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Friday, December 20, 2013

What BBC Thinks Were Best Books of 2013


Best of 2013: The top 10 books

10. Mary Coin by Marisa Silver
"Do you mind if I take your picture?" In 1936 photographer Dorothea Lange focused her lens on the exhausted face of a migrant woman, a mother of seven displaced by the Dust Bowl and caught in the downward spiral of the Great Depression. In this iconic image, caught in a quicksilver moment, using a new technology, two women - photographer and subject - were linked forever.

That's the set-up for Silver's elegantly written third novel. She braids together the stories of US government photographer Vera Dare (a proxy for Lange), her subject Mary Coin - the Oklahoma-born mother she spotted working in a California picker's camp - and Berkeley cultural historian Walker Dodge, who finds unexpected connections to them both.
Silver unleashes a kaleidoscope of images, then slows down long enough for us to absorb the emotional resonance of each. Most surprising is Mary Coin's late-life recognition of what the portrait - "frozen into an indelible past like an insult you can never take back" - means to the world outside her own. (Blue Rider Press)

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