NW - Zadie Smith

A love letter to the place you grew up, the kind of love letter that itemizes all of your lover's faults and compares them to your own, but ends with an I love you anyway sentiment. Four people from the NW corner of London, linked together by space and history and secrets. Not as enjoyable as White Teeth, but still very good, even with the different narrative styles.

The Taliban Shuffle - Kim Barker

I know what it's like to get a foreign country under your skin, to have it feel more like home than home does. For Kim Barker that place was Afghanistan - an odd choice, but after being sent there to report after 9/11 she falls for the place. She finds it so hard to leave that when she quits her job after the paper wants to recall her back to Chicago, she stays.
Anyone looking for a serious dissection of the West's role in this region should look elsewhere - this a memoir, but it does offer up some behind-the-scenes of a foreign correspondent in a strange country.

Swamplandia! - Karen Russell

Reading the jacket copy (OK - online copy) of this book turned me off - a story of a family of misfits told from the perspective for a precocious young girl. I relented eventually, though the fact that it was nominated along with The Pale King for the Pulitzer should have warned me off. (I'm a DFW fan, but The Pale King as a notebook that should have been left unpublished)

Swamplandia! starts off strong but gets murkier the more it goes along. Alternating between characters and perspective doesn't help, and there's a hollowness in the characters that echoes in the prose. The first-person accounts from Ava are so over the top with metaphor they are reminiscent of a undergrad creative writing workshop, while the third person chapters told from her brother's point of view skirt the edges of any real emotion.

A Hologram For The King - Dave Eggers

A middle-aged businessman finds himself in debt, in poor health (mental and physical) and in a tent in Saudi Arabia, waiting for the King to arrive so he can demo the hologram technology and win the IT contract for the city the King is building in the middle of the desert. He has a lump on his back that he is sure is going to kill him, and he's not sure how to pay for his daughter's university tuition. He's part of the old world, when the U.S. actually made things, and his life is an analogy of America over the last three decades. Eggers gets better with every book, and this one is his best yet.