The Known World (Pulitzer Prize, NBCC Award, and International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner)

The Known World is a historical novel by American author Edward P. Jones (1951- ); published in 2003 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, a National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (the world's literary prize with the largest purse) in 2005.

Plot Summary [1]

Henry Townsend is born a slave, but dies as a prosperous slave owner, leaving his widow Caldonia a significant legacy to deal with. Like his father Augustus, Henry is extraordinarily talented and uses his gifts to buy his freedom. Unlike his father, Henry accepts that slavery is legal and purchases a number of slaves from his ex-master William Robbins, the first of whom, cruel Moses, he makes overseer. The revelation of this situation causes a break between father and son, healed only as Henry nears death.

Robbins, the largest and most powerful landowner in Manchester County, Virginia, is unhappily married to a white woman and involved for the second time with a slave, whom he comes to love dearly. He dotes on his black children, providing for their education from a black female teacher, Fern Elston, which connects them with Henry and Caldonia during their student years. Robbins also provides ongoing advice to Henry on the obligations and demands of slave owning, and controls who will serve as sheriff in the county.

John Skiffington becomes sheriff after his long-tenured predecessor disappoints Robbins. John, a fervent Bible reader, is personally determined not to hold slaves, but dedicated to maintaining a social institution he believes both civil and divine laws bless and guarantee. He and his wife, Winifred, are given Minerva as wedding present by his cousin Counsel. They feel Minerva will fare worse in any situation other than remaining with them, and they treat her as a daughter. As Minerva nears adulthood, John is ashamed and fearful to find himself lusting after her.

John's duties are few in this peaceful county until slaves begin disappearing from Caldonia's plantation. John suspects that the overseer Moses is involved, as indeed he is. Moses is determined to marry his widowed mistress and sends his wife and son away, in the company of the crazy slave Alice. The sheriff suspects Moses has murdered them and organizes an intensive search. John's fortunes further decline when his slave patrols illegally strip Augustus of his freedom and sell hip to a wandering speculator. Finally sold on the Georgia/Florida border, Augustus is murdered by his new master as he begins the long walk back north. Moses oversteps his bounds with Caldonia, realizes his plans have failed, and he also takes flight.

Realizing Robbins has lost faith in him, the sheriff discovers where Moses must be hiding, and while trying to shake off the agony of a toothache in order to do his sworn duty, he sets off with his deputy/cousin to Mildred's home. Moses is there, taken in by Mildred, who stands with a rifle and refuses to surrender him. Pain prevents John from keeping his usual calm, civil demeanor, and he lashes out at the poor widow Mildred. John accidentally shoots Mildred dead, and is in turn gunned down by Counsel, who believes he has found the treasure that will restore his lost fortunes. Moses surrenders to Counsel, who intends to blame the two dead people for each other's murder. Moses is taken back to town, and savagely hobbled by the patrollers en route, to prevent him from ever wandering off again. Moses lives out his declining days cared for by the new overseer's cripple wife, for whose miscarriage he is responsible.

Robbins's white and black daughters meet after he suffers a stroke. Winifred and Minerva move to Philadelphia, but there they become parted. Caldonia remarries and remains with Robbins's black son, Louis Cartwright, on the plantation. Caldonia also learns from her brother Calvin, who has moved to Washington, D.C., that Celeste, Jamie, and Alice did not perish in the Manchester woods as many people thought, but are flourishing in the big city on the eve of the Civil War. Alice, no longer a crazy woman, has created two magnificent pieces of art depicting life in Manchester County and on the Townsend plantation.

[1] http://litsum.com/known-world

The Time Traveler's Wife (the Exclusive Books Boeke Prize and a British Book Award winner)

The Time Traveler's Wife is the debut novel of American author Audrey Niffenegger (1963- ), published in 2003 and won the Exclusive Books Boeke Prize and a British Book Award (millions of copies sold in the United States and the United Kingdom).

