Novels about Mental Illness

In Canada last week, there was an event known as Bell Let’s Talk; the purpose of this mental health initiative is to encourage people to talk about mental health (a subject people are reluctant to discuss though 1 in 5 Canadians will experience some form of mental illness) and to raise funds for mental health organizations.  In the United Kingdom, there is a Beat Blue Monday campaign, an effort to raise a smile among the British public and funds for mental health charities.  These events had me checking Schatje’s Shelves to find novels that deal with the topic of mental health.  Here are 20 titles I found:

After Birth by Elisa Albert

The author never explicitly names postpartum depression in this novel about a woman in the first year of motherhood, but Ari’s resentment over her experience of childbirth, alienation from the rest of the world, and complicated feelings about her son ring true to the condition.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

This novel which won the Pulitzer Prize was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.  The story reveals a single day in the lives of three women from three different time periods, including Virginia Woolf herself.

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

The Round House tells the story of 13-year-old Joe who is forced to grow up too soon after his mother is brutally attacked.   The author gives insight into the daily manifestation of PTSD, and offers the perspective of what it’s like to care about someone struggling with it.

Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum

The heroine is a woman in a seemingly happy life but she is plagued by a nearly debilitating depression which nothing seems to ease.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Leonard, one of the main characters in this novel, lives with manic depression which affects his work, his friendships, and his romantic relationships.

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald wrote this novel while his wife Zelda was in the hospital being treated for schizophrenia. Set on the French Riviera in the 1920s, the book is the story of psychoanalyst Dick Diver and his wife Nicole who also happens to be his patient.

The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

First published in 1892 and based on the author’s experiences with depression, the book is written as the secret journal of a woman who, failing to relish the joys of marriage and motherhood, is sentenced to a country rest cure. In the involuntary confinement of her bedroom, the hero creates a reality of her own beyond the hypnotic pattern of the faded yellow wallpaper.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Hannah Green

Deborah Blau, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, spends three years in a psychiatric hospital. Her story echoes the author’s experiences, and the doctor in the story was supposedly based on her real-life doctor, the German psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann.

Ordinary People by Judith Guest

Conrad tries to commit suicide after the tragic death of his older brother, so his parents send him to a psychiatric hospital. After his release, with help from his psychiatrist, Conrad examines his depression and attempts to understand his relationship with his mother.

Nobody is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey

The novel follows the impulsive Elyria on a one-way flight to New Zealand, where she’s gone to try to forget about the life — her husband, her late sister, a spiraling depression — behind her. Her thoughts are ruminative and obsessive, and increasingly violent, and reveal the inner workings of depression and anxiety.

I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb

Dominick Birdsey, the narrator, is a 40-year-old housepainter, horrifically abused and emotionally unavailable, who has an identical twin who is a paranoid schizophrenic who believes in public self-mutilation.

She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb

Delores Price slowly unravels after dealing with a traumatic event as a young teenager. As a twentysomething woman, she spends years in an institution after a suicide attempt. She eventually quits therapy and attempts to rebuild her life on her own terms.

A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee

Lee’s novel is a story of secrets and trauma that can’t be forgotten. When Franklin Hata is injured in a fire, he’s reminded of his painful past and the tortured woman he fell in love with during the war.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

The driving force of Murakami’s devastating novel is the depression which plagues Naoko, Toru, and the young man whose suicide brings them together. It’s an honest and lyrical look at the overwhelming feeling of powerlessness and helplessness that depression often brings.

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Ozeki tackles depression from two angles:  through the protagonist, 16-year-old Nao, who falls into a suicidal depression after moving back to Tokyo, and through Nao’s father, who falls into a deeper depression after losing his job.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Originally published under a pseudonym, this is the semi-autobiographical account of Plath’s own clinical depression.  In stream-of-consciousness, she describes the emotional and psychological breakdown of Esther Greenwood, a woman struggling against self-destructive thoughts and overwhelming darkness.

The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick

This novel tells the story of Pat, a young teacher who's just left a psychiatric hospital. The book portrays what it's like to live with depression, anxiety, and mood swings.

All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

What would you do if your sister asked you to help her commit suicide? That's the question around which the novel is framed. Elfreida, a successful concert pianist, asks her younger sister Yolandi, to help her commit suicide.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

The novel focuses on A day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a high society English woman. Through the character of Septimus, a shell-shocked veteran of World War I, the book criticizes the treatment of the mentally ill.  Apparently, Woolf used her own struggles with bipolar disorder to inform Septimus’s character.

