Earth in winterAndrew Miller (Europe). This sensitively written, deeply psychological novel, nominated for the Booker Prize, follows two neighboring couples as they survive the brutal English winter of 1962. The husbands, a doctor and an inexperienced farmer, are often confused by their rural lives. The wives, both pregnant, form a quirky friendship that serves as the book's dramatic engine. As the quartet's secrets and aspirations come to light, so too do the traumas of World War II and the troubled, uncomfortable dynamics of a modern era of transition. Miller's prose is tender and luxurious, punctuated by vivid imagery: snowflakes on the tongue are “fragrant with stone, the tips of the sky.” He relishes the visceral tension and harrowing interactions between his characters and their brutal surroundings.
Flop eraLara Egger (Pittsburgh). “Is this the feel/faux fur or real leather?” asks one of the poems in this charming collection, which demonstrates a keen understanding of how seduction can become destruction, language can become meaning, and error can become faith. Enlivened by irreverent madness, Egger's poetry combines elements of modern idiom and lyric tradition to create a surreal world that questions existential questions about desire and grief. “The truth is / I’m an impostor, deathly afraid / of heights,” she writes. “One way to explain sadness is to suggest that God never looks down.”
