Mimi Power and Magnifico: an author's blog

Of English literature’s romantic heroes, it's hard to find one more disconsolate than Edward Fairfax Rochester. In Sarah Shoemaker’s re-imagining of Mr. Rochester , we can better see why. Edward’s mother dies giving birth to him, his older brother is a menacing tyrant, his father a manipulating merchant with little feeling for his second son. Edward’s ties to home are severed at an early age, his closest friendships end in tragedy, his torturous marriage in Jamaica is the result of a business scheme concocted by his father when Edward was but a boy. And we thought Jane Eyre had a grim youth. How bitterness takes root and drives a good man to grievous wrongs is meticulously unravelled in Mr. Rochester. In this comes a soul-searching empathy for the depths of Edward’s feelings for Jane (herself hardly a ray of sunshine amongst literature’s most enduring heroines).  There are two sides to every couple’s story . At long last, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre has a worthy...

Happiness is a funny thing. If you’re comedienne Paula Poundstone, searching for it is even funnier. In the The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness, Poundstone cleans out the junk drawer; learns how to email and taekwondoes herself down a dress size. She picks up a nifty nickname—“Sugar Push”—by  taking swing dancing lessons, hugs every audience member after a live taping of NPR’s “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!”; talks to lizards while backpacking with her oldest daughter in the Angeles National Forest; spends a day petting her 16 cats and another watching mostly horrible movies with her three kids. In the “get positive” experiment, Poundstone sticks motivational sayings in eye-catching places, but only the ones she can’t argue. Fear of scraping off the underside of the Lamborghini she rents for a day puts a damper on its happiness-effect. Volunteering at a senior’s home is “balou-ful”, but bittersweet. In the meantime, her kids grow, laugh and talk ...

One afternoon a few years ago, two friends and I sat on my porch and mourned the gradual loss, over the years, of our nicer selves. “Where has she gone?” we each wondered. Reluctantly, we came to the conclusion that our “niceness”—our mercy—had simply worn down—an inevitable by-product of aging. We are not the only ones lamenting our winnowing of mercy. Anne Lamott does, too. Enough to write a book about it. There is hope, yet. We are not so far gone, my friends and I, that we have become the dogs in the famous New Yorker cartoon Lamott recalls in Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy : “It’s not enough that we succeed. Cats must also fail.” What if we are just out of practice? And, age aside, what if we, as a society, are all a little rusty on the mercy front? “Mercy, grace, forgiveness and compassion are synonyms” writes Lamott.  “And when we practise mercy, it is restored to us." And what if mercy is not a constant of character, some have it, some don’t, but retriev...

In the diminishing light of a winter evening thick with frost, a dark-coated stranger arrives in an Irish town. His business card presents him as Dr. Vladimir Dragan, Healer and Sex Therapist. No one checks his references. “Dr. Vlad” claims “his part of the world” to be Montenegro. He does not say Bosnia. He does not say Sarajevo. If he had, the good people of Cloonaila might have been more alert. More inclined to inquire. “Tis an honour to have you Sir,” says Dara, from behind the bar in the town pub. In this, he is mistaken. The doctor is careful; the village hospitable. Before long, he has established a place for himself. He will wait until they come to him. And they do. For Fidelma McBride, who comes too close, entwining herself in an affair where few questions are asked, the consequences will be harrowing when the doctor’s true history is revealed. Estranged from her husband, self-exiled from Cloonaila, Fidelma becomes one of the people she only read of in the pap...

To volunteer without being asked; to discriminate only for character, never for colour; to be truthful when the answer will cause hurt…such are the everyday braveries familiar to Mary North when war is declared on the third of September, 1939. And they are more than enough to propel her into action, service, love and tragedy in Chris Cleave’s Everyone Brave is Forgiven . To be brave, it helps very much to have brave friends watching over you. In this, Mary and Alistair Heath, separated by an ocean, are equally fortunate. For Mary, there is Hilda to jostle her into the ambulance corps: “Why wander through your thoughts,” says Hilda, “when you could drive through them quite recklessly, with sirens? The worst that could happen is that we might help someone.” For Alistair, requisitioned to the “unpromising rock” of Malta, there is Simonson, a fellow captain (and a character inspired by Cleave’s grandfather who served on Malta in the Second World War). Half-starved and under siege,...