I read it Because I Felt Sorry For It ! - Rated 
I should know better books up for nomination like this are usually like Oscar winning Movies-The only way you can get people to pay to read or watch them.
I was bored stiff from page 1 but I have an awful compulsion to finish a book once I have started it.
Luckily I can speed read & have a pile of really good books waiting to be read,Who pays Richard & Judy to pick up most of the worst books ever written & try & turn them into something good.
1st & last time you'll find me buying anything they recommend-now off to try and read a few more chapters,it has to finish SOON!
a wonderful new author!! - Rated 
I picked up The Visible World by Mark Slouka,and I had not expected it to be much more than a semi-interesting read. However, with every page turn, I became more and more attached to the novel, and actually found it very difficult to put the book down. Since reading this book, I have highly recommended it to all my girlfriends. It's a beautiful story about life, love and friendship filled with excitement, heartbreak and hope!! The Visible World is a wonderful novel by a wonderful new author!! I'd also recommend another wonderful new author - Tino Georgiou and his bestselling novel - The Fates - if you haven't read it yet!!
elegiac, restrained and resonant - Rated
This book has had quite mixed reviews that fall into the either very high or very low and I think that's an accurate estimate of how any individual reader will respond. I have to say that I think it's an odd choice for R&J because they tend to choose the obvious 'good reads' that are fairly superficial and, in my opinion, instantly forgettable. This, however, is neither.
As another reviwer here has said, the wartime love story genre usually tends to be full of over-ripe emotions, and (soap) operatic story-lines - this isn't. It's an immensely subtle, elegiac and emotionally-restrained tale of a man's search for a past.
In three parts, the first part is a memoir of an unnamed narrator growing up with Czech emigrant parents in New York. This is both charming and dark with shadows that will stretch into the future.
The second part is a brief intermezzo which takes him to Prague as an adult where he meets various veterans of the war who tell a variety of stories that intersect with, but are not, the story of his parents.
The third part, called a novel, is the narrator's fictional imaginging of what might have been his mother's story and her love for a man who wasn't his father, set in the tense years of 1942.
For a relatively short book (250 pages) this touches all kinds of important themes: the fragility of identity, the extent to which we ever 'know' anyone, even the people closest to us, memory and the fictionalision of our own lives, love, idealism, death.
It's not a strightforward linear narrative which might be one the things that some readers have found problematic, but that is itself one of the themes of the book: the way the past and present are mosaics that shift to tell different stories depending on our own perspective.
Overall I found this is moving book written in confident sometimes poetic but always unpretentious prose that is all the more moving for its very emotional restraint. I started it yesterday afternoon and finished it by midnight. A strong recommendation.
very good read - Rated
I, like many readers buy/read a novel based on reviews on Amazon or its R and j recommended read, some books have been ok some disappointing ,but for me this book is simply outstanding. ( am to lazy to elaborate and only contributed because of negative reviews)
Disappointing - Rated
This book was a disappointment and it was a struggle to read it all the way through. There were many unnecessary anecdotes that made no connection with the plot or the characterization in the main story. I often just found myself losing interest and even though the author picked things up towards the end, it was simply far too little and too late.
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