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-   -   MobileRead November 2015 Book Club Nominations (https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=266538)

WT Sharpe 10-19-2015 11:17 PM
November 2015 Book Club Nominations
 
Help us select the book that the MobileRead Book Club will read for November, 2015.

The nominations will run through midnight EST October 26 or until 10 books have made the list. The poll will then be posted and will remain open for five days.

Book selection category for November is: Foreign (Books originally written in a language other than English)

In order for a book to be included in the poll it needs THREE NOMINATIONS (original nomination, a second and a third).

How Does This Work?

The Mobile Read Book Club (MRBC) is an informal club that requires nothing of you. Each month a book is selected by polling. On the last week of that month a discussion thread is started for the book. If you want to participate feel free. There is no need to "join" or sign up. All are welcome.

How Does a Book Get Selected?

Each book that is nominated will be listed in a poll at the end of the nomination period. The book that polls the most votes will be the official selection.

How Many Nominations Can I Make?

Each participant has 3 nominations. You can nominate a new book for consideration or nominate (second, third) one that has already been nominated by another person.

How Do I Nominate a Book?

Please just post a message with your nomination. If you are the FIRST to nominate a book, please try to provide an abstract to the book so others may consider their level of interest.

How Do I Know What Has Been Nominated?

Just follow the thread. This message will be updated with the status of the nominations as often as I can. If one is missed, please just post a message with a multi-quote of the 3 nominations and it will be added to the list ASAP.

When is the Poll?

The poll thread will open at the end of the nomination period, or once there have been 10 books with 3 nominations each. At that time a link to the initial poll thread will be posted here and this thread will be closed.

The floor is open to nominations. Please comment if you discover a nomination is not available as an ebook in your area.


Official choices with three nominations each:

(1) We, The Drowned by Carsten Jensen
Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo
Spoiler:
NPR:
Quote:
Life in a small seaside town in Denmark becomes the basis for high drama in Carsten Jensen's international bestseller, We, the Drowned, just now hitting U.S. shelves. This is a book for lovers of seafaring tales, adventure myths and whimsical coming-of-age stories.
Goodreads:
Quote:
It is an epic drama of adventure, courage, ruthlessness and passion by one of Scandinavia’s most acclaimed storytellers.
In 1848 a motley crew of Danish sailors sets sail from the small island town of Marstal to fight the Germans. Not all of them return – and those who do will never be the same. Among them is the daredevil Laurids Madsen, who promptly escapes again into the anonymity of the high seas.
As soon as he is old enough, his son Albert sets off in search of his missing father on a voyage that will take him to the furthest reaches of the globe and into the clutches of the most nefarious company.
...
From the barren rocks of Newfoundland to the lush plantations of Samoa, from the roughest bars in Tasmania, to the frozen coasts of northern Russia, We, The Drowned spans four generations, two world wars and a hundred years. Carsten Jensen conjures a wise, humorous, thrilling story of fathers and sons, of the women they love and leave behind, and of the sea’s murderous promise. This is a novel destined to take its place among the greatest seafaring literature


(2) The Train by Georges Simenon
Amazon US / Kobo/ OverDrive
Spoiler:
Amazon and Goodreads have the same blurb:

Quote:
Against all expectations Marcel Féron has made a “normal” life in a bucolic French suburb in the Ardennes. But on May 10, 1940, as Nazi tanks approach, this timid, happy man must abandon his home and confront the “Fate” that he has secretly awaited. Separated from his pregnant wife and young daughter in the chaos of flight, he joins a freight car of refugees hurtling southward ahead of the pursuing invaders. There, he meets Anna, a sad-looking, dark- haired girl, whose accent is “neither Belgian nor German,” and who “seemed foreign to everything around her.” As the mystery of Anna’s identity is gradually revealed, Marcel leaps from the heights of an exhilarating freedom to the depths of a terrifying responsibility—one that will lead him to a blood-chilling choice.
A quote from the NY Times:

Quote:
There is no false note, not one word or sigh or smile which strikes me as anything but unavoidable. This is not a writer’s romancing story of a little man caught in the war; it is the unknown history of many little men in that vast war.


(3) Skylark by Deszö Kosztolányi
Amazon US / Kobo / OverDrive
Spoiler:
From a New York Review of Books review:

Quote:
This short, perfect novel seems to encapsulate all the world’s pain in a soap bubble. Its surface is as smooth as a fable, its setting and characters are unremarkable, its tone is blithe, and its effect is shattering.

Any story about people is implicitly concerned with fate: How has it come about that this thing rather than that thing has happened to this person rather than that person? Much fiction employs one sort of crude causation or another to strongarm events into a clumsily trumped-up case asserting that A has led inexorably to Z, or, at the other pole, drops in front of us a heap of arbitrary incident and demands that we marvel at the inscrutability of life’s course—which in fact is something we can do perfectly well on our own.

