Minnesota book events, a review of "The loneliness of Sonia and Sunny" and summer recs
Book of the week
'Land' by Maggie O’Farrell
What is the ancestral story that has come down through your family’s generations? The perilous voyage to America? The struggle to make it in this new land? The family members who stayed behind? Those stories become part of the mythology and the identity of who we are.
Novelist Maggie O’Farrell, whose novels “Hamnet” and “The Marriage Portrait” were global bestsellers, writes in the author’s note of her new book, “Land”: “Every family has its myths. In mine, we were told that one of our antecedents had worked on the first maps of Ireland.”
Her sweeping new novel is an exploration of how mapmaking, love and mysticism shape a family. She adds in that author’s note: “It’s a novel I’ve always wanted to write.”
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🤔 What's the newsroom reading?
“People may love the high snow mountains, but the mountains did not love people. If love were an insignificant matter to the mountains, well, so were hate and fear. To be neither loved nor hated, to learn one’s unimportance, to make oneself beside the point, was surely a relief”
I took a picture of that quote while reading Kiran Desai’s “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.” It’s just one of several in my camera roll.
I read in the New York Times that it took Desai 20 years to write this book, and I assume it’s because of sentences like those ones. There are countless lines in this book so precise and beautiful, I imagine her working on each one for weeks.
The story traces two Indian families and their children, Sonia and Sunny, through the late 1990s and early 2000s, to the U.S. and back again, with a surrealism that becomes more and more prominent through the novel.
This book did not come easily to me. It’s overdue at the library (don't tell)! It is dense and sprawling. An early narrative about a harmful relationship was hard for me to push through, but it was well worth it for the beauty and sharpness of the full story. I selfishly wish more writers could spend 20 years on a book like this.
— Emily Haavik, APM Reports
📰 Bite-sized Minnesota book news
Brendan Stermer of East Grand Forks, Minn., wrote to the Thread about a new ambient album he worked on that came out on Friday. Of Modern Poetry by Andy Stermer is a series of ambient compositions inspired by a selection of poetic masterpieces from the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries.
Summer is a great time to get lost in a good story, discover a new author, or tackle that book on your nightstand. MPR News host Angela Davis talks with two booksellers about their recommendations.
Award-winning documentary filmmaker Larkin McPhee tells a story of her brother Charles McPhee in her book “I’ll See You In My Dreams: A Sister's Memoir.”
A biography of Hannibal Lecter. A meditation on trees. A memoir by a child prodigy violinist. A treatise on the way we poop. These are just a few of the nonfiction books our NPR colleagues are enjoying.
