Friday Finds -- Apr 30, 2010

Hosted by MizB at Should be reading, this meme asks you what great books did you hear about/discover this past week?

I am typing up this post with near-droopy eyes. I am sleepy, tired, and aching for my bed, while sitting in my lab trying and failing to work. That's my cue to get hit the sack.

I came across some interesting books this week, the chunk of which are Orange Prize winners, but I'm only mentioning one of them here.

Hidden Wives by Claire Avery

I just noticed this some time back on Shelf Awareness. The book synopsis totally had my attention, and the cover looks so serene and beautiful.

Fifteen-year-old Sara and her beautiful sister, Rachel, are too young to legally drive a car—but are approaching spinsterhood in Utah’s secret Blood of the Lamb polygamist community. Having long since reached the “age of preparedness,” they will soon be married off to much older men selected by the hidden sect’s revered Prophet. As Sara, chosen to become her uncle’s fifth wife, grows more distraught over her impending incestuous marriage, she begins to scrutinize the faith she has followed blindly her entire life. But for Rachel, who will be married to one of the many powerful community leaders vying for her hand, disobeying the Prophet means eternal damnation. Her friendship with the newest member of the community, the young and handsome Luke, starts as an attempt to save his agnostic soul, but ends with the pair falling helplessly in love. When Rachel is forbidden to see him, her absolute faith in the Prophet is severely tested. When Rachel’s future husband is finally announced, violence erupts, and the girls must find the strength to escape the only life they have ever known…before it’s too late.

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Chef by Jaspreet Singh

Also noticed at Shelf Awareness, I was, yet again, attracted by a book on the Indo-Pak feud. I usually follow / read books on other world tragedies, but shy away from what's happening in my own country. Not a good thing!

Kirpal Singh, called Kip, is riding the slow train to Kashmir. With India passing by his window, he reflects on his destination, which is also his past: a military camp to which he has not returned for fourteen years. Kip is shy and not yet twenty when he arrives for the first time at General Kumar’s camp, nestled in the shadow of the Siachen Glacier. At twenty thousand feet, the glacier makes a forbidding battlefield; its crevasses claimed the body of Kip’s father. Kip becomes an apprentice under the camp’s chef, Kishen, a fiery mentor who guides him toward the heady spheres of food and women. In this place of contradictions, erratic violence, and extreme temperatures, Kip learns to prepare local dishes and delicacies from around the globe. Even as months pass, Kip, a Sikh, feels secure in his allegiance to India, firmly on the right side of this interminable conflict. Then, one muggy day, a Pakistani “terrorist” with long, flowing hair is swept up on the banks of the river and changes everything.

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Property by Valerie Martin

The 2003 winner of the Orange Prize, it has everything I am looking for. Has anyone read this?

Set in the surreal heat of the antebellum South during a slave rebellion, Property takes the form of a dramatic monologue, bringing to the page a voice rarely heard in American fiction: the voice of a woman slaveholder. Manon Gaudet is pretty and petulant, self-absorbed and bored. She has come to a sugar plantation north of New Orleans as a bride, bringing with her a prized piece of property, the young slave Sarah, only to see Sarah become her husband's mistress and bear his child. As the whispers of a slave rebellion grow louder and more threatening, Manon speaks to us of her past and her present, her longings and dreams - an uncensored, pitch-perfect voice from the heart of moral darkness.

Check out what others discovered here!

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