And as we’re well aware that one thing rather than another happens to each person, why should we be interested in what happens to someone who was made up in the first place? We look to fiction writers to divine the true relationships—or true lack of them—between the elements that constitute a human life. In Skylark, we encounter lives that contain no hidden exits or negotiable margins, and we come away from the book feeling that we have experienced the inalterable workings of destiny.

Dezso Kosztolányi ingeniously poises his leading characters to expose, over the course of a week—not only to us but also to themselves—the tangle of intractable emotions that has taken years to develop and binds them hand and foot. The current of satire that runs through Skylark—sometimes faint and melancholy, sometimes rollickingly gleeful—as well as the book’s brevity, might suggest a slight work; on the contrary, the book is essential, a distillation of the heart’s properties.


(4) How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić
Goodreads
Spoiler:
For young Aleksandar - the best magician in the non-aligned states and painter of unfinished things - life is endowed with a mythic quality in the Bosnian town of Višegrad, a rich playground for his imagination. When his grandfather dies, Aleks channels his storytelling talent to help with his grief.

It is a gift he calls on again when the shadow of war spreads to Višegrad, and the world as he knows it stops. Though Aleks and his family flee to Germany, he is haunted by his past - and by Asija, the mysterious girl he tried to save. Desperate to learn of her fate, Aleks returns to his hometown on the anniversary of his grandfather's death to discover what became of her and the life he left behind.


(5) Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto
Amazon US / Kobo
Spoiler:
Goodreads:
Quote:
The corpse of an unknown provincial is discovered under the rails of a train in a Tokyo station, and Detective Imanishi is assigned to the case.

In a police procedural by Japan's foremost master of mystery, Inspector Imanishi Eitaro, a typically Japanese detective fond of gardening and haiku, must follow a killer's trail across the social strata of Japan.


(6) Memoirs of Hadrian by Margeurite Yourcenar
Goodreads
Spoiler:
From Goodreads:

Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his gradual reordering of a war-torn world, writing with the imaginative insight of a great writer of the twentieth century while crafting a prose style as elegant and precise as those of the Latin stylists of Hadrian's own era.


(7) Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Goodreads
Spoiler:
From Goodreads:

Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle - yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.


(8) Resurrection by Wolf Haas
Goodreads
Spoiler:
THE FIRST INSPECTOR BRENNER NOVEL

The darkly comic book that launched the bestselling series . . .

Wolf Haas is firmly established as one of the world’s bestselling crime novelists. And now the novel that introduced Simon Brenner, Haas’s inimitable protagonist—a detective who always gets where he’s going, but never the way anyone else would—is available for the first time 
in English.

When the corpses of two Americans turn up on a ski lift in the idyllic Swiss town of Zell, former police inspector Brenner, who needs a new job, not to mention more migraine medication, agrees to investigate the deaths for an insurance company.

But as Brenner gets acquainted with the finer points of curling, community theater, and certain sexy local schoolteachers, he notices one thing starkly missing: any semblance of a clue.

Until he stumbles across a buried secret that might have explosive consequences.


The nominations are now closed.

WT Sharpe 10-19-2015 11:18 PM
Wondering if a particular book is available in your country? The following spoiler contains a list of bookstores outside the United States you can search. If you don't see a bookstore on this list for your country, find one that is, send me the link via PM, and I'll add it to the list. Also, if you find one on the list that is no longer in operation, let me know and I'll remove it from the list.

Spoiler:
Australian

Angus Robertson

Booktopia

Borders

Dymocks

Fishpond

Google


Canada

Amazon. Make sure you are logged out. Then go to the Kindle Store. Search for a book. After the search results come up, in the upper right corner of the screen, change the country to Canada and search away.

Google

Sony eBookstore (Upper right corner switch to/from US/CA)


UK

BooksOnBoard (In the upper right corner is a way to switch to the UK store)

Amazon

Foyle's

Google

Penguin

Random House

Waterstones

WH Smith


*** The Train by Georges Simenon [issybird, bfisher, fantasyfan]
Amazon US / Kobo/ OverDrive
Spoiler:
Amazon and Goodreads have the same blurb:

Quote:
Against all expectations Marcel Féron has made a “normal” life in a bucolic French suburb in the Ardennes. But on May 10, 1940, as Nazi tanks approach, this timid, happy man must abandon his home and confront the “Fate” that he has secretly awaited. Separated from his pregnant wife and young daughter in the chaos of flight, he joins a freight car of refugees hurtling southward ahead of the pursuing invaders. There, he meets Anna, a sad-looking, dark- haired girl, whose accent is “neither Belgian nor German,” and who “seemed foreign to everything around her.” As the mystery of Anna’s identity is gradually revealed, Marcel leaps from the heights of an exhilarating freedom to the depths of a terrifying responsibility—one that will lead him to a blood-chilling choice.
A quote from the NY Times:

Quote:
There is no false note, not one word or sigh or smile which strikes me as anything but unavoidable. This is not a writer’s romancing story of a little man caught in the war; it is the unknown history of many little men in that vast war.


