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I really enjoyed Kate Atkinson's Life After Life. The main character dies at the end of every chapter, and the next chapter begins as if she didn't die. The author is coming out with another book this year that follows another character from that book. Life After Life
I listened to The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin last year, and it really moved me. The main character is captivating in his kindness and strength. The book captured the sometimes gentle and sometime turbulent ebbs and flows of life, the uncertainty of it and the surprising outcomes. it begins with him at the age of 9 and follows him throughout his life. here's the goodreads description... "Set in the untamed American West, a highly original and haunting debut novel about a makeshift family whose dramatic lives are shaped by violence, love, and an indelible connection to the land.You belong to the earth, and the earth is hard.
At the turn of the twentieth century, in a rural stretch of the Pacific Northwest in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, a solitary orchardist named Talmadge carefully tends the grove of fruit trees he has cultivated for nearly half a century. A gentle, solitary man, he finds solace and purpose in the sweetness of the apples, apricots, and plums he grows, and in the quiet, beating heart of the land--the valley of yellow grass bordering a deep canyon that has been his home since he was nine years old. Everything he is and has known is tied to this patch of earth. It is where his widowed mother is buried, taken by illness when he was just thirteen, and where his only companion, his beloved teenaged sister Elsbeth, mysteriously disappeared. It is where the horse wranglers--native men, mostly Nez Perce--pass through each spring with their wild herds, setting up camp in the flowering meadows between the trees.
One day, while in town to sell his fruit at the market, two girls, barefoot and dirty, steal some apples. Later, they appear on his homestead, cautious yet curious about the man who gave them no chase. Feral, scared, and very pregnant, Jane and her sister Della take up on Talmadage's land and indulge in his deep reservoir of compassion. Yet just as the girls begin to trust him, brutal men with guns arrive in the orchard, and the shattering tragedy that follows sets Talmadge on an irrevocable course not only to save and protect them, putting himself between the girls and the world, but to reconcile the ghosts of his own troubled past.
Writing with breathtaking precision and empathy, Amanda Coplin has crafted an astonishing debut novel about a man who disrupts the lonely harmony of an ordered life when he opens his heart and lets the world in. Transcribing America as it once was before railways and roads connected its corners, she weaves a tapestry of solitary souls who come together in the wake of unspeakable cruelty and misfortune, bound by their search to discover the place they belong. At once intimate and epic, evocative and atmospheric, filled with haunting characters both vivid and true to life, and told in a distinctive narrative voice, The Orchardist marks the beginning of a stellar literary career."
The National Book Foundation selected Amanda Coplin as one of the authors being honored as "5 Under 35" in 2013.
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This time of year brings about all those thoughts of new beginnings and past memories. I've been thinking about a book I read years ago that is the best example I can think of to convey the cycle of life from birth to death. It's called One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It tells the story of creation and destruction of a town called Macondo and the Buendia family members who create the town and then bring about its eventual death down to the last surviving member of the family. In between there are stories about the different characters of the family, some quiet and some violent. There is also contact w/ the outside world which brings strife. Family members transform from peaceful pursuits to the pursuit of power.
The book can be read as having political overtones and as a commentary on South American regimes. But at heart, it's an enchanting story about all the elements that comprise human existence and society.
Has anybody out there read it and did it make such a deep impression on you? What is your nomination for a a great book about the cycle - or circle - of life?