Lowboy by John Wray

William Heller, a 16-year-old living with schizophrenia, escapes from a psychiatric hospital and ventures out into the underground labyrinth of the New York City subway system -- a metaphor for his own mind -- while his overprotective mother hires a policeman to find him.

Review of "Us Conductors" by Sean Michaels

I’m ending this month with a review from my archives.  This book, which I read in January of 2015, is currently on the longlist of the 2016 Dublin Literary Award and won the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize.  As my review indicates, I’m not on the same page as the judges and nominators. 

2 Stars

 

Not being knowledgeable about physics and not being a lover of electronic music, I did not find this book’s subject matter appealing and so read it only after it won the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Though I have not yet read the other books on the award’s shortlist, I must admit that this novel did not strike me as being of the quality I would expect for one of Canada’s foremost literary awards.

The book is very loosely based on the life of Lev Sergeyvich Termen, the Russian inventor of the theremin. He is sent to the U.S. to showcase his musical instrument and, by extension, the greatness of Mother Russia. As he meets with famous and influential Americans, he gathers contacts and intelligence for his homeland and falls in love with Clara Reisenberg, a theremin virtuoso. The novel is written as a long letter from Termen to Clara, “a letter that will never be read” (218) because he is a political prisoner.

My objection to the novel is what lies at the heart of the book: Lev’s love for Clara. He becomes obsessed with a girl who at eighteen is fifteen years younger. She periodically spends time with him, but there is no evidence of romantic feelings on her part. She seems to see Lev as a “dance partner . . . a diversion” (83) though Clara herself remains opaque and elusive; perhaps she could best be described as ethereal, like the music of a theremin. In fact, Lev’s love seems ethereal, in the sense of “tenuous” as opposed to “celestial.”

Lev remains emotionally distant with and ambivalent about other significant women in his life (Katia, Lavinia, his sister), yet we are to believe that he is capable of such an undying love for someone who does not return his love and even rejects him? Besides not being consistent with his detached personality, his constant mooning over the much younger Clara becomes annoying and is unbecoming if not a tad unsavoury. The novel may have been intended as a paean to love; its message seems to be that even unrequited love can help one survive. Unfortunately, Lev’s love seems more like obsessive infatuation, not genuine love, and a middle-aged man who is such a slave to an unrequited love is just pathetic. And after Lev’s last conversation with Clara, which we learn about only at the end, I could only shake my head in disbelief.

For an intelligent scientist and inventor, Lev seems very naïve, if not delusional. He thinks the theremin, because of its simplicity, is an instrument of public good: “Because it trusts the worker’s own senses, not the knowledge locked away in the lessons and textbooks of the elites, the theremin becomes a revolutionary device – a levelling of the means of musical production” (28). After being held as a prisoner on board a ship forcibly bringing him back to Russia, he still believes the Stalinist government will allow him to “build new wonders” (214)?!

The first part of the book, 214 pages, I found rather tedious. It reads like a dull journal: I did this and then I did that and then I met so and so. Events like marriages which should receive more detail are glossed over. Given the intended audience of Lev’s letter, one would expect more honesty if the depth of his love is to be convincing. He is certainly not given to self-examination and only in the end seems to fully realize that he has been a useful instrument of the state and admits, “What did I know of conducting” (293). He concludes, “I was in play. I was Lev Sergevich Termen, conducted” (301).

All this is not to say that the book has no merits. Its depiction of life in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s is marvelous. Likewise, life in a Siberian gulag is described in vivid if disturbing detail. And the writing is beautiful; lyricism is found throughout.

I will conclude by stating that perhaps the fault is not in the book but in my cynicism. Surely all those who have found the book to be a literary masterpiece, including the judges of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, could not be wrong.

Review of "Bone and Bread" by Saleema Nawaz

3 Stars

The novel begins with the death of Sadhana Singh.  Beena, her older sister, is the narrator.  As she clears his sister’s apartment and tries to uncover the circumstances behind Sadhana’s sudden death, she narrates the story of her family’s past and her present.  The sisters, the daughters of an American yoga instructor and a Sikh baker, grow up above the family’s bagel shop in the Hasidic community in Montreal.  Orphaned, they are left in the care of a traditional Sikh uncle.  As teenagers, Beena becomes an unwed mother and Sadhana begins a struggle with anorexia. 

