Thursday, July 19, 2012

Top 10 homes in literature

Stuart Evers's debut novel If This is Home now available in the UK from Picador books.  Ben East, in his review of the book for The Observer, called the "excellent, multilayered debut novel...a quiet triumph."

One of Evers's top ten homes in literature, as told to the Guardian:
124 Bluestone Road in Beloved by Toni Morrison

124 Bluestone Road is perhaps the most celebrated of modern haunted houses, a home "full of a baby's venom". It's the vital constituent of Morrison's novel: a living, breathing, almost sentient member of the cast of characters; a true vector of the past and present.
Read about another book on the list.

Beloved also appears on David W. Blight's list of five outstanding novels on the Civil War era, John Mullan's list of ten of the best births in literature, Kit Whitfield's top ten list of genre-defying novels, and at the top of one list of contenders for the title of the single best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years.

--Marshal Zeringue