Introduction

Welcome to the website for Novels as Stories offered at OLLI, University of Delaware, Spring 2025, by Rebecca Worley.

Both online and inperson classes are available:

• Wednesdays, 10:45 to noon, online via Zoom

• Thursdays, 10:45 to noon, in person, Arsht Hall, room yet to be assigned

Book List

As usual, I'm grappling with the choice of novels to read and discuss for this upcoming term. But I know you want to get started with locating and reading, so here are a couple to begin with:

Mercury Pictures Presents, by Anthony Marra (549 pps).

• Amazon blurb:  

  • New York Times bestseller, Winner of the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction

  • The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini’s Italy to 1940s Los Angeles—a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice from the award-winning author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

  • A gorgeous book . . . sublime.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)

  • Voted one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Guardian, and Booklist

  • Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father’s arrest. 

  • Fifteen years later, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won’t speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can’t escape the studio’s narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria’s only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. 

  • Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father’s past threatens Maria’s carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father’s fate—and her own. 

  • Written with intelligence, wit, and an exhilarating sense of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents spans many moods and tones, from the heartbreaking to the ecstatic. It is a love letter to life’s bit players, a panorama of an era that casts a long shadow over our own, and a tour de force by a novelist whose work The Washington Post calls “a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles.”

NOTE: This book was also highly recommended by two long-time class members. Thank you for that. Also it's on the long side so I wanted to list it early to give you time to read. AND, it has a really interesting concept on perspective near the beginning, a visual perspective that we can talk about. 

We Solve Murders, by Richard Osman (397 pps)

• Amazon blurb: An Editors' pick for Best Books of the Year 2024, and New York Times bestseller

  • A brand new mystery. An iconic new detective duo. And a thrilling new murder to solve . . .

  • Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He still does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar routines: the pub quiz, his favorite bench, his cat waiting for him at home. His days of adventure are over. Adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s job now. Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. Working in private security, every day is dangerous. She’s currently on a remote island protecting mega-bestselling author Rosie D’Antonio, until a dead body and a bag of money mean trouble in paradise. So she sends an SOS to the only person she trusts . . .

  • As a thrilling race around the world begins, can Amy and Steve outrun and outsmart a killer? Solving murders. It’s a family business.

NOTE: We read and discussed The Thursday Murder Club, but this is a completely different rendering of the mystery genre, perhaps more of a "man's" novel, but we can discuss all that, and its "take" on the genre in general.

The Lock-Up: A Detective Mystery (Strafford and Quirke Book 3), John Banville (397 pps)

• Amazon blurb:

  • National Bestseller, NY Times Editors' Choice, Booker Prize winner and “Irish master” (The New Yorker) John Banville’s most ambitious crime novel yet brings two detectives together to solve a globe-spanning mystery. 

  • In 1950s Dublin, Rosa Jacobs, a young history scholar, is found dead in her car. Renowned pathologist Dr. Quirke and DI St. John Strafford begin to investigate the death as a murder, but it’s the victim’s older sister Molly, an established journalist, who discovers a lead that could crack open the case. One of Rosa’s friends, it turns out, is from a powerful German family that arrived in Ireland under mysterious circumstances shortly after World War II. But as Quirke and Strafford close in, their personal lives may put the case—and everyone involved—in peril, including Quirke’s own daughter. Spanning the mountaintops of Italy, the front lines of World War II Bavaria, the gritty streets of Dublin and other unexpected locales, The Lock-Up is an ambitious and arresting mystery by one of the world’s most celebrated authors.

NOTE:  John Banville is a new "find" for me, a superb writer, Irish, won the Booker Prize for his novel The Sea. What caught my attention was his novel Mrs. Osmond, a continuation of the story of Isabel Archer, the heroine in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, one of my favorites, and another example of currently popular "paraellel" novels. 

But this is a mystery, one of several he's written. If you like him as much as I do, read anything, everything, he's written. We can discuss male mystery writers, and perhaps discuss the New York Times essay about "The Disappearance of Literary Men . . . " (Thanks to Andy Corbett for that. I'll send you the file).

The Phoenix Crown, Kate Quinn and Janie Chang (391 pps)

• Amazon blurb: An NPR Best Book of the Year

  • From bestselling authors Janie Chang and Kate Quinn, a thrilling and unforgettable narrative about the intertwined lives of two wronged women, spanning from the chaos of the San Francisco earthquake to the glittering palaces of Versailles.

  • San Francisco, 1906. In a city bustling with newly minted millionaires and scheming upstarts, two very different women hope to change their fortunes: Gemma, a golden-haired, silver-voiced soprano whose career desperately needs rekindling, and Suling, a petite and resolute Chinatown embroideress who is determined to escape an arranged marriage. Their paths cross when they are drawn into the orbit of Henry Thornton, a charming railroad magnate whose extraordinary collection of Chinese antiques includes the fabled Phoenix Crown, a legendary relic of Beijing’s fallen Summer Palace.

