Month: August 2015

Music for Wartime: Stories, by Rebecca Makkai, (Viking), 240 pages, released 23 June, 2015

Rebecca Makkai won praise last year for her novel The Hundred-Year House, but she’s perhaps best known as a writer of short stories—and she’s just had a new collection of stories, Music for Wartime, released in June. I enjoyed House, but I like the stories even better.

Makkai creates unusual characters in moments of crisis—with some of these crises more significant than others. War is ever-present, sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically. She gives us three music students killed during World War II, a musicologist attempting to document the songs of a culture being annihilated,  a political prisoner who takes on another man’s life, a miniature Johann Sebastian Bach who materializes in a present-day highrise apartment.

Makkai’s writing is peppered with little gems of sentences. “To claim one ancestor would be to claim them all, even the ones on the wrong sides of those decisive moral battles of history.” “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the movies about caring for transplanted historical people, it’s never to take them out in public.” “The glorious present tense—that blindest of tenses, ignoring all context, all past and future failures.” “After forty, you look how you deserve to.”

If you’re looking for short fiction that will surprise you, provoke you, and place you firmly within worlds you’d never have imagined on you own, you’ll appreciate Music for Wartime.

Two Bronze Pennies: A Police Procedural Set in Late 19th-Century England (D.I. Tom Harper Mysteries), by Chris Nickson, (Severn House), 224 pages, release date 1 August, 2015

Two Bronze Pennies provides a disparate set of tales. On the one hand, Detective Inspector Tom Harper has been charged with finding the perpetrator of a series of anti-Jewish murders in Leeds. This community, made up primarily of immigrants and their England-born children is tight-lipped and angry. Harper has difficulty getting the information he needs. He also worries that retaliative violence may break out at any moment.

On the other hand, Harper is also charged with assisting Capitaine Bertrand Muyrere, a French detective investigating the disappearance of Louie LePrince, the French inventor of “moving pictures” (sorry, Edison). LePrince was a historical figure and did disappear on September 16, 1890.

Harper is aided by his wife Annabelle, a self-sufficient pub owner with a bit more tact than the detective possesses. As a pub owner, she has an income significantly greater than Harper’s, which makes for some interesting moments between the pair.

If you enjoy historical mysteries, especially those carefully grounded in fact, Two Bronze Pennies will provide you with satisfying reading, taking you beyond the usual depictions of Victorian England to a complex, volatile time.