MURDER IN PICCADILLY Murder in Piccadilly is back! The British Library recently has begun publishing two series for booklovers: Spy Classics and British Library Crime
Two-thirds of the way through his science fiction novel, Darwin’s Sword, D. L. Whitehead acknowledges a Frankenstein parallel. Long before that, I had already decided
A woman who specializes in family court cases, divorce settlements, and child welfare, finds her own marriage in trouble and her own judgment questionable.This is
Co-author with Mary Ann Shaffer of the best-selling The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and creator of a highly regarded children’s series starring
What makes Ludie extraordinary is her life—not as it is shaped by popular success, but as it is lived. Award-winning author Cynthia Rylant weaves a
“Among Thieves?” Shouldn’t it be “Honor Among Thieves?” Nope, author John Clarkson got it right; there is no honor among the thieves and other lowlifes
SWEET THUNDER Ivan Doig’s Sweet Thunder follows one of the characters from his earlier novel, The Whistling Season, into maturity. Perhaps you’ll remember him as
After the Civil War, many lonesome western men sent for wives from the east. Some marriages were arranged by brokers, some by charlatans, but all
Stewart O’Nan’s novel, West of Sunset, mirrors perfectly the frenetic ennui of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life and his fiction. West of Sunset tells the story
Dorrigo Evans, protagonist of Richard Flanagan’s novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is a man of many facets. Born in poverty in Tasmania,
Circling the Sun – Paula McLain has written “Probably the very best” novel fictionalizing the life of a well-known person. When I reviewed Paula McLain’s
The Forbidden Rose is a bodice ripper with a brain, as well as the other requisite gendered anatomical parts. Set in late eighteenth-century France during
Katharine McMahon fashions a post-World War I London in her novel, The Crimson Rooms. She prefaces her story with a Wilfred Owen poem, written in
Read a newspaper lately, in hand or online? War, famine, global warming and now Ebola — it’s no wonder publishers are publishing and readers are
How to Be a Good Wife, Emma Chapman’s chillingly captivating debut novel, begins with a statement by narrator Marta Bjornstad: “Today, somehow, I am a smoker.”
Is The Bishop’s Wife a packet of sociological case studies or a novel of intricately-woven psychological narratives? A little of both, I think. Mette Ivie
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