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 →Comfort and Joy by India Knight is a thoroughly delightful foray into one woman’s celebration of Christmas, secular and loving it! Londoner Clara Dunphy is wacky about Christmas and love and sex but when it comes to her children, her family, and her food, she is completely and sanely and inspirationally committed to giving the [...]
Continue Reading →Haruki Murakami’s new novel 1Q84 is a very strange but equally mesmerizing novel. I read it without wanting to ever put it down but at 925 pages, I had to put it down to attend to life — and there were times I had to put it down just to figure out what the hell [...]
Continue Reading →The main character of Alice LaPlante’s Turn of Mind is losing her memories, a woman in her mid-sixties who has Alzheimers. Forced to retire from the career she loved, as a highly-regarded hand surgeon, Dr. Jennifer White is struggling to retain what she can, how she can, with the support of family and friends. But [...]
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 [...]
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