12/7/2023 0 Comments Best audible books 2021![]() Darkness becomes their best friend - the only time when they feel secure enough to strip away from their reality and come together as one. Jones explores the forbidden romance between two enslaved boys - Isaiah and Samuel - in the Deep South, who find solace and safety in one another, despite their circumstances and the negative forces trying to tear them apart. Scaachi KoulĪlthough it’s been classified as historical fiction, when it comes down to the heart and soul of this beautifully written debut novel by Robert Jones Jr., it's a love story at its core. What Strange Paradise cements El Akkad as one of the best writers alive today: clairvoyant, heartbreaking, and exceptional. It’s devastating and, at times, hopeful, and even when his characters act without compassion, El Akkad always rights the ship back toward tenderness. The story is brutal but compassionate, one that humanizes migrants so often stripped of their humanity as soon as they become “migrants.”Įl Akkad is infuriating because his prose is perfect, and his characters are more vivid than some people I know in real life. Every word feels essential, and every chapter is quietly devastating until you reach the novel’s conclusion, a chapter that I’m confident every reader will remember for the rest of their lives. In a little more than 250 pages, El Akkad manages to write a book about family, masculinity, migration, language, humanity (or a lack thereof), and innocence. The chapters alternate between Amir’s life before getting to the island and the journey he and Vӓnna take toward safety. ![]() He’s rescued by Vӓnna, a local teenage girl, who seems to feel her own kind of displacement even at home. ![]() This novel follows a 9-year-old Syrian boy, Amir, who has washed up as the sole survivor of a refugee boat that sank near a small island. I loved spending time in Rooney’s characters’ heads - they’re frustrating and funny, petty and loving, fallible and human. To the extent the book is “about” anything, both Alice and Eileen have love interests to me, though, they’re the least interesting bits. But I found the letters, loving exchanges between friends with (in typical Rooney fashion) major class differences and positionalities, to be lovely, moving, and even profound. To some readers (at least, some of the friends I’ve had feverish debriefs with after we devoured the book), the emails are self-indulgent drags I know at least two people who skimmed them. These emails, placed interstitially as chapters throughout the novel - which is otherwise written in a distant third person - are the only times we can really get in these womens’ heads. This time, we meet Alice, a young Irish novelist, whose long emails exchanged with best friend Eileen reflect her anxieties and ambivalences about literary fame, modern culture, impending social collapse, and the role of religion in their lives. Those familiar with Rooney’s last two books, Normal People and Conversations with Friends - both since adapted for the screen, and both hailed as landmarks of millennial fiction (whatever that really is) - will find more classic Rooneyisms in Beautiful World: deceptively simple sentences that are a real pleasure to read, skinny, pale, and brooding characters figuring out adulthood in modern Ireland.
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