*** We, The Drowned by Carsten Jensen [BenG, bfisher, CRussel]
Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo
Spoiler:
NPR:
Quote:
Life in a small seaside town in Denmark becomes the basis for high drama in Carsten Jensen's international bestseller, We, the Drowned, just now hitting U.S. shelves. This is a book for lovers of seafaring tales, adventure myths and whimsical coming-of-age stories.
Goodreads:
Quote:
It is an epic drama of adventure, courage, ruthlessness and passion by one of Scandinavia’s most acclaimed storytellers.
In 1848 a motley crew of Danish sailors sets sail from the small island town of Marstal to fight the Germans. Not all of them return – and those who do will never be the same. Among them is the daredevil Laurids Madsen, who promptly escapes again into the anonymity of the high seas.
As soon as he is old enough, his son Albert sets off in search of his missing father on a voyage that will take him to the furthest reaches of the globe and into the clutches of the most nefarious company.
...
From the barren rocks of Newfoundland to the lush plantations of Samoa, from the roughest bars in Tasmania, to the frozen coasts of northern Russia, We, The Drowned spans four generations, two world wars and a hundred years. Carsten Jensen conjures a wise, humorous, thrilling story of fathers and sons, of the women they love and leave behind, and of the sea’s murderous promise. This is a novel destined to take its place among the greatest seafaring literature


* The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov [rakulos]
No links provided.
Spoiler:
Goodreads
Quote:
Mikhail Bulgakov's devastating satire of Soviet life was written during the darkest period of Stalin's regime. Combining two distinct yet interwoven parts—one set in ancient Jerusalem, one in contemporary Moscow—the novel veers from moods of wild theatricality with violent storms, vampire attacks, and a Satanic ball; to such somber scenes as the meeting of Pilate and Yeshua, and the murder of Judas in the moonlit garden of Gethsemane; to the substanceless, circus-like reality of Moscow. Its central characters, Woland (Satan) and his retinue—including the vodka-drinking black cat, Behemoth; the poet, Ivan Homeless; Pontius Pilate; and a writer known only as The Master, and his passionate companion, Margarita—exist in a world that blends fantasy and chilling realism, an artful collage of grotesqueries, dark comedy, and timeless ethical questions.


*** Skylark by Deszö Kosztolányi [issybird, HomeInMyShoes, fantasyfan]
Amazon US / Kobo / OverDrive
Spoiler:
From a New York Review of Books review:

Quote:
This short, perfect novel seems to encapsulate all the world’s pain in a soap bubble. Its surface is as smooth as a fable, its setting and characters are unremarkable, its tone is blithe, and its effect is shattering.

Any story about people is implicitly concerned with fate: How has it come about that this thing rather than that thing has happened to this person rather than that person? Much fiction employs one sort of crude causation or another to strongarm events into a clumsily trumped-up case asserting that A has led inexorably to Z, or, at the other pole, drops in front of us a heap of arbitrary incident and demands that we marvel at the inscrutability of life’s course—which in fact is something we can do perfectly well on our own.

And as we’re well aware that one thing rather than another happens to each person, why should we be interested in what happens to someone who was made up in the first place? We look to fiction writers to divine the true relationships—or true lack of them—between the elements that constitute a human life. In Skylark, we encounter lives that contain no hidden exits or negotiable margins, and we come away from the book feeling that we have experienced the inalterable workings of destiny.

Dezso Kosztolányi ingeniously poises his leading characters to expose, over the course of a week—not only to us but also to themselves—the tangle of intractable emotions that has taken years to develop and binds them hand and foot. The current of satire that runs through Skylark—sometimes faint and melancholy, sometimes rollickingly gleeful—as well as the book’s brevity, might suggest a slight work; on the contrary, the book is essential, a distillation of the heart’s properties.


*** How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić [HomeInMyShoes, BenG, Dazrin]
Goodreads
Spoiler:
For young Aleksandar - the best magician in the non-aligned states and painter of unfinished things - life is endowed with a mythic quality in the Bosnian town of Višegrad, a rich playground for his imagination. When his grandfather dies, Aleks channels his storytelling talent to help with his grief.

