MannBooker prize

Book 27 for 2026: “Mother Mary Comes To Me”, Arundhati Roy

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Although Roy has written numerous books including the Booker Prize winning “The God of Small Things”, this is her first memoir. While the prose is easy to read, the subject matter is often heart wrenching. Roy’s mother, a single parent (divorced) in India when this was totally unacceptable, accomplishes remarkable achievements including the founding of a very successful school while acting what often seems very cruel as a mother to her two children, Arundhati and her brother. The mother’s treatment of Arundhati is so disturbing that when she is just 18 and in her third year of architecture school in Delhi, she quits going home to Kerala to see her mother and quits communicating with her for seven years. Yet, she admits to loving her mother irrationally.

Arundhati becomes involved in documentary film making, sometimes as writer and sometimes as an actor in the films. In addition to her activities as a writer and film maker, she becomes an ardent political activist against rising Hindu nationalism. She provides details of spending time with hunted activists in the jungle, getting arrested, and even tried for writing a piece the judiciary considered insulting. This is an unusually honest and intimate memoir about her family, her mother, and life and politics in India.

Book 26 for 2026: “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny”, Kiran Desai

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By an author whose previous novel won the Booker Prize, this novel was long listed for the most recent Booker Prize. Although 670 pages long, it did not take me as long as I expected to read this because I found I kept going because I wanted to know what was going to occur. It is the tale of two families and two young people, both of whom have studied and lived in the United States. The background city for both families is the Indian city of Allahabad. The two, retired, family patriarchs get together frequently to play chess even though their families are sometimes rivals for status and influence.. The two do not live far apart and all the older family members know each other, including those who have moved away to Delhi and other places. The youngest members do not know each other and accidentally meet on an overnight train. At that point they do not know that their two grandparents had tried to match make them in an arranged marriage. Later, this becomes an embarrassment.

Sonia wants to become a novelist and is attending college at a small liberal arts college in New England where she becomes involved with a famous but cruel artist who becomes obsessed with her and whose influence she has become unable to escape, initially literally and later psychologically. Sunny lives and wants to stay in NYC to escape the overbearing influence of his mother and the violence between her and the two brothers of her deceased husband.

Not wanting to reveal all the complexities of the lives of these two young people who come to love each other but whose lives keep tearing them apart and the challenges they face as they try to make sense of their lives, I will simply say this is a novel I recommend. The reader learns a lot of about Indian culture and its variances, about the huge differences among different parts of India, e.g. Goa and Delhi, but also how universal family and personal struggles really are.

Books 12 and 13 for 2026: “The Women of Troy” and “The Voyage Home”, Pat Barker

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After getting started with the first one, I realized the other was a sequel. Later, I learned this is a trilogy but the library did not have the first book of it. This British author won the Booker Prize for another historical trilogy, “The Regeneration Trilogy.” These two books are obviously about the Trojan War. Although “The Women of Troy” begins with Achilles’ son stuck in the Trojan horse, young (16), scared and concerned about how he will live up to his father’s name, most of the book occurs after the Greeks have won the war, Troy is destroyed, most of the Trojan men and boys, including infants, have been killed and the Greeks have built a village below what is left of Troy because they cannot go home. The constant gale winds make it impossible for their fleet of ships to travel. They have been stuck there for years, have become restive, often violent, bored. The women of Troy, even the princesses and other noble women are now slaves to Greek leaders. Most of the book is told from the viewpoint of several women including, Briseis, who once belonged to Achilles and is pregnant with his child but now married to the leader Acinus. Cassandra, the murdered Trojan king’s daughter, has been forced to live with Agamemnon, She has vowed revenge and has prophesied than both of them will die once they reach his Greek kingdom. This novel centers on what life is like for these Trojan women who are the spoils of war, living as slaves in the Greek camp.

“The Voyage Home” centers on the trip from Troy back to Mycenae and the immediate aftermath of their arrival home. It is mostly told from the viewpoint of Ritsa, a healer who has been assigned to watch over Cassandra even though she belongs as a slave to another person, a doctor. Because of her assignment to Cassandra and healing abilities, she has higher status than many others. Part of the story is also told from the viewpoint of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, the queen who has been in charge of Mycenae during his ten year absence. For readers who know many of the different myths surrounding her, this novel has a totally different take. It is from the viewpoint of a woman still devastated by the death of her daughter with Agamemnon whom he killed because he was told the gods would give him and his soldiers a good wind to get to Troy if he sacrificed her. He deceived Clytemnestra to achieve this sacrifice and she has never recovered from this loss.

If you enjoy Greek mythes and the different retellings of them and want to experience a different perspective, mostly told from the viewpoint of female characters, you will enjoy these books. I read both in just a few day; I became so interested.

One Book a Week-16, “The Promise”, Damon Galgut

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Winner of the 2021 Booker Prize, this novel illustrates the dismal consequences of colonialism and racism. South Africa before and after apartheid comes alive in this story about an Afrikaner family whose matriarch dies young enough to leave her husband with three children, only one of whom is old enough to be on his own. In her dying, she returns to her Jewish roots much to the horror of her husband and many others. Her youngest daughter overhears her dying wish which her husband promises to fulfill even though he has no intention of doing so. This remains an underlying thread, the promise which this daughter never forgets.

