Gianna's Top Twenty of 2014, Day 2

Non Fiction

Boyhood: Twelve Years on Film is a behind the scenes look and year-by-year companion to Linklater’s critically acclaimed masterpiece. So many things to love about this powerful book of photographs shot by Matt Lankes, which includes essays by Linklater, Hawke, Coltrane, and two really moving pieces by Patricia Arquette, and the film’s producer, Cathleen Sutherland.

The book contains over 200 images that illustrate, quite dramatically, the passage of time. It’s quite extraordinary and easily makes my top ten this year.  

Patricia Arquette

Ellar Coltrane

Fiction

If you haven’t joined the church of Evie Wyld, you’re missing out. She is one of the finest writers working today. That’s right, and I called it after reading her debut, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, one of the finest debut novels that I’ve ever read. Yeah, shit just got real, didn’t it?

Evie Wyld 

Wyld’s follow up, All the Birds, Singing is even better and a bit more ambitious. Jake, a sheep farmer living alone on the British Coast, comes to find that something (or someone) is killing off her sheep one by one. If you happened to watch Jane Campion’s mini-series this year called Top of the Lake, run to read this novel. It’s that smart, dreamy, ominous, vivid, and rich.

If you like Dan Chaon, Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan, Donna Tartt, or even David Mitchell, you will love Evie Wyld. Read her now before she becomes super famous; there's nothing better than being first. Nothing. I wonder if somewhere Evie is writing something just as nice about me....

[Okay, Liz here: Gianna totally, 100%, without question, is mentioning All the Birds, Singing now because she knows that I've been Evie Wyld's biggest fan from the beginning and Gianna is trying to scoop me. That's some crap, there. I introduced Gianna to this author. She's stealing my picks. I'd file a complaint with the ombudsperson, but 1. we don't work for the same company, and 2. I have no idea who the ombudsperson is. Humph.]

All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld

Read this book. Do it. Read it now.

Happy day! One of my favorite books of the year, a book that has haunted me for months now since I read it, is finally on sale. If I were to pick an early favorite for this year's Man Booker Prize, All the Birds, Singing 

would be that pick.

Evie Wyld showed that she is a writer with some mad skills with her debut novel, the award winning After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, a novel about fathers and sons and the cost of war set in Australia. Now she's ready to explode to the literary forefront with her sophomore effort, All the Birds, Singing. I love this book.

Jake is an isolated woman working as a sheep farmer on an island off the coast of England. She is damaged (an understatement), and only the animals provide a reprieve from her remoteness. Then, at night, something begins to mutilate her sheep. She hears noises in the dark, and she finds the torn apart bodies of her flock. (I should mention that this novel isn't a comedy.) How did Jake get to this place? And what's happening?

Wyld's first book,
also great reading

Wyld unravels Jake's story in alternating chapters, with flashbacks starting in the present and then moving backward in time. In the present, the reader is struggling with the violence of the sheep murders and the unknown perpetrator (wolf? man? monster?). In the flashbacks, the reader encounters Jake the prostitute, Jake the captive, Jake the woman with unexplained scars on her back, and Jake the teenager in Australia. One reason I love this book is that the reader's opinions about the characters shift as more of the back story is revealed. Can a man who seems like a monster also be a man who's down on his luck and a simple farmer? How does a woman so cold and dissociated as Jake become so human? The method of storytelling adds depth and tension to the narrative.

Evie Wyld

I should also mention that Evie Wyld is a brilliant writer. She conjures visceral moments with words, but her novels don't bog down with heavy handed descriptive passages. Evie Wyld should rank among the titans of a new generation of writers and should win major awards. I would eagerly read anything she wrote.