~ Where’d You Go, Bernadette. By Maria Semple. ~ The preamble to this novel identifies the protagonist. The first annoying thing is when I ask Dad what he thinks happened to Mom, he always says, “What’s most important is for...
~ Mum and Dad, by Joanna Trollope ~ Southern Spain. A middle-aged English expatriate couple, Gus and Monica, purchase some land and set up a vineyard. They abandon their oldest children in boarding schools in England, bring the youngest with...
~ The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides ~ This was an early novel of Eugenides’, written in 1993 (his famous Middlesex was written in 2002; The Marriage Plot and Fresh Complaint in 2011 and 2017 respectively). It is actually quite...
~ Light on Snow, by Anita Shreve ~ The novel opens with 12 year old Nicky (Nicole) taking her daily afternoon walk with her father, and stumbling across an abandoned baby. They rush the baby to the hospital, and are...
~ The Vanishing Half. By Brit Bennett ~ This year, especially, the profound overt and subtle effects of race on life in America have exploded into broad daylight. If it were possible, how many people would choose to be a...
~ Woman of Cairo, by Noel Barber ~ [This review would make better sense if the reader first read my review of Noel Barber’s Tanamera] Despite being set in Cairo – where Tanamera was set in Singapore – both novels...
~ The Godforsaken Daughter, by Christina McKenna ~ McKenna writes novels set in Ireland, and The Godforsaken Daughter is one in a trilogy; the other two are The Misremembered Man and The Disenchanted Widow. Her writing is charming – she...
~ Braised Pork, by An Yu ~ This debut novel by An Yu starts with a bang. Jia Jia walks into the bathroom to ask her husband which scarf he prefers, and finds him dead in the bath. She does...
~ Fall on Your Knees, by Anne-Marie Macdonald ~ This novel is set around the Piper family, migrants to New Waterford, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada, in the early 1900s. James Piper (whose mother tongue is Gaelic) is a...
~ Redhead by the Side of the Road, by Anne Tyler ~ Micah Mortimer is such a realistic character that he might as well live next door. (As it happens, he lives not very far from me, in Baltimore). He’s...
~ Signs for Lost Children, by Sarah Moss ~ This is 1880, Falmouth, Cornwall, where two rather extraordinary people for their age and time live, Tom and Ally (Alethea). They are extraordinary people in their own right, and an extraordinary...
~ Pompeii, by Robert Harris ~ To most of us, the title of this book has only one meaning: the city near Naples that was buried during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Indeed, that is the event at...
~ The Stars are Fire, by Anita Shreve ~ We start this novel with Grace and Gene in a pretty little house on the coast of Maine, with their toddler Clare and baby Tom. It seems a perfect little family...
~ All Adults Here, by Emma Straub ~ This is not an ambitious, sweeping novel. It is a small story set in a small place: Clapham, somewhere in the Hudson Valley, an essentially well-to-do little town, the kind of place...
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