The book examines the complicated bonds of sisterhood, what Beena calls “the deep trenches of our relationship.”  They are very different, almost foils.  Beena is introverted and self-conscious whereas Sadhana is an extrovert with numerous friends and causes.  Beena also lacks Sadhana’s artistic flair.  The title seems to refer to the two sisters, Sadhana being the bone and Beena the bread:  Sadhana is hard-edged and brittle and physically she is all bone while Beena is softer and physically tends to be heavier.  Sibling rivalry is certainly obvious:  the girls are competitive.  And things are not improved by the fact that they do not really communicate.  Beena’s final observation that “the work of getting closer, of loving harder, is the work of a whole life” is a good summary of their relationship:  they were not always as close as they should have been and didn’t always love each other as much as they should have. 

I found it difficult to like either sister.  Each tends to let anger affect her relationship with her sister, and both seem rather selfish.  Only after Sadhana dies does Beena try to understand things from her sister’s point of view, and Sadhana’s actions before her death suggest she too was not giving due consideration to her sister’s decisions concerning her son. 

Some of the characters lack sparkle.  The uncle becomes just a male version of the cruel stepmother, and Evan, Beena’s love interest, is just too good to be true.  Even Quinn, Beena’s son, is flat and uninteresting.  This problem probably stems from the fact that we see them only from Beena’s viewpoint and are never given their thoughts and feelings. 

The novel certainly has emotional depth in its showing the love and resentment and competitiveness of sisters, but I found the book unnecessarily lengthy.  The plot seems stretched.  For instance, the mystery around Sadhana’s death is supposed to add interest, but the suspense seems forced.  It takes Libby so long to tell her story!  And her revelation shows behaviour that is unbelievable for someone who supposedly loved Sadhana.  There are other events that serve little purpose other than to emphasize the differences between the lives of the two women.  The sub-story concerning the immigrants was too detailed, veering as it does into the political realm which has little importance in the relationship between the sisters.  Events that should have been detailed, like the meeting between Quinn and Ravi, are only sketched - again, this weakness derives from the point of view chosen for narration.

I read this novel because it appears on the shortlist of Canada Reads 2016 which has the theme of starting over - books about transformation and second chances, stories of people choosing, or being forced, to make major changes in their lives.  I shall be listening to the debates with interest because I find the theme of starting over is really not central in this book.  Though both girls have to move on after deaths and birth in their family, there is little transformation.  There is only the possibility of change in Beena’s life if she accepts “the work of a whole life” and tries harder to be more open in her relationships.

Readings for International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today, January 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, an international memorial day which commemorates the genocide that resulted in the deaths of millions.  Here are some titles from Schatje’s Shelves which fit the category of Holocaust literature and would be appropriate reading for such a sad commemoration. 

  

The Zookeeper's Wife - Diane Ackerman

This is the true story about the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo who saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands.

Katerina - Aharon Appelfeld

This is the story of Katerina, a Polish housekeeper who works for a succession of Jewish families in the years before WW II.  Raised in a culture permeated with virulent anti-Semitism, she must constantly try to overcome the prejudice instilled by her bitter mother, who beat her, and her callous father, who attempted to rape her.

A Time to Choose  - Martha Attema

Sixteen-year-old Johannes van der Meer’s homeland of Holland has been occupied by the Nazis for four years.  While enduring food shortages and nightly air raids, the people of the Netherlands wait patiently for liberation, but for Johannes the struggle to endure is full of bitterness.  The fact that his father is a Nazi collaborator has made outcasts of the entire family.

The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust - Edith Hahn Beer

Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her into a slave labour camp. When she returned home months later, she went underground and then emerged in Munich as Grete Denner. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi Party member who fell in love with her and married her though he knew she was Jewish. Edith recalls a life of constant fear.  She created a remarkable record of survival, saving every document, as well as photographs she took inside labour camps - now part of the permanent collection at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The Seamstress - Sara Tuval Bernstein

She was born into a large family in rural Romania and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren. She defied her father' s orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself expelled from that school when she responded to a priest/teacher' s vicious diatribe against the Jews by hurling a bottle of ink at him.  After a series of incidents that ranged from dramatic escapes to a year in a forced labor detachment, Sara ended up in Ravensbruck, a women' s concentration camp.

