Recently the Washington Post held a poll on the best fictional detectives, and the winner was Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache. Mortified by my ignorance about this author and detective, I put the first available Penny novel, Kingdom of the Blind,...
Neither romantic love, nor love within traditional nuclear families is at the center of this novel. Set among the Indian community of Trinidad and Tobago, Ingrid Persaud’s Love after Love follows the love between and around three characters whose love...
Many historians, opinion writers and regular people have speculated whether being married to Bill has helped or hurt Hillary Clinton. The opinions are mixed: some think that her years as First Lady brought her public prominence and jumpstarted her senatorial...
So confident and effortless is this novel, I had to check twice to confirm that it was indeed a debut. It is very specific to its characters and places and makes no claims to grand ideas, but still makes some...
Set in late 2016, the unnamed narrator of this novel has a friend, Marco Rosedale, who is accused of sexually assaulting a woman forty years earlier. An expat Brit living in America, Marco gets a call one day from a...
Charmed as I was by Sally Andrew’s first novel, Recipes for Love and Murder, I was looking forward to her second mystery, also set in the Klein Karoo of South Africa and featuring Tannie Maria, a middle-aged widow who likes...
Imbued in gangster-noir ambiance from the start, one expects Prohibition-era shootouts, hardboiled men of action, and gorgeously cynical cigarette-smoking women from Motherless Brooklyn. Indeed, the opening chapter is classic: We were putting a stakeout on 109 East Eighty-fourth street, a...
Remember back when Bollywood made silent films? (If you’re reading this, probably not.) For those who do remember the pre-Independence Hindi film era, the names Sulochana, Miss Rose, Pramila and Nadira might ring bells, but even they might be surprised...
I feel drained at the end of an Elena Ferrante novel. Her precisely detailed representations of the inner emotions are riveting and incredibly powerful, but also feel a little bit like watching a medical dissection. Every thought, whether charmingly appealing...
An island several miles off the mainland. A group of people who are invited there for an event. The weather gets worse. A body (or more?) is found, and several people have a long history (and therefore a strong motive)...
Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins had a delightfully unexpected plot: it featured Richard Burton, the filming of Cleopatra in Italy in 1963, the 2010s in Hollywood and reality TV, a proposed screenplay about the Donner Party , and the Pacific Northwest...
There’s a lot going on in Strangers and Cousins. There are family dynamics: Bennie and Walter, parents of four children ranging in age from 5 to 22, are preparing for the wedding of their oldest, Clem(entine), who is marrying her...
A more topical novel can hardly be imagined, but it is actually mere coincidence that Emma Donoghue’s latest novel is set during the 1918 (“Spanish Flu”) influenza pandemic. She started writing it in October 2018, “inspired by the centenary of...
1 stocky man who abuses his wife 1 small tender wife 1 medium-size tough woman in love with the wife 1 double-barrelled shotgun 1 small karoo town marinated in secrets 1 red-hot New Yorker 2 cool policemen 1 handful of...
~ Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez ~ Julia Alvarez writes wonderfully about Dominican immigrant families, and especially about the difficult, loving, annoying, funny parts of intra-family interactions. The bickering, affectionate relationship of her four first-generation immigrant sisters in How the Garcia...
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