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...
~ The Senator’s Wife, by Sue Miller ~ Sue Miller’s novel follows two very different women who happen to live next door to one another in a university town. And their two very different marriages. Meri and Nathan are a...
Novels about biochemists are rare. Novels about gay black biochemists are surely nonexistent, until now; in this slender niche appears Real Life, a truly unusual first novel. Set over the course of a long weekend in an unnamed midwestern American...
Every novel by Tana French is a gem, but for me, Faithful Place has an edge over the rest. In her Dublin Murder Squad series of six books (so far), French specializes in crimes where one of the detectives has...
In spare, evocative prose, Mary Costello traces the life of her protagonist, Tess Lohan, from her childhood in Ireland through decades of her life in New York, and from a school-going child with a large clutch of siblings to a...
The Goodreads Choice awards list landed in my inbox, and who can resist a list of books? (I had only read one: The Vanishing Half) The best debut novel was a novel I had not heard of, Such a Fun...
In We need to talk about Kevin, Lionel Shriver featured a chillingly callous teenager who plans and executes a shooting at his school. Big Brother focused on an extremely obese man who is ‘eating himself to death’. So Much For...
Set in a very small area of New Hampshire, Sue Miller’s The Arsonist features as its protagonist Frankie Rowley, a burned-out aid worker just returned from Kenya. Her parents have been summer visitors to the area for years, since Frankie...
This well-intentioned novel is set in 1950s India. Independence is in the air, not just for the recently independent country, but for the protagonist Lakshmi Shastri, who escapes an early marriage and domestic violence in a village to make a...
First woman Vice-President. First black woman Vice-President. First Indian-American Vice-President. First daughter of immigrants to be elected Vice-President. And what a fantastic speech she gave! Calm, confident, capable, tough, conscious of her roots, a special call-out to black women, a...
~ The Margot Affair, by Sanaë Lemoine ~ It is said that the French have more relaxed sexual attitudes than the uptight Brits and Americans. Indeed, French presidents Mitterand, Chirac, Sarkozy and Hollande have all had multiple affairs with various...
Outsidership, through the prism of friendship
Pain and Glory
Interior monologues in upstate New York
A Wimsey century, but not in cricket
Personal and political in post-apartheid South Africa
Endearing but nondescript characters
Lively memoir of a colonial childhood
Polychromatic Crime
Mothers and Daughters, tensions and connections
Giving the victims a voice
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