When Captain flint was still a good man

Young Cal lives with his parents on Loyalty Island. Each winter, Cal's father - a ship’s captain - sails to Alaska for 6 months to catch king crab. Cal feels the emotional gulf and tension caused by his father’s absence but knows their livelihood depends on it. He fills his head with stories of pirates on Treasure Island (where R L Stevenson created the original Captain Flint). When John Gaunt, the owner of the fleet dies suddenly, Cal wonders about the relationship his mother has had with Gaunt. His untimely death puts the fleet on the brink of collapse. Cal finds evidence that his father has resorted to desperate measures to save their way of life. Cal’s loyalty faces the ultimate test.

CITATION: Dybek, Nick. When Captain Flint was still a good man. New York : Riverhead Books, 2012.


...peopled with multidimensional characters and featuring well-drawn settings. Dybek writes well about family, about relationships and loyalty, about responsibility and community, and about all that passes from father to son. –Kirkus reviews

Read the transcript of an interview by Granta with author Nick Dybek.

Available on kindle and audiobook. 

Cloud Atlas

 

An ambitious novel presenting six different stories set in different time periods. Each story is read by the main character in the next chapter. After the sixth story, the other five stories are returned to and closed. The first begins in Chatham Islands (a remote Pacific archipelago off the coast of New Zealand) with the diary of a 19th-century notary. The second story shifts to 1931 with the letters of a penniless composer in 1931 Belgium. Then we meet a 1970s reporter who gets in the way of a nuclear energy company in California and a genetically engineered serf in a future "corpocracy" who slowly gains awareness of her plight. Finally we return to the Chatham islands, only centuries later in a post-civilisation world.

...brilliantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. – Goodreads   

Citation: Mitchell, David. The cloud atlas. London : Sceptre, 2004.

Available as a CD audiobook, kindle ebook + an enhanced edition with audio and video. Adapted for film starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry.

Watch the video interview with David Mitchell :

Bodily Harm

Rennie is a young journalist whose comfortable world falls apart when she discovers that she has breast cancer. After her operation, she returns to find policemen in her apartment, investigating the presence of an intruder, an invader who has made himself at home in her kitchen and left a length of rope on her bed. Unnerved by these events, she decides on a holiday escape. She flies to St. Antoine, a fictitious Caribbean island.

...on the tiny island of St.  Antoine she is confronted by a world where her rules for survival no longer apply.  By turns comic, satiric, relentless, and terrifying, Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm is ultimately an exploration of the lust for power, both sexual and political, and the need for compassion that goes beyond what we ordinarily mean by love. – Random House.

CITATION: Atwood, Margaret. Bodily Harm. New York : Bantam Books, 1996. 



Available in large print, audiobook, ebook. Look inside or listen to a sample at Amazon.
Listen to Margaret Atwood interviewed by Fay Weldon about Bodily Harm. (British Library mp3).