The Hiding Place - Corrie Ten Boom

Corrie ten Boom was a leader in the Dutch Underground during WWII. With the aid of her family, she hid scores of Jews from the Nazi invaders. She was arrested along with every member of her family, spending the remaining war years in concentration camps.

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen - Tadeusz Borowski

Tadeusz Borowski’s concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. He describes a world where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles; and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas - John Boyne

Bruno is a nine-year-old German boy whose family moves to Out-With where everyone calls his father Commandant.  Bruno hates his new home which is near a high-wired compound inhabited by sad looking people in striped pajamas. 

Daniel Half Human - David Chotjewitz

At the dawn of Hitler's rise to power in Germany in 1933, Daniel and Armin swear eternal brotherhood by slitting their wrists and mingling their blood.  Then, with the scar on his wrist still healing, Daniel receives some life-altering news: he is half-Jewish and, as such, half-hated by a growing number of neighbours, teachers, and friends. Quickly, he decides to keep his identity a secret, conspiring with Armin to join the Hitler Youth.

The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank

This is the diary of Dutch Jewish teenager, Anne Frank, written in an Amsterdam warehouse where for two years she hid from the Nazis with her family and friends.

Rena's Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz - Rena Kornreich Gelissen

Sent to Auschwitz on the first Jewish transport, Rena Kornreich survived the Nazi death camps for over three years. While there she was reunited with her sister Danka. Each day became a struggle to fulfill the promise Rena made to her mother when the family was forced to split apart, a promise to take care of her sister.

Prisoner B-3087 - Alan Gratz

Yanek Gruener, a Jewish boy in 1930s Poland, is at the mercy of the Nazis who have taken over. Everything he has and everyone he loves have been snatched brutally from him.  And then Yanek himself is taken prisoner and forced from one concentration camp to another, as World War II rages all around him. He encounters evil he could have never imagined.

Holocaust - Gerald Green

This book tells the story of the experience of two German families whose lives intersect at certain points. The Dorfs are "good" Germans, loyal to the new Nazi regime. The Weiss family is Jewish, also seemingly "good" Germans, but doomed under the new regime and its determination to exterminate the Jewish population.

Stones from the River - Ursula Hegi

The protagonist is a woman named Trudi Montag who has dwarfism. The book chronicles her life in a village in Germany in the years before, during, and after World War II.

Schindler’s List - Thomas Keneally

This novel is based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than 1000 Jews from the Nazis at enormous financial and emotional expense.

The Thought of High Windows - Lynne Kositsky

Young, Jewish and on the run from the Nazis, Esther is one of a group of children who manage to flee Germany for Belgium and then France at the beginning of World War II. Since she is from a more traditionally Jewish family, Esther is an outcast among the youngsters in her group, many of whom consider themselves to be "modern Jews." They also tease her about being overweight.

Child of the Holocaust - Jack Kuper

This childhood memoir of the Holocaust follows the travels of eight-year-old Jacob Kuperblum, who comes home one day to find his family and friends gone, rounded up by the Germans only hours earlier

The Kindly Ones - Jonathan Littell

The book is narrated by its fictional protagonist Maximilien Aue, a former SS officer of French and German ancestry who helped to carry out the Holocaust and was present during several major events of World War II.

 Number the Stars - Lois Lowry

Set in Denmark in 1939, this novel gives an account of the fears and anxieties of the Danish people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, during the German occupation.

Daniel’s Story - Carol Matas

Daniel, 14 in 1941, describes his family's sense of belonging in Germany and their refusal to flee their country despite the initial instances of anti-Semitism they experience.

We are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust - Patricia McKissack

Diary entries written by five Holocaust victims document the ordeals suffered in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, Hungary, Belgium, and Holland.

Friedrich - Hans Peter Richter

This is the story of a Jewish boy in Germany during the 1930s.  The book tells about the Holocaust in Germany and the racism against the Jewish people.

Sarah’s Key - Tatiana de Rosnay

In Paris in July of 1942, Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

Mottele - Gertrude Samuels

This true-life story tells of Ukrainian-born Mottele-Mordechai Shlayan--who at age 12 left his childhood behind when his family was murdered by German soldiers. The young violinist joined the Jewish partisans--resistance fighters-- to take revenge on their enemies.

