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Fiction of 2013
ANSWERS

Test your knowledge of some of last year’s hottest fiction.   All are classics, nothing obscure. 

If you want to have a go before seeing the answers follow this link

 

Name the novel or short story:

1. Many people feel is should won the Man Booker.  Captures the stark reality of subsistence living in a medieval English village as the peasants are displaced from their land by sheep farming.   
Harvest by Jim Crace

 2. Tells the journey of President François Mitterrand's hat after it is stolen and how it changes lives as it moves from person to person.

The President's Hat by Antoine Laurain

3 Things would have turned out better if my mother had lived. As it was, she died  when I was a kid; and though everything that’s happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.

    The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Dystopian parable about the dangers of giving over our hearts and souls to Facebook, Twitter, et al.

   The Circle by Dave Eggers

Story of a young woman moves to New York in the 1970s to become an artist,  only to wind up involved in the revolutionary protest movement that was shaking Italy at the time.

   The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

Home-schooled all his life by his loving, fiercely protective parents, this young boy, with a severe facial deformity, is about to start school for the first time.
  Wonder by RJ Palacio


7. In this short story, suburbanites of some means choose ethnic women hanging by wire threaded through their heads as choice lawn ornaments.
“The Semplica Girl Diaries” by George Saunders

8. Postmodern Gothic novel that purports to be the definitive account of a curse that infected Princeton, New Jersey, in 1905 and 1906.

 The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates

9. Story of the ghosts of the Croatian war that haunt villagers even as their home is transformed into a tourist oasis.
  The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna


10 . . .  she did not like that she had to go to Trenton to braid her hair. It was unreasonable to expect a braiding salon in Princeton—the few black locals she had seen were so light-skinned and lank-haired she could not imagine them wearing braids—and yet as she waited at Princeton Junction station for the train, on an afternoon ablaze with heat, she wondered why there was no place where she could braid her hair.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie


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