It is a gift he calls on again when the shadow of war spreads to Višegrad, and the world as he knows it stops. Though Aleks and his family flee to Germany, he is haunted by his past - and by Asija, the mysterious girl he tried to save. Desperate to learn of her fate, Aleks returns to his hometown on the anniversary of his grandfather's death to discover what became of her and the life he left behind.


* The Manuscript Found in the Saragossa by Jan Potocki [BenG]
Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo
Spoiler:
Alphonse, a young Walloon officer, is travelling to join his regiment in Madrid in 1739. But he soon finds himself mysteriously detained at a highway inn in the strange and varied company of thieves, brigands, cabbalists, noblemen, coquettes and gypsies, whose stories he records over sixty-six days. The resulting manuscript is discovered some forty years later in a sealed casket, from which tales of characters transformed through disguise, magic and illusion, of honour and cowardice, of hauntings and seductions, leap forth to create a vibrant polyphony of human voices. Jan Potocki (1761-1812) used a range of literary styles - gothic, picaresque, adventure, pastoral, erotica - in his novel of stories-within-stories, which, like the Decameron and Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, provides entertainment on an epic scale.


*** Resurrection by Wolf Haas [HomeInMyShoes, WT Sharpe, sun surfer]
Goodreads
Spoiler:
THE FIRST INSPECTOR BRENNER NOVEL

The darkly comic book that launched the bestselling series . . .

Wolf Haas is firmly established as one of the world’s bestselling crime novelists. And now the novel that introduced Simon Brenner, Haas’s inimitable protagonist—a detective who always gets where he’s going, but never the way anyone else would—is available for the first time 
in English.

When the corpses of two Americans turn up on a ski lift in the idyllic Swiss town of Zell, former police inspector Brenner, who needs a new job, not to mention more migraine medication, agrees to investigate the deaths for an insurance company.

But as Brenner gets acquainted with the finer points of curling, community theater, and certain sexy local schoolteachers, he notices one thing starkly missing: any semblance of a clue.

Until he stumbles across a buried secret that might have explosive consequences.


* Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky [Dazrin]
Goodreads | Amazon US
Spoiler:
Set in the shattered subway of a post apocalyptic Moscow, Metro 2033 is a story of intensive underground survival where the fate of mankind rests in your hands.

In 2013 the world was devastated by an apocalyptic event, annihilating almost all mankind and turning the earth’s surface into a poisonous wasteland. A handful of survivors took refuge in the depths of the Moscow underground, and human civilization entered a new Dark Age.

The year is 2033. An entire generation has been born and raised underground, and their besieged Metro Station-Cities struggle for survival, with each other, and the mutant horrors that await outside.

Artyom was born in the last days before the fire. Having never ventured beyond his Metro Station-City limits, one fateful event sparks a desperate mission to the heart of the Metro system, to warn the remnants of mankind of a terrible impending threat. His journey takes him from the forgotten catacombs beneath the subway to the desolate wastelands above, where his actions will determine the fate of mankind.

This book is the basis for the video games Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light.


* Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky [Dazrin]
Goodreads | Amazon US / Barnes & Noble
Spoiler:
From Wikipedia:

The novel is set in a post-visitation world where there are now six Zones known on Earth (each zone is approximately five square miles/kilometers in size) which are still full of unexplained phenomena and where strange happenings have briefly occurred, assumed to have been visitations by aliens. World governments and the UN try to keep tight control over them to prevent leakage of artifacts from the Zones, fearful of unforeseen consequences. A subculture of stalkers, thieves going into the Zones to get the artifacts, evolves around the Zones.

Coincidentally, this is also the basis for a video game (Stalker).


*** Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto [peterwardgd, CRussel, issybird]
Amazon US / Kobo
Spoiler:
Goodreads:
Quote:
The corpse of an unknown provincial is discovered under the rails of a train in a Tokyo station, and Detective Imanishi is assigned to the case.

In a police procedural by Japan's foremost master of mystery, Inspector Imanishi Eitaro, a typically Japanese detective fond of gardening and haiku, must follow a killer's trail across the social strata of Japan.


*** Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami [obs20, peterwardgd, WT Sharpe]
Goodreads
Spoiler:
From Goodreads:

Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle - yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.


*** Memoirs of Hadrian by Margeurite Yourcenar [sun surfer, bfisher, CRussel]
Goodreads
Spoiler:
From Goodreads:

Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his gradual reordering of a war-torn world, writing with the imaginative insight of a great writer of the twentieth century while crafting a prose style as elegant and precise as those of the Latin stylists of Hadrian's own era.


* The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe [sun surfer, ]
Goodreads | Amazon Canada / Amazon US / Kobo
Spoiler:
From Goodreads:

The Woman in the Dunes, by celebrated writer and thinker Kobo Abe, combines the essence of myth, suspense and the existential novel.

