait to take their leave. While there, the father is forced to reckon with his own past – a past Lina must face as well.

But the novel is much more than Lina and her father. The Book of Records bleeds memories and choices into the future, a story about storytelling and memory and the human condition. How we cling to the past, how we retell the events of our lives and the lives that came before, how these lives never cease but stay afloat in a limbo land on the sea or on a train, how we can weave in and out of the storylines, retelling, re-remembering them, making them ours.

Read this book.

DAYS OF LIGHT – Megan Hunter

“It was a language, she saw now, the way he touched her.”

Megan Hunter’s Days of Light (Grove Press 2025) is very Bookery, and I read it as part of my “get a jump on possible longlisted books” journey. It’s The Safekeep meets Stone Yard Devotional, and while I loved both of those novels, I rather disliked Days of Light. The writing is gorgeous, and Hunter is clearly quite talented; I simply hated both the story and the way it was told – and most of the characters. This is a “it’s not you, it’s me” moment, and I recognize that.

The novel opens on Easter Sunday 1938. Ivy is 19. Her older brother, Joseph, is home from Oxford and his girlfriend is to join them. They have a bit of odd family – their parents aren’t together but are. Her dad has his relationships and her mom has Angus (who has his own relationships.) They’re all “artistic” and rather fit the tortured artist stereotypes. Ivy is passable at all creative efforts, but not really amazing at any of them.

Ivy has a schoolgirl crush on Bear, one of Angus’s “friends” who has, quite literally, known her since she was born. He’s a “writer” and, of course,  gorgeous and hellbent on seducing her. (Enter the first “ick”)

Joseph dies that Easter Sunday – and much like when the stone was rolled away, no body was ever found. He drowns while swimming with Ivy. She sees a bright light and pays him no attention as he calls to her. She and her mother blame her.

Ivy and Bear first hook up at the funeral. (Enter the second “ick.”) After a half-hearted suicide attempt, she agrees to marry him.  What follows is a story told over six days but over decades, ending on the sixth day, which is Easter Sunday 1999.

My takeaway? Ivy was supposed to be the one to drown – the light was for her, and she knows it. Everything that happens after that moment, she just lets happen to her.  Bear? He was as good of a choice as going to Paris – she didn’t really care. When she becomes involved with Joseph’s girlfriend? Is that for her or for Joseph? She spends decades trying to find Joseph. She turns to God and has a few years as a nun because Bear died and Frances rejects her for her own husband. (She becomes Sister Francis.  Third Ick.)  Finally, the light comes for her.

I didn’t like Ivy.  Not at all.

My dislike of this novel means it is likely to be listed.

THE HISTORY OF SOUND – Ben Shattuck

“She wished that she could read music. She might have hummed the melody, or at least understood why this phrase of music was important or original or innovative enough – or elusive enough, at the risk of being forgotten – to require being written out so urgently. But she couldn’t read music, and so the artifact remained just that: something from a long time ago that she would never really understand.”

I read Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound (Viking 2024) because it was erroneously on a 2025 Booker eligible list I saw. As it was published last summer, it’s not eligible for the prize this year.  But what a happy mistake. The History of Sound is a collection of connected stories set in New England and spanning centuries. The writing is beautiful and urgent and cold and wet. You can feel the dampness and chill, and hear the cracking of the wood in the fireplace as these stories, these artifacts of memories, paintings, songs, letters, are how we find glimpses of immortality.

The collection opens with “The History of Sound” – a short-lived first love broken by circumstances and the war.  It ends with “Origin Stories” – a dusting off of the “artifacts” of music from the first story and reflection of a modern love story.  These two stories are the perfect bookends for the collection, but each story is a part of another and the way the collection is intricately woven is masterful.

As to my favorites of the twelve – it’s hard to pick.  I adored “Graft” – about a young woman in the late 1800s whose “husband” had a real family.  She left her son with her brother and disappeared. Over a decade later, she sees a boy at a museum that reminds her so much of her former husband, she’s convinced it is her son.  “The Auk,” which really needs to be read with its pair, “Radiolab: “Singularities,” is a love story about a man who will do anything for his wife, who has dementia. When he finds a taxidermized auk, a bird long extinct, he takes some pictures to play a joke on his brother.  His wife finds them and lights up. And so, the daily rouse of looking for the auk begins, because it brings her joy and reminds him of who she once was.

