NATIONAL BESTSELLER • BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • From the internationally acclaimed, Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient: “an elegiac thriller [with] the immediate allure of a dark fairy tale” (The Washington Post) set in the decade after World War II that tells the dramatic story of two teenagers and an eccentric group of characters. In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself—shadowed and luminous at once—we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings' mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is this journey—through facts, recollection, and imagination—that he narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers of our time.

It was an interesting discussion this week at NUBClub. Warlight polarized us in a strange way, in that we all pretty much agreed with a single take on the tone and plot of the book, but that led some of us to love it and some of us to find it unbearably slow and pointless. The general consensus was that the first half of the book showed a true picture of the kinds of makeshift families that war-torn areas spawn, and we generally thought the characters were interestingly painted. There was some confusion about the end of the book -- we weren't sure whether the narration had switched to a omniscient position to show us the thoughts of other characters, or whether the narrator was just imagining what happened to his mother from the limited information he could find. Everyone also agreed that there was not much a plot for the first half of the book, and that the author was using the idea of warlight -- a limited light designed to obscure things to keep them safe from attack -- as a strong structural metaphor for the lack of information that narrator had about the events of his childhood and the sketchiness of many of the scenes. Mirjam in particular pointed out how the narrator's obsession with an unknowable past left him isolated and abandoned from his original and later assembled families, while characters that walked away from the mysteries (his sister, the Darter) ended up fine. But the main issue was how much anyone cared about the characters. Half the group found the parents' abandonment of the narrator a compelling plot and empathized with the characters, making the book an easy and enjoyable read. The other half found no interesting stakes or engaging elements in the early story, leading them to not care at all about the characters and see the book as a slow, painful slog. We couldn't really isolate what caused this drastic difference in opinion; it seemed like much of it was attributed to how attached you were to Ondaajte's style and how much threat you perceived the narrator is in at the beginning of the story. In the end, we agreed to disagree, and left befuddled about why anyone could think the book was hard to read, or alternately why any could find the book interesting in any way.