Memoirs of a Board Gamer

In the nine breathtaking stories that make up her celebrated tenth collection, Alice Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory, and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.

A tough-minded housekeeper jettisons the habits of a lifetime because of a teenager’s practical joke. A college student visiting her brassy, unconventional aunt stumbles on an astonishing secret and its meaning in her own life. An incorrigible philanderer responds with unexpected grace to his wife’s nursing-home romance. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best, tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.

From Booklist
Hamill, a well-known journalist, is also a popular novelist; his 1997 novel Snow in August appeared on best-seller lists (as well as the Booklist Editors' Choice list for that year). His remarkably imaginative new novel is an exciting mix of realism and fantasy as he follows the exploits of Cormac O'Connor, born into Ulster peasantry in intolerant eighteenth-century Ireland. O'Connor is painted as a traditional mythical hero who is oversized in strength and character, and who actually carries a sword with great protective powers. In fact, the whole novel springs from Celtic mythology, for O'Connor's parents adhere neither to Protestant ways nor to Roman Catholic beliefs but to old Celtic religious practices. Both of them are killed--in separate circumstances--by the cruel Protestant earl of Warren, who, not caring at all, then seeks better fortune in New York City. O'Connor, vowing to avenge his mother's and father's brutal deaths, tracks the earl to the great American metropolis. Events come to pass wherein O'Connor is given the gift of eternal life, but for the blessing to work, he must never leave the island of Manhattan or he will die and never pass into the "Otherworld" of Celtic mythology. So, at this point O'Connor's story becomes the story of New York City, from the mid-1700s to the present, as he "absorbs its life, its menace, it cruelties, its toughness, its joys and sorrows and beauties." Hamill writes with great detail, which adds texture and spice to, rather than impeding, the narrative's swift movement. As always, he is perfectly enjoyable to read for his great felicity of style (obviously derived from his years as a journalist) as well as his originality of plot. This absolutely embracing novel is certain to hit the best-seller lists.
Brad Hooper Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

"A fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems -- the kind of book Salinger's Fanny might have written about herself ten years later, if she had spent those ten years in Hell." -- Robert Scholes, The New York Times Book Review.

"By turns funny, harrowing, crude, ardent and artless. Its most notable quality is an astonishing immediacy, like a series of snapshots taken at high noon." -- Time.

"A special poignance... a special force, a humbling power, because it shows the vulnerability of people of hope and good will." -- Newsweek. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
Albom, newspaper columnist and radio broadcaster, is, of course, best known as the author of the astonishingly successful Tuesdays with Morrie (1997). This is his first novel. With an appropriately fable-like tone, Albom tells the story of Eddie, "an old man with a barrel chest." But for us, Eddie's story "begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun"--at Ruby Pier, an amusement park by the sea, where he spent most days, for despite his advanced years, he worked as a maintenance man on the rides. He dies on his eighty-third birthday trying to save a little girl from an accident. Eddie wakes up in heaven, where he is informed that "there are five people you meet in heaven. Each . . . was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth." And, not surprisingly, this is what the novel is about: Eddie coming to appreciate his 83 years of mortal life; the novel's "point" is that apparently insignificant lives do indeed have their own special kind of significance. A sweet book that makes you smile but is not gooey with overwrought sentiment. Brad Hooper Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved