Sukey's Favorite

My Dream of You
By Nuala O'Faolain
Simon & Schuster Audio, $26
ISBN 0743518454

Buy or borrow this book!

Support your local independent bookseller

Find it in a WorldCat library

Compare prices at major online bookstores

Nuala O'Faolain's debut novel, My Dream of You, is one of the more affecting audios I've listened to lately. Her language is lyrical, her perceptions touching and finely honed. But most of all, it's a good, totally involving book with wonderful characters, and read here in a perfectly nuanced performance by Dearbhla Molloy. Kathleen de Burca, now nearly 50, turned her back on Ireland and her unhappy home almost 30 years ago. She roamed the world as an upbeat travel writer, never allowing love or commitment into her life and now, restless after her best friend's sudden death, she returns to her rejected homeland to write about a sensational 19th century Anglo-Irish divorce case (a fascinating story in itself). Though she set out to search the past, it's the present -- middle age, with its sags, snags and losses, and a single life that may forever be so -- that Kathleen must face, and so she does, with regrets of course, but with unflinching, unsentimental clarity.

Memorable May listening

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Take a new Adam Dalgliesh mystery by P. D. James that's unabridged and read by Charles Keating in his polished, silver-smooth British voice and you have all the elements to delight an audio listener. This happy convergence comes about in Death in Holy Orders, James' 17th book that once again puts her crime fiction in an eloquent class of its own. Asked to look into the death of a young ordinand at a small, elite theological college on the windswept coast of East Anglia, Commander Dalgliesh returns to St. Anselm's where he spent idyllic summers as a boy. But his quiet, circumspect investigation quickly changes when a visiting, and much disliked, archdeacon is found violently murdered and ritually laid out in the church. Everyone, from the students to the resident priests, is under suspicion, and Dalgliesh knows he's up against an extraordinarily clever and ruthless killer.


The ice stuff
Jerri Nielsen, stressed-out ER doctor, devastatingly divorced and separated from her teenage children, took a job as physician for a group of 41 scientists and support staff working at a remote Antarctic outpost. She loved the staggering emptiness, the black sky of the months-long arctic night, the ice-crusted dome where she lived and worked; she loved the camaraderie of the crew. In this frigid world, stripped of useless noise and comforts, she found her "perfect home." But just a few weeks after the station was absolutely sealed off for eight months, she found she had an aggressive form of breast cancer. Her plight, the risky flight to drop medical supplies and the even riskier flight to take her out made headlines and captured our attention for months. Now, she offers us the real story behind those headlines in Ice Bound: A Doctor's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole, written with Maryanne Vollers and read by the author.


A thrilling start
All serial killers are odious, but the one savagely offing newlyweds on their wedding nights is especially evil. And Lindsay Boxer, homicide inspector for the San Francisco police and valiant heroine of 1st to Die has taken the case in the first of James Patterson's new series. Maybe it's because she has just been told she has a life-threatening blood disease or maybe it's because the repellent rampage is picking up speed that Lindsay turns to three resourceful women friends -- a medical examiner, an assistant D.A. and reporter newly assigned to crime -- for help in piecing the ghastly puzzle together. Each brings her special skills to their unique support group, a group I'm sure we'll hear much more about in Patterson-perpetrated bestsellers to come. Performers Melissa Leo and Dylan Baker keep the tension taut and the pace racing.


The luck of the Irish
A good part of that luck is to have Maeve Binchy, who was our BookPage "cover girl" for March, writing novels about the Ireland she lives in. Her latest, Scarlet Feather, is charmingly read by Caroline Winterson in this audio presentation. As with all of Binchy's previous tales, we quickly and willingly fall into the lives of her characters. Here, we follow Cathy Scarlet and her business partner Tom Feather through a fateful year as they scramble to make their new catering business a success in thriving Dublin. Building a business is hard enough, but these two have their share of domestic problems. For Cathy the problem is a worthy, but distracted, workaholic husband and for Tom, a stunning girlfriend with grand modeling ambitions. I found myself rooting for Cathy and Tom all the way, hoping for a happy ending, but not wanting the story to end. This is Binchy at her best.


Memorable memoir
Twonny, or Fish as he was called later, was born in prison to an unwed teenage mother and raised in a nightmarish foster home where he was never loved, never wanted. His case workers tried but didn't really understand how bad the situation was. Amazingly, Antwone Quenton Fisher made it out of those Dickensian depths without getting involved in drugs or crime; somehow he never stopped dreaming, somehow he held onto the hope of finding his family, finding his way in a world stacked against him. It took years, but ultimately he found himself. Finding Fish, compellingly read by Alton Fitzgerald White, is his story, told with candor and without self-pity. Mercifully for Fish, his saga ends on a high note and is now being made into a major motion picture by Denzel Washington. But it's an alarming story, one that should make us look harder at what can happen here amidst our plenty.


© 2001 ProMotion, inc.
www@bookpage.com