To Be Sung Under Water - Tom McNeal

To Be Sung Under Water
Tom McNeal
Abacus

The first time we fall in love, lasts forever.

Love is complex. It can uplift your spirit and it can bring it crashing to the ground. Judith first falls in love in her teens. Traversing between Vermont and Nebraska where her parents have separated to, Judith meets and falls in love with Willy Blunt whilst living with her Dad. Leaving for college, she meets Malcolm and consciously starts to let go of her past. Starts to let go of Willy and the promises she made.

In her mid-forties, Judith is living in California. She is married to Malcolm and is the mother to a an intelligent teenage daughter. In her career, she is a successful film editor who puts in long hours to meet deadlines. By all counts, Judith has everything a modern career woman aspires to in the 21st-century. But Judith is not happy. She suspects her husband is having an affair, her daughter behaves distant and she feels threatened by the new breed of ambitious editors gunning for her job. As Judith becomes more disillusioned with her life, her thoughts return to happier days. And to Willy Blunt. At this point the author raises the philosophical question: if you had the chance to reunite with your first love, would you do it?

For Judith it means returning to Nebraska and track down Willy Blunt. Again the author examines whether two people ever love equally. When they meet, Judith discovers a man shrunken by life. Married with two sons, Willy never forgot Judith. Alone in the log cabin he has built he confesses to her these poignant words.

For you, I was a chapter-a good chapter, maybe, or even your favorite chapter, but still, just a chapter-and for me, you were the book.

Although the book has all the ingredients of a sweet and tender love story. McNeal's writing is staggering. A pastoral, romantic, lushly written novel that moves between past and present. Its a book that breaks your heart and makes you fall in love all over again.

The Street Sweeper - Elliot Perlman

The Street Sweeper

Elliot Perlman

Vintage

On a busy New York City corner, four people, a street sweeper, an oncologist, a history professor and a little girl are clustered in a small group. From those who pass them on that busy corner, few if any have any idea as to what has led the group here. Yet these seemingly unrelated individuals from different walks of life are bound by a common history of struggle, bravery, and unexpected kindness of those who have come before them.

Recently released from prison, Lamont Williams is an African American janitor working on probation in an Manhattan hospital and seeking to locate the daughter he has not seen for the past few years. By chance on one of his shifts, Lamont befriends an elderly patient, Henryk Mendelbrot, a Holocaust survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau prison camp.

Whilst Henryk recalls the horrors of those dark days in Poland from his hospital bed, a few kilometers uptown, the historian Adam Zignelik, a professor at Columbia University and the son of a civil rights lawyer, is on the cusp of a professional and personal crisis. Desperate for something to save him, he uncovers the remarkable story of a man who was determined to record the voices and stories of Holocaust survivors.


As the two men struggle to survive in the early 21st-century New York, their different paths converge in ways neither could have foreseen. Their stories span the 20th century, sweeping across continents and touching on pivotal historical moments, to finally bring us to the present.

In the hands of a less skillful author The Street Sweeper could have ended up as a sentimental Holocaust or a preaching civil rights story. But Perlman's fresh approach and skill breathed new life into this well-visited chapter of our history.