After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit. But when he attempts to leave the next morning, he quickly discovers that the locals have other plans. Held captive with seemingly no chance of escape, he is tasked with shoveling back the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten to destroy the village. His only companion is an odd young woman. Together their fates become intertwined as they work side by side at this Sisyphean task.


The nominations are now closed.

issybird 10-20-2015 10:51 AM
I'd like to nominate The Train, by Georges Simenon.

Amazon and Goodreads have the same blurb:

Quote:
Against all expectations Marcel Féron has made a “normal” life in a bucolic French suburb in the Ardennes. But on May 10, 1940, as Nazi tanks approach, this timid, happy man must abandon his home and confront the “Fate” that he has secretly awaited. Separated from his pregnant wife and young daughter in the chaos of flight, he joins a freight car of refugees hurtling southward ahead of the pursuing invaders. There, he meets Anna, a sad-looking, dark- haired girl, whose accent is “neither Belgian nor German,” and who “seemed foreign to everything around her.” As the mystery of Anna’s identity is gradually revealed, Marcel leaps from the heights of an exhilarating freedom to the depths of a terrifying responsibility—one that will lead him to a blood-chilling choice.
A quote from the NY Times:

Quote:
There is no false note, not one word or sigh or smile which strikes me as anything but unavoidable. This is not a writer’s romancing story of a little man caught in the war; it is the unknown history of many little men in that vast war.
Amazon Kobo OverDrive

BenG 10-20-2015 11:26 AM
I would like to nominate We, The Drowned by Carsten Jensen. I've been eyeing it for a couple of years.

NPR:
Quote:
Life in a small seaside town in Denmark becomes the basis for high drama in Carsten Jensen's international bestseller, We, the Drowned, just now hitting U.S. shelves. This is a book for lovers of seafaring tales, adventure myths and whimsical coming-of-age stories.
Goodreads:
Spoiler:
It is an epic drama of adventure, courage, ruthlessness and passion by one of Scandinavia’s most acclaimed storytellers.
In 1848 a motley crew of Danish sailors sets sail from the small island town of Marstal to fight the Germans. Not all of them return – and those who do will never be the same. Among them is the daredevil Laurids Madsen, who promptly escapes again into the anonymity of the high seas.
As soon as he is old enough, his son Albert sets off in search of his missing father on a voyage that will take him to the furthest reaches of the globe and into the clutches of the most nefarious company.
...
From the barren rocks of Newfoundland to the lush plantations of Samoa, from the roughest bars in Tasmania, to the frozen coasts of northern Russia, We, The Drowned spans four generations, two world wars and a hundred years. Carsten Jensen conjures a wise, humorous, thrilling story of fathers and sons, of the women they love and leave behind, and of the sea’s murderous promise. This is a novel destined to take its place among the greatest seafaring literature



Amazon
Amazon UK
Kobo

bfisher 10-20-2015 02:14 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird (Post 3191088)
I'd like to nominate The Train, by Georges Simenon.
je suis pour The Train par Georges Simenon.

bfisher 10-20-2015 02:17 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by BenG (Post 3191106)
I would like to nominate We, The Drowned by Carsten Jensen. I've been eyeing it for a couple of years.
Jeg sekund We, The Drowned by Carsten Jensen.

rakulos 10-20-2015 04:20 PM
Hmm, I'd like to nominate The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

Goodreads
Quote:
Mikhail Bulgakov's devastating satire of Soviet life was written during the darkest period of Stalin's regime. Combining two distinct yet interwoven parts—one set in ancient Jerusalem, one in contemporary Moscow—the novel veers from moods of wild theatricality with violent storms, vampire attacks, and a Satanic ball; to such somber scenes as the meeting of Pilate and Yeshua, and the murder of Judas in the moonlit garden of Gethsemane; to the substanceless, circus-like reality of Moscow. Its central characters, Woland (Satan) and his retinue—including the vodka-drinking black cat, Behemoth; the poet, Ivan Homeless; Pontius Pilate; and a writer known only as The Master, and his passionate companion, Margarita—exist in a world that blends fantasy and chilling realism, an artful collage of grotesqueries, dark comedy, and timeless ethical questions.
Funny, strange and difficult to summarize :)

CRussel 10-20-2015 05:11 PM
I'll nominate The Bat, by Jo Nesbo. This is the first in the Harry Hole series.

Spoiler:
The electrifying first appearance of Jo Nesbř’s detective, Harry Hole.

