Marvin Ealey Ealey itibaren 9801 Zuidhorn, Hollanda itibaren 9801 Zuidhorn, Hollanda

Only a few pages in, I'm very much enjoying this novel (ahem) take on the Lewis & Clark expedition. The author has based his narrative on the letters and journals written by the explorers before, during and after their famous voyage, but uses a cynic's eye to read between the familiar lines. Cross-outs and margin notes, combined with the writer's fertile imagination create psychological depth to men immortalised as heroes, which creates conflicts resulting from self-serving motives and the hurt feelings that result as they must also deal with the enormous physical challenges inherent in a grand journey. It's particularly enjoyable to anyone already immersed in Lewis & Clark lore, as the source material should be appreciated before it gets tainted with petty innuendo. It's nice to know the idea of friendships straining over the course of a difficult roadtrip is more timeless than car trips and fights over who chooses the music.

This book was a bit slow for me, the story is definitely brilliant but not tremendously dramatic. I can definitely see why the author is compared to Tolstoy, Flaubert and Eliot. From the Publisher With her first novel, In the Eye of the Sun, Ahdaf Soueif garnered comparisons to Tolstoy, Flaubert, and George Eliot. In her latest novel, which was shortlisted for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, she combines the romantic skill of the nineteenth-century novelists with a very modern sense of culture and politics—both sexual and international. At either end of the twentieth century, two women fall in love with men outside their familiar worlds. In 1901, Anna Winterbourne, recently widowed, leaves England for Egypt, an outpost of the Empire roiling with nationalist sentiment. Far from the comfrot of the British colony, she finds herself enraptured by the real Egypt and in love with Sharaif Pasha al-Baroudi. Nearly a hundred years later, Isabel Parkman, a divorced American journalist and descendant of Anna and Sharif, has fallen in love with a gifted and difficult Egyptian-American conductor with his own passionate politics. In an attempt to understand her conflicting emotions and to discover the truth behind her heritage, Isabel, too, travels to Egypt, where she gradually unravels the story of Anna and Sharif's love. Joining the romance and intricate storytelling of A.S. Byatt's Possession with the lyrical sensuality of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, Ahdef Soueif has once again created a mesmerizing tale of geniune eloquence and lasting importance.

Yeah, not much happens in it, but the characters are very real, and it speaks to the all too human destructive quality of wanting more than you can have, and of true loneliness. Beautiful.

I had put aside Margaret Atwood for a long, long time but my re-introduction to her has been fantastic. I was obssessed with her as a teenager and now I remember why.

Finalist for National Book Award and Newbery, this is an amazing story. It mixes the adventure of animals with myth, good and evil, survival, redemption. And it is geared for young adults. Don't let the illustrations fool you, this is a story for adults as well. Some of my favorite lines: "It could be that somehow, if we stand still long enough we can actually hear the trees and understand their messages. It could be that the light from the sun slips down at a certain slant so as to fill us in. Maybe it's just that love has its own way of informing us when loss is at hand."