SAINT X Alexis Schaitkin’s debut novel, Saint X, opens with the languid ennui of a mid-winter Caribbean vacation. An omniscient narrator sets scenes filled with
HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD C Pam Zhang juxtaposes nightmare with dream in her novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Her
AN ARTLESS DEMISE I initially encountered Anna Lee Huber’s mysteries in 2012 when her first novel featuring Lady Kiera Darcy, The Anatomist’s Wife, was published.
A SECRET SISTERHOOD Almost every page of Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney’s book, A Secret Sisterhood, inversely took me back to my college studies.
THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR A simple precis of Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor cannot do justice to the mystique of this very
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
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