Akin is the story of an 80 year old widower’s travels through the past and into the future.
Noah Selvaggio has decided to celebrate his upcoming 80th birthday by taking a trip to his place of birth, Nice France. Noah’s wife, Joan, who had died nine years earlier, continues to talk to Noah. Noah and
“I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful…To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a haunting letter from a son to his illiterate mother written in a dark, poetic stream
“Go as far as you can—way out yonder where the Crawdads sing…in the bush where critters are wild, still behaving like critters.”
Catherine Danielle Clark—“Kya”—the Marsh Girl—was 6 years old, when her mother walked out of the shack in the marsh, leaving her five children and abusive husband to fend for themselves. Slowly, each of
“Celestial Bodies” takes place in Oman and is a story of family life, love and change. The story revolves around three sisters, Mayya, Asma and Khawla, and their families past and future.
Mayya is a seamstress, quiet and secretly in love with Ali bin Khallaf, when Abdallah, the son of Merchant Sulayman asks for her
It seems as though there have been a lot of first novels lately; maybe there always have been and I have just been oblivious. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Sympathizer”, winner of the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Award for Excellence in Fiction, is a good one, so long as you do not mind vivid descriptions of
Every so often you read a book that is just a puzzler. It was good; it was bad; it was everything in between. I just cannot make up my mind. That is how I feel about Paul Murray’s “The Mark and the Void.” Ireland’s fictional approximation of The Big Short, it has elements of reality
“Mrs. Engels”, a first novel by Gavin McCrea, is a fictional account of a three year period (1870-1873)(as well as some flashbacks) in the lives of the authors of the Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels), told from the perspective of Friedrich Engels’ wife, Lizzie Burns.
Lizzie and her sister, Mary, Irish by
I need to start this blog by coming clean, by confessing a couple of things about myself.
CONFESSION NUMBER 1: I am an ERISA lawyer and that means I spend my days dealing with the intricacies of the Internal Revenue Code, the obscurities of ERISA and the agonizing and yet rewarding task of solving complex
Every year it seems there are innumerable new novels that take place in London during the blitz of World War II. And of course while I cannot claim to have read all of them, I always wonder how any single one can have anything new or fresh to say. Chris Cleave’s “Everyone Brave is Forgiven,”
Memoirs can be great or awful. Sometimes a memoir is nothing more than an author’s musings about some specific event in his or her life, with little to offer the reader beyond the author’s singular self-absorbed experience. Too much “me” and very little “why should I care?” That said, I have just read the second