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The Widow: A Novel

February 19, 2016

the widow

  We’ve all seen the real-life stories of women married to men who have committed heinous crimes and they never knew it. Fiona Barton looks at one such wife in her new novel The Widow. In it Glen Taylor is a delivery van driver whose van is seen in the area where a two-year-old child disappears from her front yard. As he moves from person-of-interest to suspect the police ... Read More...

7 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: debut, mystery, NAL

Forty Rooms

February 15, 2016

forty rooms

It is no small feat to write a novel about one woman’s life that taps into the universality of all women’s lives but Olga Grushin accomplishes just that in her new novel, Forty Rooms. With a construct based on the belief that— Forty is God’s way of testing the human spirit. It’s the limits of man’s endurance, beyond which you are supposed to learn something true each ... Read More...

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

Mudbound

February 10, 2016

  In 1939, at age thirty-one Laura is considered almost unmarriageable. All of her siblings have married and left the family home in Memphis. She has resigned herself to the fate of spinster schoolteacher when Henry McAllen appears and wants to marry her. He seems like a kind man, even if he is ten years older than her and with a limp from his time in France during ... Read More...

12 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: 1940s, Algonquin Books, book clubs, debut, historical fiction, literary, racism, Southern life

The Good Liar

February 8, 2016

good liar

  Roy Courtnay has been working one scam or another all his life. Now in his mid-70s he’s turned his hand to internet dating as a way to prey on wealthy widows. When he meets Betty she seems just his type—pretty and a bit ditzy. He provides her with welcome companionship and even opens up with his own concerns about his pension and how to stay financially afloat in ... Read More...

3 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, debut, Harper, mystery

Be Frank With Me

February 3, 2016

be frank

  M.M. (Mimi) Banning is a southern college drop-out who writes a novel at age 20 that wins the Pulitzer and sells millions of copies, after which time she withdraws from the world, never to write again. Sound familiar? (Hint: Harper Lee). All right, so it is, but from that single point author Julia Claiborne Johnson spins an exuberant tale of snark and intelligence in Be ... Read More...

8 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: contemporary life, debut, William Morrow

Girl Through Glass

January 29, 2016

girl through glass

  In the first chapter of Girl Through Glass, we meet Kate, who tells her story herself. She is in her early forties, a teacher of Dance History at a college in the Midwest. But in chapter two the novel slides back to 1977 and it is about eleven-year-old Mira who is trying to keep her balance between her unstable home life and the ballet school she loves. Burdened with an ... Read More...

2 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: ballet, debut, Harper, literary, mystery

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