Mastics-Moriches-Shirley Community Library Reader Advisory Blog: And the winner is...

In April, this blog named the nominees for the annual Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The recently-announced winner is the political thriller Red April by Peruvian author Santiago Rocagliolo, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman. Mother-haunted, wife-abandoned, literature-loving, quietly eccentric Félix Chacaltana Saldívar is a hapless, by-the-book, unambitious prosecutor living in Lima. Up to this moment, he has lived a life in which nothing particularly good or bad has ever happened to him. But he has just been put in charge of an investigation into a bizarre murder that may be linked to Peru's infamous terrorist group, the Shining Path. As the investigation proceeds, in propulsive twists and turns, Saldívar will be compelled to confront what it means to be moral in a corrupt and brutal society while witnessing what happens to both the individual and society when death becomes the only certainty in life.

Author and translator will share the £10,000 prize money; see this article from The Independent for more details about the award and the author, as well as an excerpt from the book.

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Genre: Adult Non-Fiction
Rating: 5 out of 5

"Being Mortal is about the limitations of what modern medicine can provide for people as their lives draw to a close. Gawande argues that the objective of medicine should not merely be treatment and survival; medical care should also ensure dignity in death and having control over one's final moments. He argues that instead of aggressively fighting the inescapable realities of aging, we should ask the hard questions of ourselves and our loved ones -- What makes life worth living? When should we try to extend our lives, and when should we choose a better quality of our remaining days over extending their quantity?

This book is difficult to read. Not because of the way Gawande writes -- his style is highly engaging, and he never lapses into excessively scientific jargon or overly simplistic explanations -- but because of the tough subject matter. Gawande draws on his own experiences as a doctor and peppers his book with honest and humane stories of his patients, friends, and family; the stories he tells make the book more accessible, and also more heartbreaking. (And that's not a bad thing.)

No one likes to think about their loved ones', or their own, impending mortality. But it's important to have these hard conversations, because as Gawande says, "endings matter." - Amanda

And the winner is...

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