Pure by Andrew Miller is a mesmerizing book, a stunner of historical fiction set in 1785 Paris, when an ambitious provincial engineer is commissioned to clear out the oldest cemetery in Paris, disposing of the bones, destroying the attendant church, and filling in the holes left behind any way he can. It quickly becomes apparent [...]
Continue Reading →Stephen King’s latest novel, 11/22/63, is a bit slow getting started but then it soars in a gripping and sometimes terrifying “what if” flight of fancy: what if you could change history, what if you could go back in time and prevent a hunting accident, a hot-blooded murder, or the assassination of John F. Kennedy? [...]
Continue Reading →I absolutely loved the novel Jamesland by Michelle Huneven, which was loaned to me by a cherished and bookish friend. I am glad to have sneezed all over the book, for now I can keep it for myself — and I have ordered a brand-new copy for my friend. Jamesland tells the story of two [...]
Continue Reading →The World We Found by Thrity Umrigar is a sparkling and sharp slice of life that, in presenting four personal stories, reflects and illuminates universal truths. Four women have been friends since their student days in Bombay, during the heady but dangerous years of the 1970s when protests and marches dominated university life and parents [...]
Continue Reading →For Christmas, my uncle in Belgium sent to me a book written by the Flemish writer Stefan Brijs, titled The Angel Maker. The Angel Maker has been a huge hit across Europe and now that I’ve read it, I can understand why. Brijs creates, with creepy momentum and rich atmosphere, a thoroughly chilling and enthralling [...]
Continue Reading →Anne Perry’s A Christmas Homecoming is her annual gift to readers and a sweet one it is. If you are a fan of Perry, you will enjoy this Victorian-set tale with Charlotte Pitt’s mother as narrator. Caroline has married an actor seventeen years her junior and his troupe has been invited to gentry for the [...]
Continue Reading →The Long Song by Andrea Levy is a beautifully wrought account of the last years of slavery in Jamaica, told through the stories of an old woman who mixes fact and fiction, mythology and reality, to reveal the horrors of humans owning other humans. The old woman was born a slave and named “July” as that [...]
Continue Reading →A Spell on the Water by Marjorie Kowalski Cole is a profound exploration of family, place, nature, and faith. Mary Leader, widow and mother of five, moves her family to a small lakeside resort in rural Michigan in the late 1950s, hoping to protect her children from the ugliness of the outside world and to [...]
Continue Reading →Much of the sex that goes on in The Outlander (and there is A LOT of it, and of every kind, with the exception of human/animal) does not fall within my definition of “great sex” but for time traveler Claire Beauchamp Randall, most of it does. And the great sex she finds in the Scottish [...]
Continue Reading →