Inspector Harry Hole of the Oslo Crime Squad is dispatched to Sydney to observe a murder case. Harry is free to offer assistance, but he has firm instructions to stay out of trouble. The victim is a twenty-three year old Norwegian woman who is a minor celebrity back home. Never one to sit on the sidelines, Harry befriends one of the lead detectives, and one of the witnesses, as he is drawn deeper into the case. Together, they discover that this is only the latest in a string of unsolved murders, and the pattern points toward a psychopath working his way across the country. As they circle closer and closer to the killer, Harry begins to fear that no one is safe, least of all those investigating the case.


Initially, here's the Amazon and Audible links, but I'll find the others and post shortly.
US Amazon

Audible

I know that this book is also available in at least some Canadian Overdrive collections, but don't know about US collections.

CRussel 10-20-2015 05:12 PM
Quote:
I would like to nominate We, The Drowned by Carsten Jensen. I've been eyeing it for a couple of years.
I'll third.

WT Sharpe 10-20-2015 05:30 PM
Second The Bat.

Dazrin 10-20-2015 05:36 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel (Post 3191257)
I'll nominate The Bat, by Jo Nesbo. This is the first in the Harry Hole series.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe (Post 3191268)
Second The Bat.
The Bat was our 2014 selection.

issybird 10-20-2015 06:03 PM
Just as an FYI, The Master and Margarita was the lit club selection in June 2011.

WT Sharpe 10-20-2015 06:22 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dazrin (Post 3191272)
The Bat was our 2014 selection.
Oops! Disallowed.

CRussel 10-20-2015 09:07 PM
Darn. I missed that.

issybird 10-21-2015 10:09 AM
I'm going to nominate Skylark, by Deszö Kosztolányi.

Most of the blurbs give away too much plot, so I'm quoting from a New York Review of Books review:

Quote:
This short, perfect novel seems to encapsulate all the world’s pain in a soap bubble. Its surface is as smooth as a fable, its setting and characters are unremarkable, its tone is blithe, and its effect is shattering.

Any story about people is implicitly concerned with fate: How has it come about that this thing rather than that thing has happened to this person rather than that person? Much fiction employs one sort of crude causation or another to strongarm events into a clumsily trumped-up case asserting that A has led inexorably to Z, or, at the other pole, drops in front of us a heap of arbitrary incident and demands that we marvel at the inscrutability of life’s course—which in fact is something we can do perfectly well on our own.

And as we’re well aware that one thing rather than another happens to each person, why should we be interested in what happens to someone who was made up in the first place? We look to fiction writers to divine the true relationships—or true lack of them—between the elements that constitute a human life. In Skylark, we encounter lives that contain no hidden exits or negotiable margins, and we come away from the book feeling that we have experienced the inalterable workings of destiny.

Dezso Kosztolányi ingeniously poises his leading characters to expose, over the course of a week—not only to us but also to themselves—the tangle of intractable emotions that has taken years to develop and binds them hand and foot. The current of satire that runs through Skylark—sometimes faint and melancholy, sometimes rollickingly gleeful—as well as the book’s brevity, might suggest a slight work; on the contrary, the book is essential, a distillation of the heart’s properties.
Amazon Kobo OverDrive

HomeInMyShoes 10-21-2015 11:52 AM
Let's go somewhere I haven't been before with:

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić.

Spoiler:
For young Aleksandar - the best magician in the non-aligned states and painter of unfinished things - life is endowed with a mythic quality in the Bosnian town of Višegrad, a rich playground for his imagination. When his grandfather dies, Aleks channels his storytelling talent to help with his grief.

It is a gift he calls on again when the shadow of war spreads to Višegrad, and the world as he knows it stops. Though Aleks and his family flee to Germany, he is haunted by his past - and by Asija, the mysterious girl he tried to save. Desperate to learn of her fate, Aleks returns to his hometown on the anniversary of his grandfather's death to discover what became of her and the life he left behind.


This would cover Bosnia & Herzegovina.


I will also second Skylark.

fantasyfan 10-22-2015 09:42 AM
I'll third The Train.

fantasyfan 10-22-2015 09:47 AM
I'll third Skylark.

BenG 10-22-2015 01:57 PM
How about The Manuscript Found in the Saragossa by Jan Potocki.
The film version, The Saragossa Manuscript, is a favorite of mine (along with Jerry Garcia and Martin Scorsese who put up the money to fund an English language print).
It has stories within stories (at one point it's a story within a story within a story within a story within a story.) :)

Spoiler:

Alphonse, a young Walloon officer, is travelling to join his regiment in Madrid in 1739. But he soon finds himself mysteriously detained at a highway inn in the strange and varied company of thieves, brigands, cabbalists, noblemen, coquettes and gypsies, whose stories he records over sixty-six days. The resulting manuscript is discovered some forty years later in a sealed casket, from which tales of characters transformed through disguise, magic and illusion, of honour and cowardice, of hauntings and seductions, leap forth to create a vibrant polyphony of human voices. Jan Potocki (1761-1812) used a range of literary styles - gothic, picaresque, adventure, pastoral, erotica - in his novel of stories-within-stories, which, like the Decameron and Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, provides entertainment on an epic scale.