Each story has a mate, a partner in storytelling. From the mysterious death of a camp of loggers that isn’t so mysterious to the appearance of the auk, to first loves and lost loves and last loves, there’s something so human about this collection.

Read this book.

THE ANTIDOTE – Karen Russell

“A person can lose everything in an instant. A fortune, a family, the sun. I’ve had to learn this lesson twice in my life.”

“The coroner gave me the only picture that I have of Mama, a print of her body in the ditch.”

“I guess, the way I see it, you could tell the story of the Dust Bowl another way. You could widen the lens and say: this land is blowing because we stole it from the people who knew how to care for it.”

Karen Russell’s The Antidote ( Knopf 2025) went a bit higher on my TBR due to Booker Prize predictions. Having read it, I can say without pause or question that this quirky, magical, gritty, historical novel needs to be on that list – it may very well by my top read of the year, and I was remiss to not include it. There’s something Maguire’s Wicked meets Louise Erdrich meets Stephen King about it, which explains why I love every single word on every single page, but it’s also wholly its own beast.  And what a beautiful beast it is.

With themes of stolen lands, lives, and stories, Russell plops us in Uz County, Nebraska, nestling her story between the Black Sunday dust storm of 1935 and the flooding of the Republican River, and the story that takes place between the dust and the rain is absolute perfection.

The Antidote is a Prairie Witch, a Vault. People can deposit their memories inside her to retrieve or not retrieve later. Only after Black Sunday, she’s found herself bankrupt – the memories are gone. Before she became the Antidote, she was Antonina Rossi, and her sections are told to her son, addressed as “You.”

Asphodel “Dell” Oletsky is the young girl sent to live with her bachelor uncle after her drunk mother winds up dead in a ditch. She’s driven to win and plays basketball on a team that’s heading to the championship but just lost their sponsor. She becomes the Antidote’s assistant to help fund the team.

Harp Oletsky is Dell’s bachelor uncle. A religious man, he tries to understand why God didn’t let a speck of dirt into his home during Black Sunday and why his wheat flourishes while all around him, the crops have withered and died. Something is happening at his homestead – he understands that much. He just doesn’t know what.

Cleo Allfrey is the New Deal photographer who finds herself in possession of a bit of a magical camera.

Other POVs that enter the novel are the Scarecrow, who stands tall during the dust storms and who is gathering memories of what or who he was before, and Cat, the sheriff’s orange tabby who has her own vendetta and motives.

The Antidote is strange and fierce, gritty and gracious, honest and hopeful.

Read this book.

THE UNBROKEN COAST – Nalini Jones

Nalini Jones’s debut novel, The Unbroken Coast (Knopf – expected 8/12/2025), is a story of intertwined lives, found families, regrets, and triumphs. Set in and around a Mumbai fishing village, the novel follows a prominent retired professor who is struggling with his memories, and a young Koli girl from the fishing village whose family is struggling to stay one step ahead of the debt collector.

Professor Francis Almeida, even retired, is a historian, and he finds scholarly projects that highlight the history of the place he calls home. His work results in the fancy hotel being built, and he’s rewarded for his efforts by his glass never being empty when he visits the hotel lounge. He’s a man marked by loss – a daughter died in his arms not long after birth. He’d also lost his fiancée, a girl who loved pink and breathed life and laughter wherever she went.  And he’d lost that girl’s sister – the big “what if” of his life.  He fills his days with research and alcohol and riding his bike to keep his memories at bay.

He met Celia when she was a baby, but neither know of their first encounter. It is their second, ten years later, when he runs into her on his bike and she breaks her arm that forever seals their conjoined fates.

Celia is the daughter of a fisherman, and her mother sells fish at the market, like the other Koli women of the village. Her younger sister has a “delicate deposition,” and Celia is at time a glass child, overlooked and boxed in for the benefit of Evangeline. Or so she thinks. She doesn’t know about the dengue fever and the shrine of Our Lady of Navigators.  She butts heads with her mother frequently, each knowing how to quickly wound the other.

At the request of Essie, Francis’s wife, Celia, begins to come to the home regularly. Her mother becomes their fisherwoman, and the Almeidas give the family hand-me-down clothes and shoes from their American grandchildren that were left behind during visits.

Years pass.  Celia grows up, gets married. Francis’s memory problems become more apparent.  The two continue to fade in and out of each other’s lives.

