The Renovation

Hello Bookworms. Happy November! Can you believe it’s here? It’s time to put away the Halloween decorations in a while and get ready for this penultimate month. I was away in the Bay Area (see photo above), which was gorgeous and surprisingly warm, so I didn’t post last weekend. I’ve been MIA for a while. And usually today I would post a monthly Preview of new releases, but I will wait till next weekend for that. Life was too busy this week. And who knew October could be such a crazy month, but it went by in a flash.

I had a good trip, and my sister and I went to the book event in San Francisco with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Kingsolver about her new novel Partita. It was a great treat to hear her talk of her books and life, and the novel was included with the ticket. It’s on my fall list to read. My sister finished a copy before the talk and gave it two enthusiastic thumbs up.

At the event, Kingsolver spoke about how she found the need to write a different kind of story — a love story — after the big success of her epic novel Demon Copperhead. These past few weeks, she’s been drawing big crowds on her U.S. book tour and has sold out at various venues. She’s not only a true literary star but also a fun and insightful speaker. Her love of classical music comes through in her new novel about a pianist, and she’s had a notable pianist play at each of her book tour stops across the country. It’s very cool. So catch her if you get a chance.

And now onto November. This month we will find out the winners of several big book prizes, notably the Booker Prize on Nov. 9, the Canadian Giller Prize on Nov. 16, and the National Book Awards on Nov. 18. There’s also various other literary prizes including France’s literary Goncourt Prize (Nov. 3), which you can find out more about the finalists here. Parlez-vous français?

I can only guess that Marlon James will win the Booker for his highly heralded novel The Disappearers (thanks to Carmen for reading that long novel and reporting back … that it’s explicit and violent but also gripping and well done, worth 5 stars). But do either Elizabeth Strout or Douglas Stuart have a shot? Those are the two shortlisted authors I’ve read. Or will they give the Booker to the smaller novel May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry … or the less popular novel The End of Everything by M. John Harrison — which only has a 2.85 (!) rating on Goodreads. Are the Booker judges smoking weed? They passed on shortlisting The Renovation and Switzy but green-lighted The End of Everything, so you figure it.

And now I’ll leave you with a couple reviews of what I finished lately.

The Renovation by Kenan Orhan / Farrar Straus, & Giroux / 257 pages / 2026

4.25 stars. When we first meet the narrator Dilara she’s a recent immigrant to Italy from Turkey with her husband and aging father. She’s trained as a child psychologist but can’t get a job in Italy. So she focuses on domestic chores like caring for her father who has Alzheimer’s and having the bathroom renovated. But when it’s done, she finds out they’ve made it into a prison cell like the infamous awful one in Istanbul. She tries to contact the contractor to fix it but has no such luck.

As it goes on, things happen in the cell … with guards and inmates and you wonder if Dilara is actually losing her mind or what’s exactly going on. She misses her homeland terribly and the stress of caring for her father wears on her a lot. Her husband flees on a trip. And soon it unfolds why they came to Italy in the first place, which is due to the political oppression in Turkey under President Erdoğan and her father being a professor and dissident. You have to see how it plays out with the cell and Dilara … it’s a bit of a doozy.

I liked this allegorical novel quite a bit — thanks to Carmen for her favorable review on GR. It’s clever and unsettling … political and timely … weird and unique … about our current world under authoritarian figures, in this case Turkey. Dilara is quite a narrator who seems taken to the brink and we are pulled along with her. At times you sympathize with her predicament and at other times she tires you to the nub. By the end, I needed Dilara to give it a rest. This novel reminded me slightly of a strange cross … between like Paul Lynch’s novel Prophet Song and Charlotte Wood’s novel Stone Yard Devotional. Just the feelings of apprehension and unease.

I often like novels with narrators on the brink and this was no exception. It was sort of funny because we recently had a small bathroom renovated (with gray tile) and I could relate a bit to this story about a cell, Lol. This new-to-me author Kenan Orhan wowed me at times, and he wrote this debut in his early 30s, whoa. I was really surprised too to hear he lives in Kansas City. I was sure he was in Istanbul, but apparently his relatives are there. The book — the author says — emerged from “his frustration with Erdogan’s regime, and the heartbreaking outcome of the 2023 elections” among other things. It’s a dynamite debut.

Brawler: Stories by Lauren Groff / Riverhead / 281 pages / 2026

3.75 stars. I had this book of stories on my pile for quite a while. It was on my summer list and then on my fall list before I finally got to it. I am not typically a short story reader, but this collection has received a lot of fanfare, so I wanted to get to it. Lauren Groff has now written three books of short stories and five novels, so you wonder a bit of her preference. Which does she like better and excel at? A bit of both it appears.

The nine stories in this collection are mostly sad … people on the fringes going through hard things. In “The Wind,” the girl’s grandmother is trying to escape with her and her brothers on the bus before her abusive husband returns; while in “To Sunland,” a sister is dropping off her mentally disabled older brother in a group home following the death of their mother; whereas the title story “Brawler” features a teenager who’s good on the diving team but faces an incapacitated mother at home by herself.

Also I liked the last story “Annunciation” which I think is the only one with a first-person narrative about a girl who leaves her family after college graduation without telling them, and winds up in Redwood City, Calif., renting a cottage from an older lady who tells her life’s adventures in bits and pieces. While there, she also works with a co-worker she’s fond of who’s on the run. All in all, it’s a sad-ish but golden time in her young life that she never forgets.

In notes at the end of the book, Groff writes about the inspiration for each story, which is interesting. Her real life is mingled with a few of these such as “Annunciation.” Though I’ve only read her novel Fates and Furies in addition to this, I think I’ll continue to read Groff’s books in the future. She seems to have talent to burn.

Next I was going to review Paul Yoon’s moving, superb new novel Etna, but I think I’ll wait till next time since I’ve gone on long enough. I can’t seem to write shorter reviews.

But how’s your reading going? Did you change your clocks today? Our province for the first time is keeping the same Daylight Savings Time here, which is a bit confusing since other places are changing. We will see how it goes. It’s crazy — each place is different. I admit I like DST and keeping the clocks the same.

For those in the U.S., make sure to vote by Tuesday. I have voted absentee by mail in the state of Virginia. Go! And have a great week.