Amazon US

Amazon UK

Kobo

BenG 10-22-2015 02:04 PM
I'll second How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić.

HomeInMyShoes 10-23-2015 10:57 AM
I think I've got one more nomination to go.

I'm going to nominate Resurrection by Wolf Haas.
Spoiler:
THE FIRST INSPECTOR BRENNER NOVEL

The darkly comic book that launched the bestselling series . . .

Wolf Haas is firmly established as one of the world’s bestselling crime novelists. And now the novel that introduced Simon Brenner, Haas’s inimitable protagonist—a detective who always gets where he’s going, but never the way anyone else would—is available for the first time 
in English.

When the corpses of two Americans turn up on a ski lift in the idyllic Swiss town of Zell, former police inspector Brenner, who needs a new job, not to mention more migraine medication, agrees to investigate the deaths for an insurance company.

But as Brenner gets acquainted with the finer points of curling, community theater, and certain sexy local schoolteachers, he notices one thing starkly missing: any semblance of a clue.

Until he stumbles across a buried secret that might have explosive consequences.


The Brenner books have some action, some humor, some somewhat queasy moments, but not enough of that to turn one off. Just fun books.

For those that read countries like me, this one covers Austria.

Dazrin 10-23-2015 02:21 PM
I will third How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone and hope my library will quickly add it based on my request.

With availability in mind, I will nominate Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky (which is free today at Amazon, maybe elsewhere.)

Goodreads | Amazon US (free 10/23)

My take: Originally, non-English, check (Russian). Easily available, check (free.) Independently published, check (originally free on his website and later published and translated into 35 different languages.) Interesting setting, check (set in the subways of Moscow which have become the world's largest bomb shelter.) Gritty, Russian post-apocalyptic fiction, check (I loved Roadside Picnic when it was nominated for August 2013.)

Description:
Spoiler:
Set in the shattered subway of a post apocalyptic Moscow, Metro 2033 is a story of intensive underground survival where the fate of mankind rests in your hands.

In 2013 the world was devastated by an apocalyptic event, annihilating almost all mankind and turning the earth’s surface into a poisonous wasteland. A handful of survivors took refuge in the depths of the Moscow underground, and human civilization entered a new Dark Age.

The year is 2033. An entire generation has been born and raised underground, and their besieged Metro Station-Cities struggle for survival, with each other, and the mutant horrors that await outside.

Artyom was born in the last days before the fire. Having never ventured beyond his Metro Station-City limits, one fateful event sparks a desperate mission to the heart of the Metro system, to warn the remnants of mankind of a terrible impending threat. His journey takes him from the forgotten catacombs beneath the subway to the desolate wastelands above, where his actions will determine the fate of mankind.

This book is the basis for the video games Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light.


I will also nominate Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

Goodreads | Amazon US | B&N

This first came to my attention when it was nominated for August 2013. It didn't win* but I was able to get it from the library and really enjoyed it.

Description:
Spoiler:
From Wikipedia:

The novel is set in a post-visitation world where there are now six Zones known on Earth (each zone is approximately five square miles/kilometers in size) which are still full of unexplained phenomena and where strange happenings have briefly occurred, assumed to have been visitations by aliens. World governments and the UN try to keep tight control over them to prevent leakage of artifacts from the Zones, fearful of unforeseen consequences. A subculture of stalkers, thieves going into the Zones to get the artifacts, evolves around the Zones.

Coincidentally, this is also the basis for a video game (Stalker).


*There was very tough competition that month and I would have been happy with any of the selections. I have read six of the nominations from that month and enjoyed all of them (Doomsday Book, Ender's Game, Lost Horizon, A Princess of Mars, Rendezvous with Rama, Roadside Picnic.) I am certain I will try the other four in the future as well.

HomeInMyShoes 10-23-2015 02:52 PM
Ooh, I'm out of nominations, but Roadside Picnic was an excellent read.

peterwardgd 10-23-2015 03:58 PM
I'd like to nominate Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto.

The only Japanese police procedural novel i've read and one of the only translated ones i could find tbh as most don't/didn't make it outside of Japan it seems. I enjoyed it a lot and rated it enough to buy it in paperback form as well digital for my collection.

Goodreads:
Quote:
The corpse of an unknown provincial is discovered under the rails of a train in a Tokyo station, and Detective Imanishi is assigned to the case.

