Godwin: A Novel

by Richard W. Brown February 28, 2025

Godwin: A Novel

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 34 seconds

Today, I dove into “Godwin” by Joseph O’Neill, the brilliant mind behind “Netherland,” which snagged the title of Best Book of the Year from the New York Times Book Review. This captivating tale follows the adventure of two brothers embarking on a globe-trotting quest to find an extraordinary African soccer prodigy—someone who might transform their lives forever. The thrill of their journey and the promise of discovery have me hooked!

Mark Wolfe, a brilliant self-thwarting technical writer, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter. Born and raised in the United Kingdom, his half-brother Geoff is a desperate young soccer agent. He pulls Mark across the ocean into a scheme to track down an elusive prospect known as “Godwin“—an African teenager Geoff believes could be the next Lionel Messi.

Narrated in turn by Mark and his work colleague Lakesha Williams, Godwin is a tale of family and migration as well as an international adventure story that implicates the brothers in the beauty and ugliness of soccer, the perils and promises of global business, and the dark history of transatlantic money-making.

As only he can do, Joseph O’Neill investigates the legacy of colonialism in the context of family love, global capitalism, and the dreaming individual.

Mr. O’Neill was born in Ireland and grew up in Mozambique, Iran, Turkey, and Holland. His previous novels include the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Netherland and the Booker Prize long-listed The Dog. O’Neill’s short fiction appears regularly in The New Yorker and his political essays in The New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City.

When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!

My random thoughts on love, grief, life and all things considered.

My Big Climb to Conquer Cancer on April 25, 2026
Please join me in making a difference! No matter the amount, your contribution can have a meaningful impact. As I do every year, I will match every donation made. Thank you! […]
50th Wedding Anniversary
All we ever needed was love—true love! It's the most powerful force in the world—a force that can heal, uplift, and give us our only hope for salvation. […]
The Infamous Walker Limps Home
My Apple Fitness app shows that I’ve averaged four miles daily over an unpredictable month, which might be my new normal. As long as I can walk every day, my streak will continue. Today marked 1,555 days and counting. […]
Living and Grieving
I am believed and seen. I believe in others and recognize their true selves. Though I may reside in my home, I live, grieve, and thrive within my community. […]
The Triad of Love
I focus on being good, rather than feeling good, and living a life my wife would be proud of, rather than letting sorrow overshadow my remaining days. […]

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A Game Called Dead

Read: November 2021

A Game Called Dead

by Michael Stephen Daigle

A Game Called Dead by Michael Stephen Daigle is the sequel to “The Swamps of Jersey,” the first Frank Nagler Mystery. Having read the fourth one – The Red Hand, I recently read the first one and thought this was an excellent time to read the second in this impressive deceptive series.

Reading the Frank Nagler Mysteries is rare when this reviewer knows the author. Mr. Daigle wrote this is the overview of A Game Called Dead.

Nagler is called to investigate the brutal attack on two women at the local college. It begins a tale of urban terror, which seems to be directed at Nagler and his associates.

The story introduces the mysterious terrorist #ARMEGEDDON, who taunted the police from cyberspace.

The story also digs deeper into Nagler’s past, especially the old Charlie Adams serial-killer case, and his relationship with Lauren Fox, who played a crucial role in exposing the political corruption in “Swamps.” She is back and steps into the front of Nagler’s life.

The story also introduced Harriet Waddley-Jones, a college dean, Nagler’s nemesis, and later ally.

Each book is a challenge to write a “better” book. In this case, I wanted tighter, faster action to develop a theme and flow to help carry the story. Sound and the description of sound are keys.

I also wanted Nagler to confront aspects of his past. Can he reconcile them, or will they always haunt him?

This reviewer’s opinion was a more substantial plot than the first book in the Frank Nagler Mysteries. Like all good mysteries, the suspense built page by page, and I figured out who the villain was late in the novel.

The one part that was difficult for me to read was the ending and the potential reigniting of the relationship with Lauren Fox. Having lost Jan, my wife, this year, I am aware of Frank Nagler’s pain in the first book about losing his wife. Ms. Fox only appeared in The Swamps of Jersey as a lost friend. I understand that some widows need to find love again to feel happy, which is not what I need or am seeking. The next book may provide some difficult moments on this topic, but I look forward to reading the next Frank Nagler Mystery.

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So Far Gone

Read: June 2025

So Far Gone: A Novel

by Jess Walter

For the week before Father’s Day, I read So Far Gone by Jess Walter, a hilarious, empathetic, and brilliantly provocative adventure through life in modern America about a reclusive journalist forced back into the world to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren. Is this gripping tale of a grandfather’s love and determination the perfect read for the upcoming Father’s Day?

Rhys Kinnick, a character who has truly gone off the grid, provides a humorous twist to the story. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window, and fled for a cabin in the woods with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons.

Now, Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?

With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick, a man who is struggling with his past and his present, heads off on a wild journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, So Far Gone is a rollicking, razor-sharp, and moving road trip through a fractured nation from a writer who has been called “a genius of the modern American moment.”

Jess Walter is the author of seven previous novels, including the bestsellers The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins, the National Book Award Finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction, collected in The Angel of Rome and We Live in Water, has won the O. Henry Prize and the Pushcart Prize and appeared three times in Best American Short Stories. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!

Enjoy a limited-time offer of 20% off your next book purchase at Bookshop.org!

What Kind of Paradise

Read: July 2025

What Kind of Paradise: A Novel

by Janelle Brown

What Kind of Paradise is a captivating and suspenseful novel by bestselling author Janelle Brown. It follows a young woman on her quest to understand self-identity. The story boldly explores complex themes, including the relationships between parents and children, the balance between nature and technology, the tension between innocence and knowledge, the losses we experience in our past, and our aspirations for the future.

This unforgettable narrative delves into what shapes us as individuals. The first thing you have to understand is that my father was my entire world, says Jane, the narrator.

Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read instead of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the fact that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Walden-esque utopia.

As Jane becomes a teenager, she begins to push against the boundaries of her restricted world. She begs to accompany her father on his occasional trips away from the cabin. But when Jane realizes that her devotion to her father has made her an accomplice to a horrific crime, she flees Montana to the only place she knows to look for answers about her mysterious past and her mother’s death: San Francisco. It is a city amid a seismic change, where her quest to understand herself will force her to reckon with both the possibilities and the perils of the fledgling internet, and where she will come to question everything she values.

Janelle Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of I’ll Be You, Pretty Things, Watch Me Disappear, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, and This Is Where We Live. An essayist and journalist, she has written for Vogue, The New York Times, Elle, Wired, Self, Los Angeles Times, Salon, and more. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two children.

When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!

Enjoy a limited-time offer of 20% off your next book purchase at Bookshop.org!

Demon Copperhead: A Novel

Read: December 2022

Demon Copperhead: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver is a must-read page-turner! Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenage single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

With more knowledge about the devastation of an economy that works for a few and the opioid crisis, I felt as if I was reading about people I knew. Although the book focuses on the impact on boys, it also details the devastation that girls experience.

If Jan had read Demon Copperhead, she would have encouraged me to read it. It reminds us of the work we must do to repair the world.

As a widow, it was a reminder of the long road that we must all take even after we have hit bottom.

WNYC’s All of it hosted an interview with Barbara Kingsolver in which she speaks about Demon Copperhead and her writing.

Demon Copperhead is one of the NYTimes’ top five fiction books of 2022. I have read three of them, The Candy House, The Furrows, and Checkout 19.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview.

In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damage to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion and, above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.