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This is Between Us

December 11, 2013

this is between us

  This is Between Us is an intimate look at the minutia that comprises a relationship. And not in that lovey-dovey, fictional way but in the real, confusing, tedious, painful way. Author Kevin Sampsell navigates the terrain of affairs, blended families, teenagers, and jealousy in quirky little vignettes. The story covers five years that begin as an affair on both sides, move ... Read More...

3 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: contemporary life, Pacific Northwest, Portland, Tin House

Want Not

November 26, 2013

want not

In his new novel, Want Not, author Jonathan Miles explores the concept of wanting in contemporary American society. The story moves between the disparate lives of three groups: Elwin Cross, an overweight linguist professor whose wife has recently left him for a chef; Talmadge and Micah, a young freegan couple squatting in a tenement in Manhattan; and Sue, a 9/11 widow, her ... Read More...

5 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary life, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, literary

The Night Guest

October 16, 2013

night guest

  Ruth is a widow who lives alone and is awakened late one night by the sound of a tiger in her living room. As improbable as it sounds she is convinced, to the point of calling her grown son and describing the incident to him. Even after falling back asleep and waking to a normal morning, she wonders if it actually happened. It is this delicate interplay between reality and ... Read More...

4 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary life, debut, Faber and Faber

Cartwheel

October 7, 2013

cartwheel

Maybe that was the problem with this family—they were all in direct competition with one another to see who could bend over backward the farthest, who could suffer the most. Jennifer Dubois’ new novel, Cartwheel, is as knotted and tangled as the judicial system itself. Add the fact that it takes place in a foreign country and you have the makings of a novel that will grip ... Read More...

3 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary life, Random House, South America, suspense

Mother Mother

September 20, 2013

mother mother

Koren Zailckas doesn’t waste any time. In her first novel Mother, Mother: A Novel she takes no more than one hundred pages to pull the mask off Josephine Hurst, a woman who believes she is the pinnacle of modern motherhood—raising two lovely daughters (one destined for Broadway) and a son so gifted she has to home school him. Whether this is true or not seems beside the point ... Read More...

3 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary life, Crown, debut, family, suspense

Enon

September 13, 2013

Enon

They are a young couple who had a single child young and who lost the child in an instant of combustion and are straggling around their home in shock at the child’s death but nonetheless trying to spare each other in at least some slight degree the full blow of the end of their fragile marriage by acting as if it isn’t the end for just a little longer, by spreading the blow ... Read More...

3 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary life, literary

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