The Reader - Bernhard Schlink

In postwar Germany, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg becomes the lover of Hanna, a woman twice his age. Then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.

Maus  - Art Spiegelman

This graphic novel tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Maus, by portraying the Nazis as cats and the Jews as mice, approaches the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust.

Sophie’s Choice - William Styron

This book concerns the relationships among three people sharing a boarding house in Brooklyn:  Stingo, a young aspiring writer from the South who befriends the Jewish Nathan Landau and his lover Sophie, a Polish, Catholic survivor of the German Nazi concentration camps.  The plot ultimately centers on a tragic decision that Sophie was forced to make on her entry, with her children, into Auschwitz

The Pianist - Wladyslaw Szpilman

On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman played Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor live on the radio as shells exploded outside.  It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: That day, a German bomb hit the station, and Polish Radio went off the air. Though he lost his entire family, Szpilman survived in hiding. In the end, his life was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin Nocturne on a piano found among the rubble.

Night - Elie Wiesel

This is Wiesel's best-selling memoir/novel of his year spent in four concentration camps as a 15-year-old during the Holocaust.

The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

It is 1939 in Nazi Germany.  Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbours during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

Review of "The Piano Maker" by Kurt Palka

3 Stars

In the 1930s, Hélène Giroux arrives on the French Shore in Nova Scotia.  She becomes the pianist and choirmaster of the church in St. Homais.  Her integration into the life of the village is interspersed with flashbacks to her past:  her family’s piano factory in France pre-WWI, the effects of the Great War on her and her family, her immigration to Canada, and her involvement with Nathan Homewood who finds and sells valuable artifacts.  From the beginning it is clear that Hélène has a dark secret in her past, a secret which she ends up having to confront in a very public way.

I love novels with strong female characters.  And Hélène is certainly resilient and resourceful and stoic.  Unfortunately, I sometimes found her just too adept to be believable.  She is skilled at playing, tuning, and building pianos, so I was impressed.  But then she is able to effortlessly master commanding a dog sled team, so much so that she is told by a guide that “’You are good with the dogs.  They like and respect you.  I’ve seen that only once before.’”  Her being hired as part of a Canadian entourage which is touring Europe to promote Canada to potential immigrants seems incredible since she hasn’t ever been to Canada.  Surely Canada had some accomplished pianists who could have represented their country abroad!

The novel starts slowly.  It is only about half way through that I became more engaged.  What bothered me, however, is that information is constantly being withheld.  That is a cheap way to build suspense.  For example, there is a re-trial because of some new evidence, but the reader is not given any specifics of the case or that evidence.  This vagueness becomes annoying, and the support the defendant receives from so many people when they know virtually nothing about the case stretches credulity. 

It takes a while to become accustomed to the style.  To say the prose is straightforward and restrained would almost be an understatement.  Anyone reading the book aloud would read it in a monotone.  People speak as though some “thing that was in the room right now might break.”  The style is appropriate to the muted emotions that pervade.  The only person who seems to possess passion is the assistant Crown attorney when she is cross-examining the defendant. 

The book is not overly long, yet there are events which serve little purpose.  The assistant Crown attorney pushes the judge to let her introduce the new evidence in the case, but then she insists on asking questions and bringing in her first expert witness – none of this questioning advances her case in the least.  Likewise, the arrival of Hélène’s daughter seems irrelevant.  She arrives and then shortly afterwards returns to London.  Claire spends only one night at her mothers, and there are no mother-daughter conversations that address the serious issues faced by Hélène.  Characters appear and then disappear; this is the case with Lady Ashley.  And what is the point of insisting on Hélène’s going to confession when she insists that she does not believe in the sacrament?  The priest advocates hypocrisy? 

This is a quick and easy read.  

Novels Inspired by Fairy Tales

On January 17, I wrote about novels inspired by mythology.  While working on that blog entry, I also found some titles of novels inspired by fairy tales though Schatje’s Shelves has only half a dozen of these:

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire is a retelling of the Cinderella tale and his Mirror, Mirror draws a connection between the poison apple in the original Snow White story and the Borgia family's well-known appetite for poisoning its foes.

