Clik here to view.
When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man
Riverhead Books, April 2013 Those of us left behind dug in. Through the fall, through the winter, it seemed we lived on the border of a real life lived elsewhere. It seemed that the absence was ours...
View ArticleClik here to view.
And the Mountains Echoed
Riverhead Books, May 2013 I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us. The first time we met Khaled Hosseini was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
Riverhead, March 2013 To be effective, a self-help book requires two things. First, the help it suggests should be helpful. Obviously. And second, without which the first is impossible, the self it’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sweet Thunder
Riverhead Books, August 2013 In Sweet Thunder, Morrie Morgan and his new wife Grace are still on their year-long honeymoon when they get called back to Butte, Montana. A former boss is giving them his...
View ArticleClik here to view.
On Such a Full Sea
Riverhead Books, January 2014 People often write of singers or actors with such amazing voices it would be a pleasure to listen to them read the phone book. For the written word Chang-rae Lee is such...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Vacationers
Riverhead Books/Penguin Group, May 2014 The second novel can be a stressful time for any novelist but more so if their first hit it big, as did Emma Straub’s Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures. How...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mambo in Chinatown
Riverhead Books, June 2014 Jean Kwok is back with Mambo in Chinatown, another tenderly crafted novel about the assimilation process for Chinese immigrants in America. This time we’re absorbed into...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Friendswood: A Novel
Riverhead Books, August 2014 Friendswood, Texas is a good, old oil-based community. Rosemont is a small suburb built near a refinery and life is good there, until funny greasy black coils of goo...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Paying Guests
Riverhead Books, September 2014 By the end of World War I Frances Wray has lost almost everyone in her life she cares about—her two brothers to the war, her father to a heart attack, and the person...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Gretel and the Dark
Riverhead Books, October 14, 2014 Unless you’re reading a book of short stories it is unusual to get more than one scary plot in a single novel, but that is exactly what happens in Eliza Granville’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Girl on the Train
Riverheard, January 13, 2015 Take the unreliable narrator format from Gone Girl and multiply it times three and you’ve got Paula Hawkins’ debut novel The Girl on the Train. Three women—Anna, Rachel,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fates and Furies: A Novel
Riverhead Books, September 15, 2015 Hello, dear Reader! It’s Monday and I know for a lot of you it’s a busy day, getting back into the weekly grind, so if you’re on the run and don’t have time for a...
View ArticleWhen Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man
Those of us left behind dug in. Through the fall, through the winter, it seemed we lived on the border of a real life lived elsewhere. It seemed that the absence was ours somehow, not theirs, that we...
View ArticleAnd the Mountains Echoed
I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us. The first time we met Khaled Hosseini was ten years ago when he took...
View ArticleThe Paying Guests
By the end of World War I Frances Wray has lost almost everyone in her life she cares about—her two brothers to the war, her father to a heart attack, and the person she loves to the circumstances...
View ArticleGold Fame Citrus
Nature refused to offer herself to them. The water, the green, the mammalian, the tropical, the semitropical, the leafy, the verdant, the motherloving citrus, all of it was denied them and had been...
View ArticleThe Hours Count
Lately, I’ve fallen into a literary rabbit hole of fiction about the 1950s, which is interesting as it’s a time period I’ve never paid much attention to, but is popping up all over the fictional...
View ArticleInfinite Home
Edith and her husband Declan bought their Brooklyn brownstone 66 years ago and have been living in it and renting out its apartments ever since. Now Declan has been gone for decades and the...
View ArticleWealthy Women: Mini-Reviews
You might have thought this was a one-time post, but if so, you don’t know me well. I love two things in the reading-for-pure-entertainment genre: wealth and dysfunction so I will always give novels...
View ArticleSons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty
It seems like a fairly straightforward equation: a father plus a mother plus three children equals happiness, but when the pluses that bind their reality is removed these elements no longer add up...
View Article