Book Review: All the Lonely People by Mike Gayle

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: All the Lonely People
Author: Mike Gayle
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Publication date: November 1, 2023
Length: 385 pages
Genre: Contemporary fiction
Source: Library
Rating:

If you loved A Man Called Ove, then prepare to be delighted as Jamaican immigrant Hubert rediscovers the world he’d turned his back on this “warm, funny” novel (Good Housekeeping).

In weekly phone calls to his daughter in Australia, widower Hubert Bird paints a picture of the perfect retirement, packed with fun, friendship, and fulfillment. But it’s a lie. In reality, Hubert’s days are all the same, dragging on without him seeing a single soul.

Until he receives some good news—good news that in one way turns out to be the worst news ever, news that will force him out again, into a world he has long since turned his back on. The news that his daughter is coming for a visit.

Now Hubert faces a seemingly impossible task: to make his real life resemble his fake life before the truth comes out.

Along the way Hubert stumbles across a second chance at love, renews a cherished friendship, and finds himself roped into an audacious community scheme that seeks to end loneliness once and for all . . .

Life is certainly beginning to happen to Hubert Bird. But with the origin of his earlier isolation always lurking in the shadows, will he ever get to live the life he’s pretended to have for so long?

All the Lonely People by Mike Gayle came to my attention thanks to a blog post highlighting an upcoming short story by the same author — and I was interested enough to want to read the story (which was just released last week, and I haven’t gotten to yet) and to look into his other works. Several of his books sound great… and I’m so glad I decided to give All the Lonely People a try!

Hubert Bird is a widower in his 80s living alone with his cat Puss in the home he shared with his late wife for over fifty years. Hubert was born and raised in Jamaica, and immigrated to London as a young man in search of a job and better prospects. There, he found true love, which flourished despite the racism that he and his white wife faced, raised a family, and lived through life’s ups and downs.

But now, Hubert shuns company and chooses isolation, having driven off his remaining friends years earlier during a dark time in his life. His one source of brightness is his weekly phone call with his daughter Rose, a professor living in Australia. Each week, he tells Rose about his active social life, going into great detail about the antics he gets up to with his close friends Dottie, Dennis, and Harvey, and Rose delights in hearing about his social circle and their escapades. The problem is, none of it is true — it’s a fiction that Hubert has created so that Rose won’t worry about him. But when Rose announces that she’s coming for a visit in a few months, Hubert begins to panic. He’ll have to come clean to Rose about all his lies, but maybe that won’t be so bad if he can actually make some friends between now and her visit.

When a chatty young neighbor, a single mom with a cute 2-year-old, comes knocking on his door, it’s Hubert’s first bit of connection. From there, as he ventures out more often, he starts meeting others, including a young baker from Latvia, an older woman who loves gardening, and a few other random people from the neighborhood. Hubert’s life takes an even bigger turn when the group of friends decide to form a committee — the Campaign to End Loneliness in Bromley. Suddenly, Hubert is thrust into the limelight as the face of the campaign, and his lonely life has been replaced by an ever growing circle of friends and associates.

Past sorrows never truly go away though, and when Hubert faces a shock that makes him finally confront a loss that he’s never gotten over, he’s tempted to retreat back into his former isolation, where he might have been alone, but at least he could pretend that nothing mattered to him.

All the Lonely People is a lovely book full of a charming cast of characters, depicting a life well-lived. Hubert’s life wasn’t easy, but it was full of joy. He experienced great pain and loss, but also true love and friendship. The story is told through chapters that alternate between “now” — Hubert in his 80s, reconnecting with the world around him — and “then”, his journey from Jamaica, finding his way in London, and his life with Joyce and their children.

It’s a beautiful story about connection, caring about others, and finding meaning in life through the people we meet along the way. Hubert is a remarkable character, and it’s wonderful to see him forging new relationships and rekindling old friendships.

As Hubert says toward the end of the book:

Extraordinary things can happen to ordinary people like you and me, but only if we open ourselves up enough to let them.

I highly recommend All the Lonely People. The characters are memorable and easy to care about, and while Hubert thinks of himself as ordinary, his story is anything but.

I’m eager to read more by this talented author! Suggestions welcome!

