Sybil's List: February 2021

A stunning debut in which the narrator is a young gay boy living in poverty in Glasgow with his alcoholic mother. It won the Booker Prize.

Written in the form of a tv script, this is a witty, entertaining, and deeply insightful study of racial identity and of the ways Asian Americans are made to feel alienated in our culture.

When a couple from Manhattan rent a house in the Hamptons for a summer vacation are asked for refuge from the Black owners of the house, the narrative veers into a frightening future.

Nothing is what it seems in this mesmerizing tale of two sisters who come with their mother to a deserted summer house outside of London.

The prodigal son who is one of the fascinating characters in Robinson’s Gilead trilogy moves from sin to redemption in this novel of spiritual awakening.

The last of Smith’s intensely contemporary narratives set within a year’s seasons encapsules current events as reflected in the lives of disparate characters reunited from the previous novels.

The six short stories and the knockout title novella in this stunning collection illuminate the daily tensions and injustices that confront Blacks in contemporary society.

The unlikely relationship of two gay men – Benson is Black, and Ben is Japanese -- is threatened when Ben’s mother flies from Tokyo to Houston just as her son leaves to see his estranged father in Osaka.

A journalist and first-time mother who moves out of her beloved Brooklyn to a college community hires a student as a babysitter and creates a false feeling of friendship between them.

Dramatic events during the 1918 flu epidemic and its impact on the patients and the staff of an overcrowded Dublin hospital are seen through the eyes of a valiant nurse in the maternity ward.

A nurse in a neonatal ward in a London hospital faces exhaustion and burnout as she cannot prevent the death of terminally ill babies.

A middle-aged Zimbabwean woman who has failed to achieve the promise of her ambitious youth takes a physical and psychological journey back to her ancestral homeland.

A long and loving marriage undergoes tension when the couples’ son joins a radical cult that poses danger to their Minnesotan community.

A little-known chapter of English history, when a potential atomic attack was simulated during a civil defense training base, casts a long shadow over the lives of two men who met there.

What seems like a doomed quest by a woman determined to observe the last migration of Arctic terns before climate change destroys them ends on a measure of hope and resilience.

Fantasy fiction set in an eerie underwater realm that may be the result of climate change.

In another of French’s excellent crime novels, a moral crisis afflicts a retired American policeman when he retires to a remote Irish village.

The multi narrators of this provocative debut novel set in the West Bank dramatize the complex issues that fuel the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. (Feb. pub)

Exceptionally informative, brilliantly insightful, eloquent; need more be said?

Subtitled The Origins of our Discontent, this is a brilliant exploration of the ways that racial prejudice is embedded in our society.

This is the best and most important biography of Sylvia Plath, written with mesmerizing intensity. With access to new archival information. Clark securely places Plath in her rightful place in the literary pantheon.

The Native American tribal leader and his visionary brother lost their attempts to unite tribes into a confederacy that could challenge the colonists who were seizing their ancestral lands.