"State of Wonder" is an immensely touching novel, although as with much of Patchett's work, its emotional impact is somewhat muted by her indefatigable niceness.
Three women are on a journey of self-discovery in Ephron's whimsical, touching novel: Tracee, a kleptomaniac in a wedding dress; Lana, a recovering alcoholic; and Rita, a minister's wife desperate to escape her marriage.
Willy Muller is a reptilian celebrity biographer, misanthrope and all-round scuzzy character haunted by the ghost of his estranged daughter, who before her suicide mailed him every journal she'd written since she was 9. Writing here last year, Jeff Giles called this "an acerbic, sneakily touching novel" that at its best "calls to mind Martin Amis's phosphorescently nasty oeuvre".
After the dot-com crash, the unnamed narrator of La Farge's touching novel — a computer programmer unmoored by the crash and also by the death of his grandfather — returns to the upstate New York town where he spent childhood summers with his grandparents.
It requires a touch screen, a novel hardware input device and some smart programming, a perfect combination for a final project.
Date: Tuesday 2 March Time: 7.00pm Venue: Hall One, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG Price: £9.50 American author Jonathan Safran Foer will join John Mullan for a discussion of Everything is Illuminated, his funny and touching novel about a young American Jew's journey to the Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis.
Marti Leimbach's Daniel Isn't Talking is a beautifully crafted and immensely touching novel which also depicts the dramatic effects autism can exert on the dynamics of the family.
This familiar street theater is replayed with maximum pathos toward the conclusion of "Monumental Propaganda," Vladimir Voinovich's satirical and often touching novel, when a few bedraggled protesters advance down the famous Moscow thoroughfare Tverskaya Street.
In Carey's touching novel, set in a London museum of "clocks and watches, automata and other wind-up engines," a grieving curator immerses herself in 19th-century journals about the construction of a mechanical bird.
My favourite character is undoubtedly Alfie, the poor old tortoise who gets taken away from his little house on the balcony.' To kinder characters, now, and the theme of friendship, Lottie Longshanks wrote a delightful review of the heart-touching novel Layla Queen of Hearts by Glenda Millard.
The World Without You is a heart-searing, eye-tearing, and soul-touching novel about loss and resilience, family and individuals, and the enduring connections that bind us together, no matter how awful a wrenching we endure.