Plot summary [1]

Using alternating first-person perspectives, the novel tells the stories of Henry DeTamble (born 1963), a librarian at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and his wife, Clare Abshire (born May 24, 1971), an artist who makes paper sculptures. Henry has a rare genetic disorder, which comes to be known as Chrono-Displacement, that causes him to involuntarily travel through time. When 20-year-old Clare meets 28-year-old Henry at the Newberry Library in 1991 at the opening of the novel, he has never seen her before, although she has known him most of her life.

Henry begins time traveling at the age of five, jumping forward and backward relative to his own timeline. When he leaves, where he goes, or how long his trips will last are all beyond his control. His destinations are tied to his subconscious—he most often travels to places and times related to his own history. Certain stimuli such as stress can trigger Henry's time traveling; he often goes jogging to keep calm and remain in the present. He also searches out pharmaceuticals in the future that may be able to help control his time traveling. He also seeks the advice of a geneticist, Dr. Kendrick. Henry cannot take anything with him into the future or the past; he always arrives naked and then struggles to find clothing, shelter and food. He amasses a number of survival skills including lock-picking, self-defense and pickpocketing. Much of this he learns from older versions of himself.

Once their timelines converge "naturally" at the library—their first meeting in his chronology—Henry starts to travel to Clare's childhood and adolescence in South Haven, Michigan, beginning in 1977 when she is six years old. On one of his early visits (from her perspective), Henry gives her a list of the dates he will appear and she writes them in a diary so she will remember to provide him with clothes and food when he arrives. During another visit, he inadvertently reveals that they will be married in the future. Over time they develop a close relationship. At one point, Henry helps Clare frighten and humiliate a boy who abused her. Clare is last visited in her youth by Henry in 1989, on her eighteenth birthday, during which they make love for the first time. They are then separated for two years until their meeting at the library.

Clare and Henry marry, but Clare has trouble bringing a pregnancy to term because of the genetic anomaly Henry may presumably be passing on to the fetus. After five miscarriages, Henry wishes to save Clare further pain and has a vasectomy, not before impregnating Clare for the sixth time which results in another miscarraige. Clare is impregnated for the seventh time and gives birth to their daughter Alba when Henry time travels forward in time when he is 33 to Clare's bedside. Alba is diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement as well but, unlike Henry, she has some control over her destinations when she time travels. Before she is born, Henry travels to the future and meets his ten-year-old daughter on a school field trip and learns that he died when she was five years old.

When he is 43, during what is to be his last year of life, Henry time travels to a Chicago parking garage on a frigid winter night where he is unable to find shelter. As a result of the hypothermia and frostbite he suffers, his feet are amputated when he returns to the present. Henry and Clare both know that without the ability to escape when he time travels, Henry will certainly die within his next few jumps. On New Year's Eve 2006 Henry time travels into the middle of the Michigan woods in 1984 and is accidentally shot by Clare's brother, a scene foreshadowed earlier in the novel. Henry returns to the present and dies in Clare's arms.

Clare is devastated by Henry's passing. She later finds a letter from Henry asking her to "stop waiting" for him, but which describes a moment in her future when she will see him again. The last scene in the book takes place when Clare is 82 years old and Henry is 43. She is waiting for Henry, as she has done most of her life, and when he arrives they clasp each other for what may or may not be the last time.

[1] Wikipedia.org

Gilead (Pulitzer Prize & National Book Critics Circle Award winner)

Gilead is a novel written by American author Marilynne Robinson (1943- ), published in 2004 and won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Gilead

