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Penitence: A Novel

February 3, 2025

penitence

When Penitence begins 13-year-old Nora is alone in a jail cell after turning herself in for killing her 14-year-old brother. An opening like this has the heft to carry a traditional thriller/mystery whether as a police procedural (solving the crime) or a courtroom drama (Nora on trial). Instead, debut author Kristin Koval forges a completely different path in what becomes a ... Read More...

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, debut, family, literary, mystery

This Motherless Land

January 27, 2025

motherless

A loving, happy, Nigerian family is torn apart when a daughter survives a horrific car crash that leaves her mother and brother dead and her father’s grief makes him hate her for surviving. This is This Motherless Land and Funke is the daughter, who at eight finds herself on a plane to England to live with her mother’s white family, people she’s never met and knows almost ... Read More...

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, childhood, cultural, family

Instructions for a Heatwave

January 16, 2025

instructions

In 1976 England was in the midst of a terrible drought and heat wave. It’s an inauspicious and unexpected time for a happily married, retired man to go missing, but Robert does, taking only his keys and his passport. His wife Gretta is left in a frazzled state and his adult children have all been called to come home and look for him in Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, Instructions for ... Read More...

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, England, family, historical, literary

Crow Mary by Kathleen Grissom

January 13, 2025

crow mary

In the northern territory of Montana in 1872 a 16-year-old Crow Nation girl named Goes First marries an American fur trader twice her age. Her life and travels with him form the center point of Kathleen Grissom’s engrossing novel, Crow Mary. Goes First’s life has been a typical one amongst her people, nomadic, with the years following the migrations of the buffalo. She ... Read More...

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction

Snake Oil: A Novel

December 13, 2024

snake oil

Three women, one company. Set in the wellness industry Snake Oil is about the woman who starts the company and two of the women who work for her. At opposite ends of the spectrum, one is a fervent believer in the company’s mission while the other avidly opposes it, but needs the paycheck. When the novel opens a clinical trial for a new supplement is wrapping up. It’s release ... Read More...

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary life, debut, mystery, women

The Last Days of Night

December 11, 2024

the last days

It’s hard to imagine that an ordinary and ubiquitous household item could be the source of riveting fiction, but in The Last Days of Night it is. Author Graham Moore makes a new, young lawyer the central character in what is an astonishing battle over who invented the light bulb and who would profit from it. For someone who believed Thomas Edison invented the light bulb The ... Read More...

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: 19th century, book clubs, historical

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