Five Minutes Peace

Twitter Authors' 2009 favourites

One of the many things I love about Twitter is that it is crammed with authors. (And readers. And publishers, agents, publicists, and more. All passionate about books.) And so I asked via my own Twitter (@Keris) what their favourite book of 2009 was. 

Caroline Rance: A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth

Caroline Smailes: An A-Z of Possible Worlds' by A.C. Tillyer

Sarah Fox: The Children's Book by A S Byatt

BARBARA SAMUEL O'NEAL reviews The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

Barbara Samuel is the author of such gorgeous books as Lady Luck's Map of Vegas and Madame Mirabou's School of Love. As Barbara O'Neal, she's written The Lost Recipe for Happiness, which I am desperate to read. Her review of The Art of Racing in the Rain was previously published on her blog and is reprinted with permission.

If I tell you it is narrated by a dog, you might think it won’t be something you’ll like…too precious, too self-conscious. But you would be wrong on both counts. Enzo the dog is one of the best characters I’ve ever met. He’s honorable and flawed, devoted and hungry for his own goals. His beloved master, Denny, is a race car driver who must face a terrible series of events (and there are some parts through the middle that make it hard to read). Throughout the novel, Enzo explains to us how racing works, who the masters are and how they make it work.

KATHERINE CENTER reviews American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

Katherine Center - author of The Bright Side of Disaster, one of the Top 10 books I've read this year - reviews Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife:

I just finished Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel, American Wife: “a work of fiction loosely inspired by the life on an American first lady.” And oh, how I loved it.

The writing is so fine. The dialogue is so crisp and smart, the inner landscape of the main character is so textured and complicated. The story felt completely real to me. I read the first of four sections with tears in my eyes for page after page, and then, by the last section, I was toting the book with me everywhere–pulling it out at stoplights, walking and reading in the halls of my son’s school at pick-up, and, this afternoon, letting my kids make a potion out of a mushed-up hard-boiled egg and a cup of orange juice. All so I could keep reading.