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THE CAVES OF PÉRIGORD

Name: THE CAVES OF PÉRIGORD
Author: Martin Walker
ISBN: 0-7432-2284-9

by Martin Walker ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2002

The cave art is great, the rest less gripping.

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A fourth novel from journalist and CNN commentator Walker (The President We Deserve: Bill Clinton, His Rise, Falls and Comebacks, 1996, etc.).

Art historian Lydia Dean, 30, works for a London auction house and is offered by Major Manners, a divorced British officer, a large flat chunk of clay with a marvelously well-painted bull on it, which his father brought from France after WWII. She dates it at 15,000 b.c., obviously from a prehistoric somewhere like Lascaux. The scaled-down bull on this painting, however, is ten or twenty times smaller than a bull in any known cave painting, the smallness and excellence of the image pointing to an advance in that art. Lydia explains to Major Manners that his late father’s rock is of such high historic interest that no auction house would touch it, since it has no provenance and quite possibly will cause an international scandal should France demand it back. And then the rock is burgled from the auction house. Time leaps backward 17,000 years, and we’re with cave folk in the Vézère Valley, where the apprentice young cave painter Deer (he’s great at swimming deer) has fallen for young Little Moon, herself secretly a gifted painter. But Keeper of the Bulls, the top cave painter, wants Little Moon for himself. Then we leap to 1943 and Major Manners’s father, Captain Jack Manners, of the Special Operations Executive, landing in France to help the Resistance, which is disastrously split into political factions that foresee their own postwar battles. Even so, Jack must help blow up bridges and attract Nazi focus away from the forthcoming D-day invasion. Eventually, he stores his large stock of armaments in a cave accidentally reopened by a German mortar shell. Meanwhile, Deer and Little Moon run off and find their own white chalk cave where—freeing art from the shackles of religion—they explore new dimensions in rendering and portraiture.

The cave art is great, the rest less gripping.

Pub Date: March 12, 2002

ISBN: 0-7432-2284-9

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
A GRAVE IN THE WOODS
by Martin Walker

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THE COLDEST CASE
by Martin Walker

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SHOOTING AT CHÂTEAU ROCK
by Martin Walker

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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

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Life lessons.

Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Pub Date: July 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-345-46750-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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THE VEGETARIAN

by Han Kang ; translated by Deborah Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2016

An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.

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In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.

Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.

An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.