Spanning 1978 – 2005, The Unbroken Coast gathers up a bit of Mumbai history, including the 1993 bombings, Christian and Muslim relations, the struggles of Koli families who rely on fishing, and the rise of AIDS, and fries it all with onions in a sizzling pan.

It’s a solid debut.

*A huge thanks to the publisher for the advanced copy.

CO-WIVES, CO-WIDOWS – Adrienne Yabouza

Current installment of Tommi Reads the World – we’re still in the C’s!!!

Country: Central African Republic
Title: Co-Wives, Co-Widows
Author: Adrienne Yabouza
Language: French
Translator: Rachael McGill
Publisher: First published in Mali, 2015; Dedalus, 2021

Co-Wives, Co-Widows is the first book from the Central African Republic to be translated into English. The self-educated Yabouza fled the country in 2013, seeking political asylum in France. She writes in Sango, Yakoma, Lingala, and French. Co-Wives, Co-Widows is her second book to be published in French.

As for the novella itself, it is a biting little delight. A quick read at 124 pages, the novel is the story of Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou, Lidou’s two wives. When the story opens, the two women are going to vote. Lidou, comfortable with how things are (he’s doing well for himself, has two beautiful wives and several children) isn’t sure he is going to exercise his right. The only thing Lidou isn’t happy with is that he is having some issues in the bedroom. He begins taking some traditional concoction along with Cialis. When he dies, the reader is the only one who knows why.

With his death, Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou find themselves with an uncertain future. Lidou’s greedy relatives seek to kick them out of their home and take any and all inheritance for themselves.  Police are called. Attorneys are involved. What follows is a scathing but at times comical take on domestic lives, bribery, and political corruptness.  (And you’ll just love Ndongo!)

Read this book!

NESTING – Roisín O’Donnell

“Nights like this, she knows this is real, she’s not imagining it. The fear is bright, animal, sure. Pure blue at the heart of a flame.”

“But right now, there’s no space for stories.”

Rounding out my Booker predictions for the weekend is Roisín O’Donnell’s debut novel, Nesting (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2025 – true story – I used to intern at Algonquin back in 2002.) I listed Nesting  not in my original 13 predicted selections but in an honorable mention section. Having read it – I think I’d pulled it over to the 13 (I keep going back and forth between this and Confessions.)

Ciara Fay’s husband is manipulative, controlling, and abusive. As she apologetically explains, he doesn’t hit her – as if she should be grateful the abuse isn’t worse. He may not hit her, but there’s intimidation, financial abuse, isolation, and sexual abuse. She spends her time walking on eggshells, barely daring to breathe.  Nights are worse. One day, she decides she cannot take it anymore. In a split-second decision, she drives off with her two kids, their passports, and an armload of clothes.

The obsessive calls and texts start. O’Donnell masterfully showing the manipulation in the simple text messages. Ciara calls him, has a reasonable conversation about spending a few days with her mother in England, and spends much of the little money she’s squirreled away from him on plane tickets. When she arrives at the airport, she learns he’s put a hold on the passports – Ciara and her daughters are grounded at a crossroads between Ryan’s control and Ciara’s resilience and strength.

What follows is a year of continued attempts at control and manipulation, of wielding custody and the court system as a weapon, of forcing himself back into her life and refusing to pay support. Of note, he “saves” a nest of fledging crows and uses to them in an attempt to bring her home.  Because, as he stresses, she knows how to take care of them. There’s a push and pull, a wound constantly being picked at, as Ciara – having learned she’s pregnant – begins to find herself and makes strides in breaking away.

Nesting sinks its claws in you, pulling you in like a car wreck or a TruCrime podcast, your fingers clenched in the hopes that Ciara doesn’t become a statistic.  You’re tethered.  Like a captive crow.  Or woman.

Read this book.

THEORY & PRACTICE – Michelle de Kretser

“As a child I’d often heard, ‘Tell the truth and shame the devil.’ When the truth was told, someone had to be shamed – usually the teller of the truth. It was time, I told myself, to stop fearing shame.”

“Who will write the history of tears?”

Another Booker prediction comes from Australia – Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser (Catapult 2025). A slim little thing, Theory & Practice has that Booker smell as it follows a writer looking back to her time as a graduate student studying Virginia Woolf.  Undoubtedly drawing comparison between herself and the famed author, our first-person narrator (who remains unnamed for most of the novel) has her world upended a bit by lessons on theory, discoveries in Woolf’s writing, and her own life experiences.

This was an interesting read on the heels of Our Evenings – both are about writers reflecting on their lives, both are in academia and struggling with expectations while also questioning methods, and both are “others” – David Winn has a Burmese father and Cindy has Sri Lankan parents.

It also proved an interesting read for someone who also had graduate studies. My focus was post colonialism and “writing back” – concepts our narrator grapples with in her scholarship but also in her existence. While I didn’t study Woolf, my focus on Nadine Gordimer and my scholarship into theory was eerily similar. (While I did complete my thesis and degree, I didn’t become a famous author or scholar.)

Theory & Practice is a coming-of age story of post-colonialism and feminism that hides a mirror.  And it’s a masterful work that can reflect the reader back so precisely.

Read this book.

OUR EVENINGS – Alan Hollinghurst

“I lay there for agonized hours as the miracle of being in bed at him was nibbled away by the heat and the hangover and the longing.”

This year, I decided to get “a jump” on potential Booker books, and Alan Hollinghurst’s (a previous Booker winner) new novel, Our Evenings (Random House 2024) was a no brainer prediction for me. Even if not listed, I’d recommend it; Hollinghurst’s writing is simply beautiful. While reading, I likened the novel to a candy bar with a bit of everything – chocolate, nougat, caramel, nuts, Krispies… Every page was a delightful surprise.

Beginning when he turns 13, the novel spans the life of David Win, the son of a Burmese man he’s never met and knows next to nothing of and a British dressmaker. David has been awarded a scholarship to a prominent boarding school. There, he struggles with racism, classism, intellectualism, jealousy, and his own sexuality.  Also there, he finds his voice, a passion for acting, and a fragile relationship with the wealthy white parents of a classmate who sponsored the scholarship he’d won and serve as his patrons for years to come. What follows is a lifetime of loving, living, and learning – all the while Giles Hadlow and his parents remain in the periphery of his life.

Based on the opening to the novel, I wrongly assumed the book would focus on his relationship with Giles, a bullying teen and David’s first “relationship” who grew up to become the Brexit Minister with some questionable politics.  I was pleasantly surprised to learn Giles and the Hadlows, while ever present and playing prominent roles at varying times in his life, don’t define the story of David Win.

I don’t typically like books within books, particularly when you learn the book being written by the main character carries the same name as the book you are reading – so that aspect of the plot did annoy me.  Our Evenings, the book within the book, is the story of the men who spent their evenings with David – the first time the title appears is when he’s listening to music with a teacher – but the novel, while encompassing that, also focuses on David’s mother and her partner, his unknown father, and his relationship with himself as a brown gay man.

Hollinghurst’s storytelling is complex and delicious.

Read this book.

*Tune in at the end of the month to see if the novel is longlisted for the 2025 Booker!

THE PRETENDER – Jo Harkin

“Lambert isn’t sure if he’d remember to answer to the name Lambert, but he does, every time. What kind of soul does he have, that can tip itself out of a John Collan cup into a Lambert Simons cup, without spilling a drop.”

In 1487, Lambert Simnel, a boy raised in obscurity and believed to be the true heir to the throne, was crowned as King Edward VI, last of the Plantagenet kings. He became the leader of the York rebellion. The rebellion failed, but King Henry VII took pity on the young boy – instead of putting him to death like many of the rebellion leaders, he put him to work as a spit turner.  Known as a “pretender” to the throne, Jo Harkin’s The Pretender (Knopf 2025) is based on his true story.  She breathed life into a footnote in history and created a 476-page novel full of history, wit, and heartbreak.

When the novel opens, John is a ten-year-old boy growing up on a dairy farm. He misses his older brothers who have gone to school, and he is being bullied by a goat. No one is more surprised than him when he learns that he is not his father’s son, he’s not John at all. He’d been put with the family for sake-keeping and is heir to the throne. His once-father had been paid. He is taken away from everything he ever knew – including his very name.

John, Lambert, Edward… he wears all the faces as he becomes the figurehead in the York rebellion – a young boy struggling with identity, belonging, and knowledge that he has zero desire to be king; he’d rather read books and tell fart jokes.

Lambert’s voice is well established and well crafted through the chunky novel, and while I think the novel may suffer from being too full of puffery in some spots, I do think it’s an overwhelming success and a fun read, albeit at times  difficult due to the authenticity of language.  (And who doesn’t love Joan?!?  Why couldn’t there have been more Joan!?!?)

Read this book.