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 PAINTER OF BATTLES A book worth reading is a book worth talking about, but not always. Arturo Pèrez-Reverte is Spain’s popular author of literary
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.
MY KITCHEN YEAR Ruth Reichl: My Kitchen Year was reviewed by Ann Ronald in Bookin’ with Sunny in 2016. Ann’s review set the stage for
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
DOG ON IT Please don’t wait for the dog days of summer to read Spencer Quinn’s Dog On It. Based on our present pandemic restrictions,
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
THE PERFECT HORSE The Perfect Horse by Elizabeth Letts, author of The Eighty Dollar Champion, was the perfect book to review for the Concord Clayton
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 introduces us to a new series featuring Hugo Marston. Much to my delight, I accidentally discovered a new mystery series (or new to
A GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD Therese Anne Fowler’s latest book, A Good Neighborhood, is one very good novel. The first thing that will catch your attention is
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