To Read & To Write

"The Revenant: A Novel Of Revenge" tells the story of frontiersman Hugh Glass, a Western legend, who survived the wilderness on his own after he was brutally attacked by a grizzly bear and left for dead by The Rocky Mountain Fur Company. The year is 1823 and the frontier is abounding with Native American tribes, which, for the most part, doesn’t make Glass’s plight any easier, until one kind Sioux tends to his wounds and takes him in.  The author of this book, Michael Punke, writes with clarity and a knack for solid historical fiction, and spins a tale of survivalism driven by the need for retribution. Glass is not upset that his partners have left him – he was severely wounded and a burden; they had tried to carry him on a handmade stretcher over the treacherously cold and snowy landscape (not to mention covered with trees, shallow quarries, fords, mountainous terrain, and the like) for three days. Punke’s interpretation of Glass’s story describes a man driven by rage at...

The idea to write this novel came from a famous painting - titled "An Indian Lady" - by the Irish artist Thomas Hickey. The painting (which can be found in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin) sparked Mary Finn's interest in writing a fictional story about an Irishman wed to an Indian woman. In her novel "Anila's Journey", readers will meet a compelling girl named Anila, who is half Irish and half Bengali. She is born during the eighteenth century. Finn portrays the hardships within the world of colonial India: a world where cultures intertwine amid political unrest, creating social tensions within the family group and beyond. "Anila's Journey" fills this dark backdrop with vivid prose and mesmerizing poetry. In colonial India during the late 18th century, racism ran rampant, and so there is a thread which runs within these pages that holds the issue of race relations. Yet, Mary Finn does not exploit this cultural phenomenon in her w...