Callie’s Picks

Cloud Atlas

Short listed for the 2004 Man-Booker prize, Cloud Atlas is a highly imaginative narrative that takes place in a half-dozen different times and places. each part is written in a different style and a precarious thread connects each section one to another. An adventurous ride and read that won’t disappoint…

One Last Look

After several wretched months at sea, Eleanor Oliphant arrives in Calcutta with her brother Henry and sister Harriet. It is 1836, and her beloved Henry has just been appointed England’s new Governor-General for India. Eleanor is to be his official hostess.
Despite the imported English gowns and formal soir?es, India makes a mockery of Eleanor’s sensibilities. Burning heat, starving people, insects as big as eggs-it is all an unreal dream, rife with tumultuous life. Harriet gives herself over to the adventure. Henry busies himself with official duties. Eleanor, though groping for bearings, slowly finds her isolation punctuated by moments of elation: her first monsoon, graceful women in vibrant sarees, Benares rising out of the mist. She discovers she likes curries and her native servants; and often dislikes her compatriots. Over the course of six years and a trek from Calcutta to Kabul and back, India manages to unsettle all of her “old, old ideas.”

The Master

Like Michael Cunningham in “The Hours,” Colm Toibin captures the extraordinary mind and heart of a great writer. Beautiful and profoundly moving, “The Master” tells the story of a man born into one of America’s first intellectual families who leaves his country in the late nineteenth century to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers.

In stunningly resonant prose, Toibin captures the loneliness and the hope of a master of psychological subtlety whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed those he tried to love. The emotional intensity of this portrait is riveting.