Last week the 2009 Nebula Award Final Ballot nominees were announced and for the first time in several years I didn’t know one of the books up for Best Novel.
The Love We Share Without Knowing by Christopher Barzak.
Sadly and intriguingly, I knew nothing about this book. I had to know more. The other nominees are fantastic. I knew The City & the City by China Mieville would be on the list. I knew The Windup Girl by Pablo Bacigalupi would be on the list. I had sneaking suspicions that Boneshaker by Cherie Priest and Finch by Jeff Vandermeer would be on the list. My best friend assured me that Flesh and Fire by Laura Anne Gilman would be on the list.
That left The Love We Share Without Knowing by Christopher Barzak, the book that had slipped by my awareness on ninja feet.
Since I am one of those people who have to watch every single motion picture up for the Best Picture Oscar, just so I feel in the know and yet can fully criticize once the winner has been announced, the same goes with the Nebula and Hugo Awards. I try my hardest to read all novels up for the awards.
One, it is kind of my job now to do it, but two and more importantly, I like to do it. In an odd way similar to the Oscars, I feel complete if I’ve read the books nominated.
Over the weekend I did a couple of online searches to learn more about The Love We Share Without Knowing and its author, Christopher Barzak. What I found was quite interesting. I went and bought the book within two hours of doing my research. That’s how easily I was moved to buy it.
Here is the book summary for those of you also intrigued:
In this haunting, richly woven novel of modern life in Japan, the author of the acclaimed debut One for Sorrow explores the ties that bind humanity across the deepest divides. Here is a Murakamiesque jewel box of intertwined narratives in which the lives of several strangers are gently linked through love, loss, and fate.
On a train filled with quietly sleeping passengers, a young man’s life is forever altered when he is miraculously seen by a blind man. In a quiet town an American teacher who has lost her Japanese lover to death begins to lose her own self. On a remote road amid fallow rice fields, four young friends carefully take their own lives–and in that moment they become almost as one. In a small village a disaffected American teenager stranded in a strange land discovers compassion after an encounter with an enigmatic red fox, and in Tokyo a girl named Love learns the deepest lessons about its true meaning from a coma patient lost in dreams of an affair gone wrong.
From the neon colors of Tokyo, with its game centers and karaoke bars, to the bamboo groves and hidden shrines of the countryside, these souls and others mingle, revealing a profound tale of connection–uncovering the love we share without knowing.
Exquisitely perceptive and deeply affecting, Barzak’s artful storytelling deftly illuminates the inner lives of those attempting to find–or lose–themselves in an often incomprehensible world.
I can tell you right now that Christopher is one of the cleanest writers I have read. Every word is placed exactly where it should be and his prose flows incredibly smoothly. There is an art to that and Christopher possesses it. To see what I mean, read an excerpt from The Love We Share Without Knowing HERE!
Jonathan Lethem, who knows a thing or two about the Nebula Awards, had this to say about Christopher’s book:
“Barzak’s sympathy and humor, his awareness, his easeful vernacular storytelling, are extraordinary.” — Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn
Congrats to all of the Nebula Award nominees. As far as I can tell, you all deserve it!