  • His patronage offers Gemma and Suling the chance of a lifetime, but their lives are thrown into turmoil when a devastating earthquake rips San Francisco apart and Thornton disappears, leaving behind a mystery reaching further than anyone could have imagined . . . until the Phoenix Crown reappears five years later at a sumptuous Paris costume ball, drawing Gemma and Suling together in one last desperate quest for justice.

NOTE: Yes, Kate Quinn, again, her latest, an historical novel about the San Francisco earthquake, and Chinatown (hence her co-author). And the women who played roles during that historical period--and she cites sources.

There are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak (498 pps., 4.6* on AMZ)

• Amazon Blurb:

  • From the Booker Prize finalist, author of The Island of Missing Trees, an enchanting new tale about three characters living along two great rivers, all connected by a single drop of water.

  • In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives. 

  • n 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains. 

• • In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time. 

  • In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.  

  • A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, a drop which remanifests across the centuries. Both a source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”

NOTE:  This is an interesting author, from Turkey, now living in Britain, exiled for her writing although she's been nominated multiple times for multiple writing awards. It features 3 characters and 3 time periods with a unifying drop of water. So, literature with an environmental theme.

Readers Choice

As I've done in the past, class members will choose the final book. We'll vote during the first class. Please consider:

Camino Ghosts, John  Grisham (295 pps. 4.5* on AMZ)

• Amazon blurb: 

  • Mercer Mann, a popular writer from Camino Island, is back on the beach, marrying her boyfriend, Thomas, in a seaside ceremony. Bruce Cable, infamous owner of Bay Books, performs the wedding. Afterward, Bruce tells Mercer that he has stumbled upon an incredible story. Mercer desperately needs an idea for her next novel, and Bruce now has one. 

  • The true story is about Dark Isle, a sliver of a barrier island not far off the North Florida coast. It was settled by freed slaves three hundred years ago, and their descendants lived there until 1955, when the last one was forced to leave. That last descendant is Lovely Jackson, elderly now, who loves her birthplace and its remarkable history. But now Tidal Breeze, a huge, ruthless corporate developer, wants to build a resort and casino on the island, which Lovely knows, deep down, is rightfully hers. Mercer befriends Lovely, and they plunge into an enormous fight over who owns Dark Isle, taking on Tidal Breeze Corporation, its lawyers, lobbyists, and powerful Florida politicians. But Lovely knows something about the island that could seriously cloud the dollar signs in the developer’s eyes: the island is cursed. It has remained uninhabited for nearly a century for some very real and very troubling reasons. The deep secrets of the past are about to collide with the enormous ambitions of the present, and the fate of Dark Isle—and Camino Island, too—hangs in the balance. 

  • NOTE: Grisham would be our third male mystery writer--popular and acclaimed. So 3 male mystery writers with 3 female historical writers.

OR

By Any Other Name,  Jodi Picoult (525 pps. 4.4* on AMZ)

• Amazon blurb:

  • #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the co-author of Mad Honey comes an “inspiring” (Elle) novel about two women, centuries apart—one of whom is the real author of Shakespeare’s plays—who are both forced to hide behind another name. “You’ll fall in love with Emilia Bassano, the unforgettable heroine based on a real woman that Picoult brings vividly to life in her brilliantly researched new novel.”—Kristin Hannah, author of The Women. 

  • Young playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor Emilia Bassano. But seeing it performed is unlikely, in a theater world where the playing field isn’t level for women. As Melina wonders if she dares risk failure again, her best friend takes the decision out of her hands and submits the play to a festival under a male pseudonym. In 1581, young Emilia Bassano is a ward of English aristocrats. Her lessons on languages, history, and writing have endowed her with a sharp wit and a gift for storytelling, but like most women of her day, she is allowed no voice of her own. Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees all theatre productions in England, Emilia sees firsthand how the words of playwrights can move an audience. She begins to form a plan to secretly bring a play of her own to the stage—by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work. 

  • Told in intertwining timelines, By Any Other Name, a sweeping tale of ambition, courage, and desire centers two women who are determined to create something beautiful despite the prejudices they face. Should a writer do whatever it takes to see her story live on . . . no matter the cost? This remarkable novel, rooted in primary historical sources, ensures the name Emilia Bassano will no longer be forgotten.

NOTE: We've read Jodi Picoult before, although a while ago. This is her first historical novel--two timelines, Renaissance England and modern America, following two women trying to be acknowledged as writers. Emilia Bassano was a real published poet, and the novel plays with speculation that she wrote Shakespeare's plays, something we're not really going to talk about. Speculation has also identified her as Shakespeare's "Dark Lady." But we will talk about Renaissance writers, including Christopher "Kit" Marlowe, who does appear in the story. His is an interesting factual story. But Emilia is also a courtesan and we get quite a bit of information about that career choice.

Links to previous course websites:

Spring 2024

https://sites.google.com/udel.edu/booksingenres/welcome

Fall 2024

https://sites.google.com/udel.edu/readnovels/home

Fall 2023

https://sites.google.com/udel.edu/novelties/home