In a police procedural by Japan's foremost master of mystery, Inspector Imanishi Eitaro, a typically Japanese detective fond of gardening and haiku, must follow a killer's trail across the social strata of Japan.
Amazon

Kobo

issybird 10-23-2015 04:10 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by peterwardgd (Post 3193028)
I'd like to nominate Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto.

The only Japanese police procedural novel i've read and one of the only translated ones i could find tbh as most don't/didn't make it outside of Japan it seems. I enjoyed it a lot and rated it enough to buy it in paperback form as well digital for my collection.
Wow, much cheaper at Amazon US!

CRussel 10-23-2015 05:16 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by peterwardgd (Post 3193028)
I'd like to nominate Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto.

The only Japanese police procedural novel i've read and one of the only translated ones i could find tbh as most don't/didn't make it outside of Japan it seems. I enjoyed it a lot and rated it enough to buy it in paperback form as well digital for my collection.

Goodreads:


Amazon

Kobo
I'll second this.

issybird 10-23-2015 05:20 PM
I'll third Inspector Imanishi Investigates.

obs20 10-23-2015 10:51 PM
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

I've had this on my TBR list for awhile.

peterwardgd 10-24-2015 05:55 PM
I'll second Kafka on the Shore. I've read it already but it is one of my favourite Murakami novels and its the one i recommend to people who haven't read anything of his.

sun surfer 10-25-2015 07:57 PM
I nominate Memoirs of Hadrian by Margeurite Yourcenar, originally written in French. I've wanted to read this for awhile now; it was nominated and ended only one vote away from winning in the other club some years ago.

From Goodreads:

Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his gradual reordering of a war-torn world, writing with the imaginative insight of a great writer of the twentieth century while crafting a prose style as elegant and precise as those of the Latin stylists of Hadrian's own era.

Goodreads

issybird 10-25-2015 08:07 PM
I'm out of nominations, but I'd love to see this chosen. It would be just the goad I needed to get it read, also!

bfisher 10-25-2015 11:51 PM
I'll second Memoirs of Hadrian by Margeurite Yourcenar.

CRussel 10-26-2015 01:59 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird (Post 3194230)
I'm out of nominations, but I'd love to see this chosen. It would be just the goad I needed to get it read, also!
I'm not sure I'll vote for it, but I'll happily use my third for it, Issy. Then we can let the vote decide. :)

issybird 10-26-2015 08:37 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel (Post 3194337)
I'm not sure I'll vote for it, but I'll happily use my third for it, Issy. Then we can let the vote decide. :)
Thank you. :) :)

WT Sharpe 10-26-2015 08:47 AM
I'll third Kafka on the Shore and provide a description from Goodreads:

Quote:
Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle - yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.

sun surfer 10-26-2015 03:00 PM
Bad news- I just went to find ebook links to post here for Memoirs of Hadrian and found that it isn't available as an ebook. I should've checked before posting. I think that means that it's not eligible for this club, so I withdraw it. Sorry for bursting your bubble issybird; I was looking forward to the possibility of it too!

sun surfer 10-26-2015 03:40 PM
I know it's the eleventh hour but let me try again-

I nominate The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe, originally written in Japanese; it sounds intriguing.

From Goodreads:

The Woman in the Dunes, by celebrated writer and thinker Kobo Abe, combines the essence of myth, suspense and the existential novel.

After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit. But when he attempts to leave the next morning, he quickly discovers that the locals have other plans. Held captive with seemingly no chance of escape, he is tasked with shoveling back the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten to destroy the village. His only companion is an odd young woman. Together their fates become intertwined as they work side by side at this Sisyphean task.

Goodreads / Amazon US / Amazon Canada / Kōbō at Kobo


I'll use the rest of my nominations on Resurrection and Roadside Picnic. The Manuscript Found at the Saragossa looks interesting too but I have no more votes.

issybird 10-26-2015 03:45 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by sun surfer (Post 3194657)
Bad news- I just went to find ebook links to post here for Memoirs of Hadrian and found that it isn't available as an ebook. I should've checked before posting. I think that means that it's not eligible for this club, so I withdraw it. Sorry for bursting your bubble issybird; I was looking forward to the possibility of it too!
Oh, I knew it wasn't an ebook; I just assumed the rule had been relaxed.

HomeInMyShoes 10-26-2015 03:46 PM
I'll second The Woman in the Dunes. It's on my list of books from Japan to read.

sun surfer 10-26-2015 03:47 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird (Post 3194676)
Oh, I knew it wasn't an ebook; I just assumed the rule had been relaxed.
Ah, well, in that case we'll need a ruling from the Grand Muckity-Muck! I'd still love for it to win. :D


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