Plot [1]: The book is an account of the memories and legacy of John Ames as he remembers his experiences of his father and grandfather to share with his son. All three men share a vocational lifestyle and profession as Congregationalist ministers in Gilead, Iowa. Ames' father was a Christian pacifist, but his grandfather was a radical abolitionist who carried out guerrilla actions with John Brown before the American Civil War, served as a chaplain with the Union forces in that war, and incited his congregation to join up and serve in it; as Ames remarks, "He preached this town into the war." The grandfather returned from the war maimed with the loss of his right eye. Hereafter he was given the distinction that his right side was holy or sacred in someway, that it was his link to commune with God and he was notorious for a piercing stare with the one eye he had left. The grandfather's other eccentricities are recalled in his youth; the practice of giving all and any of the family's possessions to others and preaching with a gun in a bloodied shirt. The true character and intimate details of the father are revealed in context with anecdotes regarding the grandfather, and mainly in the search for the grave of the grandfather. One event that is prevalent in the narrators orations is the memory of receiving communion of sorts from his father at the remains of a Baptist church, burned by lightning. Ames recalls this as an invented memory adapted from his father breaking an ashy biscuit for lunch. In the course of the story, it quickly emerges that Ames's first wife, Louisa, died while giving birth to their daughter, Rebecca (a.k.a. Angeline) who also died soon after. Ames reflects on the death of his family as the source of great sorrow for many years with special reference to the growing family of his dear and lifelong friend, Boughton. Many years later Ames meets his second wife, Lila, a less-educated woman who appears in church. Eventually Ames baptizes Lila and their relationship develops culminating in her proposal to him. As Ames writes, John Ames Boughton (whose father is the local Presbyterian minister and Ames' lifelong friend) reappears in the town after leaving it in great disgrace following his seduction and abandonment of a girl from a poverty-stricken family near his university. The daughter of this relationship died when she was three years old despite the efforts of the Boughton family to look after her. Young Boughton, the apple of his parents' eye but deeply disliked by Ames, seeks Ames out; much of the tension in the story results from Ames's mistrust of young Boughton and particularly of his relationship with Lila and their son. In the dénouement, however, it turns out that Boughton is himself suffering from his forced separation from his own common-law wife, an African American from Tennessee, and their son; the family are not allowed to live together because of segregationist laws, and her family utterly rejects Boughton. It is implied that Boughton's understanding with Lila lies in their common sense of tragedy as she prepares for the death of Ames, who has given her a security and stability she has never known before.

Although there is action in the story, its mainspring lies in Ames' theological struggles on a whole series of fronts: with his grandfather's engagement in the Civil War, with his own loneliness through much of his life, with his brother's clear and his father's apparent loss of belief, with his father's desertion of the town, with the hardships of people's lives, and above all with his feelings of hostility and jealousy towards Boughton, whom he knows at some level he has to forgive. Ames's struggles are illustrated by numerous quotations from the Bible, from theologians (especially Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion), and from philosophers, especially the atheist Feuerbach, whom Ames greatly respects. It is unusual that a book with so much of this kind of content should be so widely recognized as a successful novel, and should achieve such acclaim from a secular audience. However the abstract and theological content is made meaningful because it is seen through the eyes of Ames, who is presented in a deeply sympathetic manner, and writes his memoir from a position of serenity despite suffering while always remaining conscious of his limitations and failings. In the closing pages of the book, Ames learns of Boughton's true situation, and is able to offer him the genuine affection and forgiveness he has never before been able to feel for him. Although it is not stated, there is an implication that he dies in his sleep, or at his prayers, after reaching this resolution.

[1]. Wikipedia.org

Middlesex (Pulitzer Prize winner)

Middlesex is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by American author Jeffrey Eugenides (1960- ) published in 2002.

Despite slow initial sales, the book became a bestseller. Its characters and events are loosely based on the author's life and his observations on his Greek heritage. Eugenides developed the idea of writing Middlesex after he read the memoir Herculine Barbin, and was unsatisfied with its lack of discussion about hermaphrodites' anatomy and emotions.

The novel begins with the narrator, aged 41, recounting how the recessive gene, 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, caused him to be born with the characteristics of a female. He is christened with a female name Calliope and nicknamed Callie. After learning about the syndrome in his adolescence, he changes his name to the masculine name Cal. The narration periodically returns to the frame story of present-day Cal, who is bearded, male and interested in women, foreshadowing the personal revelations of Callie. The narration briefly explains how Desdemona, Cal's grandmother, predicted her grandchild to be male while Callie's parents had already made preparations for the birth of a daughter.

