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How Should a Person Be?

July 15, 2013

How Should a Person Be

  How Should a Person Be? is the new novel by author Sheila Heti, asking the same question. The novel’s Sheila is an aspiring playwright trying to find her place in the world. It’s her belief that everyone around her already knows how to be and so does not struggle the way she does. Initially, she believes fame is what she wants but on her own terms. By a simple life, I ... Read More...

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

Rutherford Park

July 12, 2013

Rutherford Park

  Rutherford Park is the estate of the Cavendish family and like any good British estate, it is rife with intrigue and drama. Elizabeth Cooke captures all the details, upstairs and downstairs, in her new novel Rutherford Park, the story of the Cavendish family, on the cusp of World War I. Despite the many changes in the world around them, the English aristocracy continues to ... Read More...

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: 20th century, England, family saga, historical fiction

The Light in the Ruins

July 8, 2013

The Light in the Ruins

  The Light in the Ruins, Chris Bohjalian’s latest novel, is set at the Villa Chimera in Tuscany in 1943, a pastoral estate where the war is largely unseen. The Rosatis are a titled Italian family and while they have one son preparing for the Allied invasion in Sicily and another who works at a museum trying to control the flow of Italian art out of the country, their lives ... Read More...

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, Doubleday, historical fiction, Italy, murder, mystery, Nazis, WWII

The Adventuress by N.D. Coleridge

July 5, 2013

The Adventuress

  Vanity Fair is William Thackeray’s cutting look at the foibles and caricatures of Victorian England, as manipulated by the very tenacious and unscrupulous Beck Sharpe. In The Adventuress, author N.D. Coleridge takes this vixen of literature and recasts her in the modern day world as Cath Fox, a young woman from lowly and questionable beginnings who has no intention of ... Read More...

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: chick lit, contemporary life, England, Thomas Dunne Books

Brooklyn Girls

July 1, 2013

Brooklyn Girls

  You’re twenty-two, living in Brooklyn (Manhattan's scruffy-but-cool cousin), and have just lost your job for drunkenly Facebooking an indiscreet photo of yourself on top of a bar. Yes, it was a rockin’ good party but your bosses have no sense of humor so what to do now? If you’re Pia Keller, the narrator in Brooklyn Girls, you borrow ten thousand dollars from a loan shark, ... Read More...

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: Brooklyn, chick lit, contemporary life, St. Martin's Press

Note to Self

June 28, 2013

Note to Self

While it seems to be a contradiction in terms to describe a novel as both sharp and sluggish, it applies (in the best way) to Alina Simone’s debut, Note to Self. She melds the jagged edge anxiety of an unemployed woman in NYC with the ennui that means getting out of bed is a Herculean task. She woke up in the mornings already exhausted by the possibilities.   The woman is ... Read More...

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary life, debut, Faber and Faber, unemployment, women

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