Lulu did something for me that not even my sister Angela would do. When Angela saw me cry, my sister said, You’re drowning in a glass of water. I tell you, Angela is cold. But cold! Pfft! She has no...
There’s no shortage of authors who write popular historical-fiction novels. What makes Robert Harris distinctive among them is the solid research that goes into his novels, and the accurate, detailed descriptions that leave the reader more knowledgeable than before. Some...
As the sweet aromas of freshly-baked bread awaken memories of her apprenticeship at a French boulangerie, she feels the desire and ambition to bake bread once again. Bread, in this novel, is a metaphor for life, healing and finding oneself....
In a small Irish village — “dead centre. The exact middle of the country” — in the 1850s, an English nurse is hired for a most unusual task: to watch over eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell, a child who has taken no...
MI-6, home of James Bond and George Smiley, is legendary. MI-5, its less famous cousin, deals with domestic intelligence in the UK. It has generally not been featured in novels, perhaps because stalking terrorism on the streets of Brixton seems...
In the late 90s, the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover as a low-wage worker. She wanted to examine, first-hand, the rhetoric surrounding Bill Clinton’s Welfare Reform Act, which pushed welfare recipients into minimum-wage jobs on the theory that any job...
Two boys in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, become friends in the 1940s. They are both fifteen, both Jewish, both highly intelligent, both have fathers who are rabbis, and both study at yeshivas (Orthodox Jewish schools). They have an enormous amount in common,...
In 1947, six nuns from Kentucky set off for Bihar, India, to build a hospital in the small town of Mokama on the banks of the Ganges. None of them spoke Hindi, or any other Indian language. None of them...
The success of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series has inspired a host of similar series: set in various locales with lots of local colour and female detectives solving mysteries by using their local knowledge as...
Jess Walter’s novels are warm, engaging, funny, quirky character stories, with a strong connection to his hometown of Spokane, Washington. Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions were both lovely reads. His latest published work is a collection of short stories....
This funny, light novel tackles several topics: the world of counterfeit luxury goods, the ethical dimensions thereof, the ambition and focus of Chinese immigrants compared to the naivete of second-generation Chinese-Americans, Chinese family dynamics. In this novel, none of these...
Marie Mitchell is a welcome update to the fictional is spy contingent. She is female, black, and American, all of which give Lauren Wilkinson’s debut novel a completely different atmosphere from the classic spy genre dominated by Cold-War British men....
Nigerian writing in English, both from within the country and from the diaspora, is certainly hitting its stride. This is the latest of several Nigerian-based novels to come my way. The eponymous Glory has just returned to London from a...
Movie-loving feminists are likely to have heard of the Bechdel Test for representation of women in film. Is there more than one woman? Do the women talk to each other? About anything other than men? It makes one take a...
The Silent Patient screams ‘unreliable narrator’ from just about the first chapter. Alicia Berensen, a beautiful and talented artist, was found one night with a dead husband, a gun with her fingerprints, and slashed wrists. She survived, but has not...
A bubble poised perfectly for a fleeting moment
Rollicking Irish charm
Good Omens in our future
A Year in the Lives … at an American mall
Life changes in Nairobi
Existential Coming-of-Age, with an American Multilingual Twist
Quarantine Art
Poignant and Prosaic
Idealism and apathy in a turbulent political period
Contemporary Irish
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