My favorite “reads” of 2009

Here are my favorite books of 2009; most of them were published before 2009 but these were the books I read and treasured last year. Choosing my list makes me realize that I particularly value reading about certain themes (family, politics, power), certain genre (history, mystery, suspense), and certain styles or moods (noir, urban, ironic). With my proclivities declared, these are my personal “bests” of last year.

Two thrillers which were published in 2009 explore the scourge of racism and how it stunts individuals and warps societies. Black Water Rising by Attica Locke is set in 1980s Houston where Jay Porter is a struggling lawyer, expectant father, a former sixties radical scarred by his run-ins with the law, and a black man living precariously in a racist society. An evening out with his wife propels Jay to a chance rescue and a reluctant involvement in a lethal mystery involving Houston’s most powerful people. Malia Nunn’s A Beautiful Place to Die takes place several decades and half-a-world away, in South Africa in 1952 as apartheid is being legislated into official law. Police detective Emanuel Cooper, a man with a mysterious past, is called to investigate the murder of a police chief with godlike powers in the remote South African countryside. Strong plots, menacing atmospherics, and compelling characters make these strong debut novels. I hope to hear (actually read) from these accomplished writers again soon.

Perhaps because my father is a veteran, I find myself increasingly drawn to books about World War II in Europe. William I Hitchcock, currently a professor of history at Temple University, has written The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe. Bitter Road is a readable and comprehensive history of the war as seen through the sufferings of the civilian populations in France, Belgium, Holland, Eastern Europe, and Germany caught by Nazi occupation and battleground Europe, beginning with D-Day and through liberation and the Displaced Persons camps set up by the Allies in the aftermath of the carnage. If you’ve ever wondered why post-war Europe has evolved into the European Union, tilts toward social democracies, and has opposed American wars in Vietnam and Iraq, Hitchcock’s tragic and moving history will be illuminating.

The Bernie Gunther novels of British thriller writer Philip Kerr follow Berlin policeman Bernie Gunther, a no-nonsense detective in the American tradition of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, through the rise of the Nazis, the debacle of the Third Reich, and the post-war occupation of Germany. I first read Kerr’s 2009 A Quiet Flame which finds Gunther arriving in Juan Peron’s Argentina in 1950 along with other wanted SS officers, including Adolf Eichmann. Soon Gunther’s background as a former homicide detective embroils him in a case involving the murder of one young girl and the disappearance of another. These cases thrust Gunther into the cross-hairs of Peron’s dictatorship even as they bear a disturbing similarity to unsolved murders from Berlin in 1932; murders that took place as the Nazis were taking power in Germany. A Quiet Flame is the fifth novel in Kerr’s series. I quickly found and read the previous four: March Violets, The Pale Criminal, A German Requiem, and The One from the Other. I have found them all compelling as solid mysteries set against the horrific spectacle of a society’s descent into collective madness and mass murder.

The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean draws us back to the horrors of the Eastern front juxtaposed to the glories of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage (art) museum. The novel’s heroine Marina survived the siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) while serving the Hermitage’s treasures, first as docent, then packer, guard, and caretaker as the Germans encircled and attacked the city. After the war, Marina and husband Dmitri reunited and emigrated to the U.S. Now elderly and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, Marina’s current life in San Francisco has slipped away and she is back in the Hermitage, caring for the paintings, surviving cold, hunger and shelling. Only her love of the paintings that hung on the walls before the war, fervently memorized and still recalled with precision and passion, seem to now keep her alive. Madonnas is a poignant story and a testament to the power of art.

The aftermath of World War II sets the somber tone of austerity and decline in the Sarah Waters novel, The Little Stranger. England is still recovering from the war when the local village doctor is called out to the remote Hundreds Hall to attend to a sick servant. So begins Dr. Farraday’s immersion into the lives of the aristocratic Ayres family: widowed Mrs. Ayres; son Rodney, crippled when his RAF plane crashed; and older sister Caroline, destined by demographics and fate to be a spinster. Then there is Hundred Hall itself – once a splendid manor house, now decaying from neglect and lack of funds. Baffling and inexplicable events soon target Hundreds Hall and its inhabitants as Farraday marshals the forces of science and reason to fight an invisible foe. Author Sarah Waters has concocted a chilling and disturbing atmosphere of claustrophobia and dread. By novel’s end, she has pulled the rug of your assumptions as a reader out from under you. I look forward to reading her again.

Two other veteran novelists have also written stories about families and relationships that I especially enjoyed. Alice Hoffman writes books about families, especially the bonds between mothers, daughters, and sisters. The Story Sisters is certainly about these ties. Elv, May, and Claire are young sisters who are inseparable until “the summer of the gypsy moths when everything changed.” The trauma of those days will strain the Story family for years but the bonds will remain. Alice Hoffman has a gift for blending the prosaic and the mystical into dramatic stories that explore the most profound issues: love, death, evil and redemption.
Eleanor Lipman has a gift for creating smart urbane stories about New Yorkers as if Jane Austen and Carrie Bradshaw were co-writing novels together. When Henry Archer pens a note of condolence to his ex-wife who has now been widowed, he unleashes a series of events that will transform his life. Best yet, Henry’s ex-wife and newly re-found daughter will benefit from Henry’s generosity in this witty comedy of manners. The Family Man features the sweet-tempered Henry and New York at its most glamorous; it is frothy, fun, and charming.

Another smart and sophisticated woman, Alice Steinbach, left her career as a reporter at the Baltimore Sun and lived in Europe for a year, open to people, places and adventures. Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman is part memoir with some literary references and a beautifully written and sometimes reflective travel tale. Steinbach’s stay in Paris and travels in Italy are filled with engaging adventures and people and a joy to read.

I look forward to many more memorable “reads” in 2010 . . .