A freelance journalist and his brother get caught up in a geopolitical hornet’s nest when they travel to their ancestral land of Somalia.
A seasoned war correspondent based in New York City, Malik knows a thing or two about global hot spots. But even with stints in the Congo and Afghanistan under his belt, nothing prepares him for the surreal experience of landing in Mogadiscio, home to human traffickers and pirates alike. Fortunately, he is not alone. His Somali-born father-in-law, Jeebleh, has accompanied him, hoping to smooth the younger man’s way, and introduce him to some locals who will help him find sources for his stories, and keep him safe. Through Jeeblah he meets Bile, an ailing physician who, like Jeeblah, served time in jail as a political dissident. Bile lives with his much younger lover, Cambara, a situation that has not gone unnoticed by the ostensibly pious Union of Islamic Courts. Meanwhile, Malik’s bother Ahl has flown to the autonomous Somali state of Puntland to track down his teenage stepson Taxliil, who ran away from his Minnesota home with some other boys to join the Shabaab group of Islamic fighters. Desperate to bring the kid home before he martyrs himself, Ahl pleads with Malik to interview a dangerous local kingpin in hopes of gleaning info on Taxliil’s whereabouts. Risking his life, and those of the people around him, Malik discovers the symbiotic relationship between pirates and Islamic extremists, as well as the surprising origins of the piracy epidemic. Things get riskier still when U.S.-backed Ethiopian forces invade in an attempt to drive out the Islamist leadership. Harrowing without resorting to sensationalism, this highly topical final volume in Farah’s Past Imperfect trilogy (Knots, 2007, etc.) should burnish his well-deserved reputation. It is dense, complex stuff, but his brave and imperfect characters are a pleasure to follow.
Gripping but utterly humane thriller set in one of the least-understood regions on earth.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59448-816-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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