Vernon God Little (2003) is a novel by DBC Pierre. It was his debut novel and won the Booker Prize in 2003. The title character is a fifteen-year-old boy who lives in a small town in the U.S. state of Texas. When his friend Jesus Navarro commits suicide after killing sixteen bullying schoolmates, suspicion falls on Vernon, who becomes something of a scapegoat in his small hometown of Martirio. Fearing the death penalty, he goes on the run to Mexico.
The Famished Road is the Booker Prize-winning novel written by Nigerian author Ben Okri. The novel, published in 1991, follows Azaro, an abiku or spirit child, living in an unnamed most likely Nigerian city. The novel employs a unique narrative style incorporating the spirit world with the "real" world in what some have classified as magical realism. Others have labeled it animist realism. Still others choose to simply call the novel fantasy literature. The book exploits the belief in the coexistence of the spiritual and material worlds that is a defining aspect of traditional African life.
No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread, accompanied by four supporting narratives.
The Gods of Mars is a 1918 Edgar Rice Burroughs science fiction novel, the second of his famous Barsoom series. It can be said that the novel set the tone for much science fiction to come. Its influence can clearly be seen in franchises such as Star Trek and Farscape. While Burroughs no doubt borrowed liberally from the pulp fiction of his day, particularly westerns and swashbuckling tales, the pacing and themes set the tone for the soft science fiction genre. The protagonist, John Carter, with his proficiency in hand-to-hand combat and flirtations with beautiful alien women, could be said to have set the mold for later influential icons like Captain James T. Kirk and James Bond.
I expected to be thrilled by this novel about neo-Nazis and their attempts to gain power using the spear that pierced the side of Christ, but it was an effort to work my way through this novel. I believe it's focus is too narrow-- it's missing a sense of international intrigue that you would get from a good spy novel, or a sense of awe that you would get from a novel that knows something about the occult. In short, it needed to have opened up a bit more, to have a more global perspective on what are basically earth-shaking events. It doesn't help that some of the action scenes are a bit awkward, either. An adequate time-killer, nothing more.