The story starts again further back in time, in a small village in Asia Minor, with the protagonist's Greek paternal grandparents. Eleutherios "Lefty" Stephanides and Desdemona Stephanides are orphaned siblings who share a close bond that begins to develop into a romantic relationship, despite their misgivings. Soon, in the aftermath of the 1922 war between Greece and Turkey, and amid graphic scenes of the Great Fire of Smyrna, the siblings are forced to seek refuge by emigrating to America. On the eve of their departure, Desdemona agrees to marry her brother. The marriage is possible because no one in America knows they are siblings and, as such, the legal and social prohibitions against marriage between siblings are not a risk. They reach the United States, and settle in Detroit, Michigan, home of their cousin Sourmelina "Lina" Zizmo, hinted to be a closeted lesbian, their American sponsor, and her husband Jimmy. Lefty soon goes into an alcohol-smuggling business run by Jimmy. In time, Desdemona gives birth to a son, Milton, while Lina gives birth to a daughter, Theodora, called "Tessie". Desdemona is made aware of the potential for disease in children due to consanguinity and becomes anxious about her pregnancy and the morality of her sexual relationship with Lefty. With the quality of his marriage declining, Lefty decides to open a bar and gambling room, calling it the Zebra Room.

Lefty and Desdemona's son, Milton, marries Lina's daughter, Tessie. Milton and Tessie, who are second cousins, have two children, Chapter Eleven and Callie. Chapter Eleven (a reference to the fact that he eventually becomes bankrupt) is a biologically "normal" boy, while Callie is intersexed. However, the family does not know this for many years, and Callie is consequently raised as a girl.

At 14, Callie falls in love with her female best friend, who is referred to in the novel as the "Obscure Object" (is a reference to the 1977 film That Obscure Object of Desire directed by Luis Buñuel). Callie has her first sexual experiences with both genders, the Obscure Object and the Obscure Object's brother. After Callie is injured by a tractor, a doctor discovers that Callie is intersexed, and she is taken to a clinic in New York where she undergoes a series of tests and examinations. Faced with the prospect of sex reassignment surgery, Callie runs away and takes the male identity of Cal. Cal hitchhikes cross-country, finally arriving in San Francisco, where he becomes an attraction in a burlesque show.

The club where Cal works is raided by police, and Cal is returned to Chapter Eleven's custody. Desdemona sees Cal as male for the first time, and the book ends when Desdemona confesses to Cal that Lefty was her brother. After learning that Milton had been killed in a car accident, Cal stands in the doorway to the family's Middlesex home (a male-only Greek tradition thought to keep spirits of the dead out of the family home) while Milton's funeral takes place. As an adult, Cal becomes a diplomat and is stationed in Berlin. He meets Julie Kikuchi, a Japanese-American woman with whom he starts a relationship. [1]


[1]. Wikipedia.org

Empire Falls (Pulitzer Prize winner)

Empire Falls is a novel written by Richard Russo (1949- ); published in 2001 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002.

A small, fictional mill town in Maine called Empire Falls, though once booming in industry, is quickly deteriorating. Dominated by the powerful Whiting family, the town can no longer sustain itself. Seen through the eyes of Miles Roby, the manager of the Empire Grill, which is also owned by Mrs. Whiting, his struggles with family, including his divorce and the life of his teenage daughter, Christina (nicknamed "Tick"), greatly mirror the condition of the town. His soon-to-be ex-wife Janine is going out with and preparing to marry the owner of a fitness center in town. As prospects for the town's future dwindle, the past is visited to explain Miles' history as well as those around him and the town itself. A subplot of the novel involves a school shooting carried out by a poor high school student, who is orphaned after the death of his grandmother, and bullied by the rest of the school's students, particularly Tick's ex-boyfriend, Zack. [Reference]

Empire Falls