March is reading comfort month for me. Spring break is just a week away, and I've been compiling my companion books for my week away. For the most part, my favourite reads are in the mystery genre, although I've expanded my interests in recent years. I have a long list of favourite mystery authors, most of whom are British (think P.D. James, Reginald Hill, Ian Rankin). We can now add Tom Rob Smith to this list, for his debut novel Child 44, which was long listed for the Booker prize in 2008. I tend to think of Booker nominees as "literary" genres, and while I totally admire how well this book was written, what made it so enjoyable to read was that it was a thriller about child murders in Stalin's Russia. What made it even more pleasurable to read, in the end, was that it is a brutally accurate portrayal of what life was like in the USSR of the 50s, and what it surely must be like now in many parts of the world. There were echoes of Orwell's 1984 in there, and it was chilling to imagine what it must have been like to try to survive in that society. The detective chase had so many twists and turns, and there was so much to learn about daily life, that the 400 pages flew by during my commutes.
I'm not hoping a request for his follow-up novel, The Secret Speech, will come off the library system in time for my Saturday departure. Although I have two novels already packed, my favourite list has just grown again.