The difficult, often prejudiced and unequal, relations between the races underpins the actions of most of the characters, leading a few to greater humanity and kindness, but most into lives of loss, disappointment, and anger.

One Book a Week-9: “Flights”, Olga Tokarczuk

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How to describe this unusual novel? Here’s a possible list:

-No over all plot.

-Several stories about individuals scattered throughout, e.g. read about a person and event, then many pages later back to that person and the consequences of the event(s).

-Short philosophical musings/vignettes interspersed here and there. One reviewer counted 116.

-One common theme relates to the title, Flights, in that in most of the “stories” people are traveling or have traveled on quests for “meaning” or escape from a cumbersome reality.

I learned the following from reading this book:

-Per his request Chopin’s heart was taken from his body. His body was buried in Paris but his sister secretly transported his heart in a jar of special preservation liquid back to Poland, the land of his birth.

-A Dutch anatomist discovered the Achilles tendon after dissecting his own amputated leg.

-Plastination is the method used in anatomy to preserve bodies and body parts. Several characters in the book make their living or are obsessed with this process.

This is not a book for those who prefer relaxing reading or for the “faint of heart”.

Note: The author won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2018. This book won the Mann Booker for translated literature from all over earth in 2018. I plan to read another of her books–have now read two of them–but since the other one in English is 1000 pages long rather guess it might take more than a week for me to read it. This is actually the 11th book I have read to date in 2023 but did not start blogging about them so two are missing in the blog posts,

One Book a Week-8:”The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”, Shehan Karunatilaka

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The Booker (previously Mann-Booker) Prize winner in 2022, this book is filled with gruesome events and dark, graveyard humor. Since if takes place in Sri Lanka, if you know little about Sri Lanka history in the last 50 years, you might want to do a quick review so you know about the civil unrest and the various Sri Lankan ethnicities, e.g. Tamil, Sinhalese, Burgher. Written from the viewpoint of the title character, a war photographer, after being murdered, he resides in a sort of celestial purgatory while he tries to save his two best friends and male lover who are still alive and discover the identity of his murderer. He is given seven moons in which to accomplish this task. Not a book for the faint of heart, it contains gruesome war and torture details but frequently is also quite funny and filled with “truths”. In an interview the author explained, “Sri Lankans specialize in gallows humor; it is our coping mechanism.” As I read, I underlined passages I found especially meaningful, profound, or fascinating. Here are some of them:

“-There are only two gods worth worshipping. Chance and electricity.

-Hell is all around us and it is in session as we speak.

-Evil is not what we should fear. Creatures with power acting in their own best interests; that is what should make us shudder.

-There has never been an era of peace in all recorded history.

-Interest in fair play and democracy are not always the same thing.

-I have a superb name for God. Whoever.

-Laws are needed because made-up religions are not enough.

-The universe is nothing but mathematics and probabilities…we are nothing more than accidents of our births.

-They say the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

-Your race, your school, your family will dictate how the dice of life will fall for you.

-All religions keep the poor docile and the rich in their castles.

-People are ok if bad things happen to people who are not them.

-Do not be afraid of demons; it is the living we should fear.

-I have thought long and there are no answers. There is only this. There is only now.

-We must all find a pointless cause to fight for, or why bother with breath?

-The kindest thing you can say about life. It’s not for nothing.

-I cannot understand why humans destroy when they can create. Such a waste.”

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One Book a Week-6: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

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Even though I try to keep up-to-date on Nobel Prize authors, I was unfamiliar with this one until I saw this book on a table at Barnes and Noble. First, the title intrigued me; then the blurb added more mystery. I bought it–so glad I did. Once I started, there was no stopping–fascinated.

Written in first person, it is contains the thoughts and experiences as related by an older woman. Once a bridge engineer, she now resides in the Polish countryside near the Czech border. Winters are harsh; most of the people who live there live there only in summer. She stays and cares for the houses of the summer people while they are gone all winter. She also teaches English part-time to children at the local school. Her passions are animals and astrology. Even though a science type, she is totally convinced that astrology contains life’s secrets even to the point of predicting the time and events of a person’s death. The book is also a murder mystery with an ending totally different from what I expected.

Now I am going to purchase the author’s book, Flights, which won the Mann Booker prize in 2018.

A Way to Live Your Life

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I just finished “Slow Man”, the latest book by the Nobel and two times Mann Booker winner, J.M. Coetzee.  How I ever managed to read so many books and miss his remains a mystery to me.  This particular passage stuck me as very instructional and how I hope I have lived and continue to live:

“So that someone, somewhere might put you in a book.  So that someone might want to put you in a book.  Someone, anyone–not just me.  So that you may be worth putting in a book…Live like a hero.  That is what the classics teach us.  Be a main character.  Otherwise what is life for?”