Fortune Smiles - Book Review

I had earlier read The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson. He creates quite unique characters. He had won Pulitzer prize for that book. This story is about a former Stasi prison warden in denial of his past. He is an East Germany prison warden, who deals with the reunification of Germany, his prison closing down, and he is a deadbeat husband whose wife left him. In his martyr moments, he rewrites his personal and professional history.

There is a refugee from North Korea, who is up in the air by his new freedom, a UPS driver in hurricane-torn Louisiana looking for the mother of his son. Book is geek’d up and set a little in the future, having a lot of class of its own. The book features a man and his paralysed wife and looks at the possibilities of a high tech virtual world and loneliness.

The story encompasses love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal. Tender, wry, utterly compelling. They show us humanity where you might least expect it. Book is twice readable and writing is ver