Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Five books for helping with loss

Diana Evans is the award-winning author of Ordinary People, The Wonder and 26a. Her prize nominations include the Guardian and Commonwealth Best First Book awards, and she was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. Ordinary People was nominated for the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction, selected in The New Yorker Best Books of 2018, and has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Rathbones Folio Prize.

At the Guardian Evans tagged five books for helping with loss, including:
There is no such redemption for April Wheeler, the entrapped wife and mother who wants more out of life in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road: her attempt to reach for it fails miserably. This is a dark and bleak novel, but darkness is sometimes just the thing – an equalness of tone, a comparing of shades. And here April’s tragic fate also acts as a warning of what happens when a dream for a life gets waylaid or upstaged by easy convention. And when is a better time to break from convention than in grief and loss, a place where such things fade into mist?
Read about the other books Evans tagged.

Revolutionary Road also appears on Jenny Eclair's six best books list, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books for Mad Men fans, Hanna McGrath's list of five fictional characters who tell it like it is, John Mullan's list of ten of the best Aprils in literature, Selma Dabbagh's top ten list of stories of reluctant revolutionaries, Laura Dave's list of books that improve on re-reading, Tad Friend's seven best fiction books about WASPs, and James P. Othmer's list of six great novels on work.

--Marshal Zeringue