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi uses the classic Snow White conceit to explore issues of race in 1950s America. The wicked stepmother banishing her daughter for being too fair is seen in a whole new light.

Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth is a re-imagining of Rapunzel.

Snow White by Donald Barthelme is a satiric modern retelling of the classic fairy tale which provides a commentary on the absurdities and complexities of modern life.  The seven dwarves are men who live communally with Snow White and earn a living by washing buildings and making Chinese baby food.

Pinocchio in Venice by Robert Coover is a comic fable.  Pinocchio, his wish granted, is an aged, much-honoured scholar who returns home to complete a book on the Blue-Haired Fairy and to die: he is returning to wood.

Obviously, my collection is not extensive in this genre.  I did, however, come across a useful website (http://www.endicott-studio.com/jomareadinglists/recommended_fairy_tale_fiction/) which has a comprehensive list of novels, stories, and poetry collections which make use of fairy tales, folktales, and folk ballads, re-envisioned for modern readers.

And on the topic of fairy tales, research shows that some are much older than previously thought:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/20/fairytales-much-older-than-previously-thought-say-researchers?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks

Nominees for the 2016 Edgar Awards

This past Tuesday was the 207^th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe so the Mystery Writers of America announced the Nominees for the 2016 Edgar Allan Poe Awards honouring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2015.

There are six books in the Best Novel category:

The Strangler Vine by M.J. Carter

Set in the wilds of 19^th-century colonial India, this is a historical thriller introducing

William Avery, a young soldier with few prospects except rotting away in campaigns in India, and Jeremiah Blake, a secret political agent, a genius at languages and disguises, disenchanted with the whole ethos of British rule, who cannot resist the challenge of a mystery.  What starts as a wild goose —trying to track down a missing writer who lifts the lid on Calcutta society—becomes very much more sinister as Blake and Avery get sucked into the mysterious Thuggee cult.

The Lady from Zagreb by Philip Kerr

It’s 1942 and a superior has asked homicide detective Bernie Gunther to track down a glamorous German actress believed to be hiding in Zurich.  He takes the job because he has no choice:  the superior is Goebbels himself.  Soon Bernie finds himself involved in something much more sinister. The actress, it emerges, is the daughter of a fanatical Croatian fascist, the sadistic commandant of a notorious concentration camp. And the Swiss police have a cold case that they want Bernie to take a look at, one that seems to have connections to some powerful people back in the Reich.

Life or Death by Michael Robotham

Audie Palmer has spent a decade in prison for an armed robbery in which four people died, including two of the gang. Seven million dollars has never been recovered and everybody believes that Audie knows where the money is. For ten years he has been beaten, stabbed, throttled and threatened almost daily by prison guards, inmates and criminal gangs, who all want to answer this same question, but suddenly Audie vanishes, the day before he's due to be released. Everybody wants to find Audie.

Let Me Die in His Footsteps by Lori Roy

Everyone knows Hollerans don’t go near the Baines family.  It’s been that way since Joseph Carl Baine was hanged in 1936.  But on a dark Kentucky night in 1952 Annie Holleran crosses over into forbidden territory because local superstition says that Annie can see her future in the Baines’ well. What she sees instead, there in the moonlight, is a dead woman. And suddenly the events of 1936, events that have twisted and shaped the lives of Annie and all her kin, are brought back into the present. And if Annie is to save herself, her family and this small Kentucky town, she must face the terrible reality of what happened all those years ago.

Canary by Duane Swierczynski

Honours student Sarie Holland is busted by local police while doing a favour for her boyfriend. Unwilling to betray him but desperate to avoid destroying her future, Sarie becomes a confidential informant. 

Philly narcotics cop, Ben Wildey, hungry for a career-making bust and desperate for results, pushes too hard and inadvertently sends the nineteen-year-old into a death trap, leaving Sarie hunted by crooked cops and killers.

Night Life by David C. Taylor

This historical mystery, set in 1950s New York City, has a protagonist caught between police and Mafia ties.  Detective Michael Cassidy is assigned to the case of Alexander Ingram, a Broadway chorus dancer found tortured and dead in his apartment. Complications grow as other young men are murdered one after the other.  And why are the FBI, the CIA, and the Mafia interested in the death of a Broadway gypsy?

If you are interested in the nominees in the other categories, go to this website:  http://www.theedgars.com/nominees.html#best.