Novels & Nibbles

Join us on Friday, August 28th at 7:00 PM at Mirko Pasta in Buckhead as we take on the entirety of The Blinds by Adam Sternbergh. Come hungry and ready to talk, and we'll get a table sorted once everyone rolls in.

This one is a neo-western, so expect the dusty small-town setting and the standoff energy without the horses-and-saloons era. It takes place in a remote Texas town officially called Caesura, though everyone living there just calls it the Blinds. The catch is that the residents are all former criminals or witnesses who had their memories wiped and got handed new identities, a sort of last-chance witness protection where nobody knows whether they did something terrible or only watched it happen. Leaving isn't really on the table if you want to stay alive. Holding the whole thing together, more or less, is Sheriff Calvin Cooper, who has kept an uneasy peace for years until a suicide and a murder show up close together and the place starts to come apart. It gets into memory, identity, and guilt, and whether anyone really gets a clean shot at starting over, and it's got a noir, thriller edge with a dark streak running through it.

The setup alone should give us plenty to talk about, from how the town actually runs to what we make of Cooper and the people he's watching.

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Join us on Friday, September 18th at 7:00 PM at Nai Thai Cuisine in Dunwoody as we take on the entirety of Citizen Orlov by Jonathan Payne (Approximately 288 pages). Come hungry and ready to talk, and we'll get a table sorted once everyone rolls in.

Orlov is a fishmonger in a small, unnamed country somewhere in the mountains of central Europe, and the story opens around the end of the First World War. He's honest, unremarkable, and thinks of himself as a thoroughly good and dutiful citizen. One day he's walking past a government building, hears a telephone ringing through an open window, and answers it because it seems like the responsible thing to do. The voice on the line gives him a set of cryptic instructions meant for a secret agent, and by the time he tries to pass the message along and explain that he's nobody at all, it's already too late — everyone has decided he's an agent, and nothing he says talks them out of it. He gets absorbed into the Ministry of Security, handed a real assignment involving the king, and dropped into a world of competing schemes where he can't tell who's on which side or what he's actually walked into. That's our spy pick for the month, though Orlov has to be one of the least likely secret agents to ever anchor one. It's set up as a comic spin on the genre, with all the usual machinery — handlers, coded phone calls, a jumpy security state — dropped on top of a man who has no business being anywhere near any of it.

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