RUSSIAN WINTER Years and years ago, I was served a roasted onion. I’ve never forgotten the crisp softness as I peeled away the layers, the
THE SECRETS OF WISHTIDE The Secrets of Wishtide is another Victorian murder mystery with a smart, articulate sleuth and dark Dickensian overtones. The premise of
MEMORIZING SHADOWS, INSPIRATION FROM THE ARIZONA TRAIL AND STONE WISHES ON THE COLORADO PLATEAU Because we couldn’t go hiking together in red rock country this
IN DEPENDENCE The title of Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s novel, In Dependence, captures the thematic subtleties presented in its pages. Is twentieth-century Nigeria seeking independence, or
SPEAK NO EVIL Occasionally I encounter a novel that leaves me speechless. Uzodinma Iweala’s Speak No Evil left me not only speechless but breathless, too.
BLACKOUT You probably shouldn’t read (as I did) Marc Elsberg’s thriller, Blackout, while cable news is concentrating on the catastrophic outcomes of a spreading coronavirus.
REBEL CINDERELLA Adam Hochschild renews my faith in biographers and the art of biography. Rebel Cinderella models the very best of this sort of intellectual
THE FENCING MASTER Spanish author Arturo Perez-Reverte and his translator, Margaret Jull Costa, have created a novel that may best be described as a
ORDINARY WOLVES Not long ago in Bookin’, I described Susan Orlean’s nonfictional achievement, The Library Book, as a moving meditation coupled with journalism and research.
STAR OF THE NORTH D.B. John’s thriller, Star of the North, pulls back the curtain on North Korea’s secretive milieu. The novel explores the terrain
MERCY HOUSE Alena Dillon’s novel, Mercy House, uniquely blends laughter with tragedy, pain with redemption. Its setting is a Bedford-Stuyvesant shelter for abused women. Run
ALWAYS HOME The subtitle of Fanny Singer’s Almost Home delineates the content—“A Daughter’s Recipes & Stories.” What begins as a paeon to Fanny Singer’s famous
A TALE OF TWO MURDERS Heather Redmond has begun writing a new detective series featuring a youthful Charles Dickens pursuing multiple murderous clues and figuring
GERTRUDE STEIN HAS ARRIVED In 1933-34, just after Gertrude Stein published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas to great acclaim, the writer and her faithful
TINY LITTLE THING Tiny Little Thing, a novel written by Beatriz Williams, advertises itself as “a perfect summer read.” I’m prejudiced against catalogs like “100
THE BOOKSELLER Much to my delight, I accidentally discovered a new mystery series (or new to me, at least) at a library book sale. Mark
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