Having loved Liardet’s first novel, We Must Be Brave, I was of course eagerly anticipating this, her second. And once again, right from the start, I found myself in the hands of a skilled storyteller. This novel was set in...
Surely The Circus Train contains the most incredibly sanitized description of the Holocaust ever. A description of two prisoners in the Theresienstadt Ghetto includes this line the scant diet of watery soup and moldy potatoes making it nearly impossible to...
It seems to be a season of historical fiction for me: the latest to cross my path is set in the early 1900s, in Colorado. At 17, Sylvie Pelletier is the oldest child of a Quebecois family, whose father Jacques...
I’d venture to guess that when most people think of San Francisco, they think of one of the following: the ’60s, with flower children and LSD; an epicenter of the gay rights revolution; or the tech era with highpriced real...
The book cover has a wonderful evocative image, of a lone sailing ship on wide open seas under a massive, looming sky which takes up four fifths of the image. The colour of the skies are ominous above, with massive...
Kate Atkinson has great talent. Her debut novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum was a lovely, if sometimes grim, multigenerational tale of a family in York, with a twist that is hinted at occasionally, and slowly becomes clear over...
The Batavia sails! From a distance, a queenly glide; on board, the frantic effort of all hands. Roars and curses and trumpeted orders. The new ship must be learned and felt. A week at sea and ship and crew will...
This latest Maggie O’Farrell novel is once again a work of historical fiction, like Hamnet, and even more riveting. Now the reader finds themselves in the mid-1500s, Renaissance Italy. Our protagonist is Lucrezia, fifth child of Cosimo D’Medici of Florence....
Finland has a population of 5 million today, and the Finnish-American population is about half a million. The Scandinavian-American community is dominated by the 3.5 million of Swedish origin. Given these numbers, it is not surprising that most people know...
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...
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...
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,...
Although I began to read this book with eagerness, it is with reluctance that I am reviewing it. I had enjoyed several of Khan’s other novels featuring Inspector Chopra and the baby elephant, mostly set in Mumbai, a lighthearted set...
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....
This is one of Chevalier’s earlier novels – her third actually, after Girl with the Pearl Earring and Virgin Blue – and for some good reason I can no longer recall, I began to read it but didn’t get far...
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