Purchase links: Amazon – Bookshop.org – Libro.fm
Disclaimer: When you make a purchase through one of these affiliate links, I may earn a small commission, at no additional cost to you.

23Aug2024

Book Review: The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: The Wind Knows My Name
Author: Isabel Allende
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Publication date: June 6, 2023
Length: 253 pages
Genre: Historical/contemporary fiction
Source: Purchased
Rating:

This powerful and moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea weaves together past and present, tracing the ripple effects of war and immigration on one child in Europe in 1938 and another in the United States in 2019.

Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler was six years old when his father disappeared during Kristallnacht—the night their family lost everything. Samuel’s mother secured a spot for him on the last Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria to the United Kingdom, which he boarded alone, carrying nothing but a change of clothes and his violin.

Arizona, 2019. Eight decades later, Anita Diaz, a blind seven-year-old girl, and her mother board another train, fleeing looming danger in El Salvador and seeking refuge in the United States. However, their arrival coincides with the new family separation policy, and Anita finds herself alone at a camp in Nogales. She escapes through her trips to Azabahar, a magical world of the imagination she created with her sister back home.

Anita’s case is assigned to Selena Duran, a young social worker who enlists the help of a promising lawyer from one of San Francisco’s top law firms. Together they discover that Anita has another family member in the United States: Leticia Cordero, who is employed at the home of now eighty-six-year-old Samuel Adler, linking these two lives.

Spanning time and place, The Wind Knows My Name is both a testament to the sacrifices that parents make and a love letter to the children who survive the most unfathomable dangers—and never stop dreaming.

The Wind Knows My Name is a compact but powerful story about lost children, sorrow, and resilience. It’s also quite political, which I didn’t have a problem with, but some may readers may wish to know that the author is very up front in her thoughts on a certain former President and the current, ongoing immigration crisis.

But beyond the politics and the highly charged topics, The Wind Knows My Name is deeply affecting because of the individual characters, their painful childhood experiences, and the way unexpected connections help them forge new paths forward.

The book opens in Vienna, 1938, as the horrors of Kristallnacht unfold. For young Samuel Adler, it’s the night his whole world falls apart. Eventually, to save his life, Samuel’s mother sends him off to England on a train filled with other Jewish children — and while Samuel does go on to live a long and fulfilling life, the early trauma never leaves him.

Later, we meet Leticia, a Salvadoran girl whose father crosses the border into the US with her after their entire family is murdered in the massacre of their small village.

And still later, closer to the present day, we meet Anita — also from El Salvador, cruelly separated from her mother at the border as they seek asylum from extreme danger back home.

As these three people come together, with assistance from Selena, a social worker, and Frank, the ambitious lawyer who finds his true calling in pro bono work helping undocumented children, their complicated pasts offer reflections of commons experiences, even while each has suffered in their own unique and unforgettable way.

At less than 300 pages, The Wind Knows My Name is a fast read, especially as it’s so compelling that it’s difficult to pause and come up for air once you start. Each character’s story is absorbing and tragic, and yet, there are rays of hope in each of their stories as well — even more so as they come together in an unusual but lovely found family.

My main quibble with this book has to do with the storytelling itself. Isabel Allende is a masterful writer and has a beautiful way with words, and she’s highly gifted when it comes to evoking her characters’ inner lives, dreams, and nightmares. However, the writing in this book relies too often on telling rather than showing. Especially in the later chapters, new interludes open with a recitation of what the characters have been doing. We don’t see these events unfold; we hear about them after the fact.

The story itself and what the characters experience is never uninteresting, but there’s a distance because of this narrative approach that left me feeling the emotional impact a little less than I’d expected.

I also felt disappointed that Samuel’s adult life is largely skipped and told in summary after the fact, when we meet up with him again in his 80s. I couldn’t help but feel that there was so much more to see and understand. Given the length of the book, perhaps there wasn’t room to go deeper into the characters’ lives, except in terms of how they all connect, but I wished for more, for Samuel and the others. The Wind Knows My Name might have been more satisfying if it had expanded further on all of the characters and let us go deeper into their worlds.

Overall, however, the events and experiences contained within The Wind Knows My Name are deeply moving, and I came to care deeply about all of its people and the relationships they create and nurture.

Highly recommended.