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An Untamed State

March 14, 2016

an untamed state

  When Mireille Jameson returns to Haiti with her husband and infant son to visit her wealthy family she knows of the tensions between the island’s poor and its rich. What she cannot anticipate is that on their way to an afternoon at the beach a gang of men will stop their car, beat her husband and kidnap her at gunpoint. For almost two weeks these young men will hold her ... Read More...

14 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: contemporary fiction, cultural, debut, Grove Press, Haiti, literary

All Things Cease to Appear

March 9, 2016

all things

  Last week I reviewed The Undertaking which is a marvelous read in that it allows the reader to fully revel in feelings of rage, disgust and retribution (which is necessary relief if you’re watching political news these days). This is not the case in Elizabeth Brundage’s novel All Things Cease to Appear. It is much more attuned to contemporary times, when even though a ... Read More...

8 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary life, family, Knopf, literary, marriage, mystery

The Undertaking: A Novel

March 3, 2016

undertaking

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of novels set in Berlin in the midst of World War II. Novels that document the trampling of many people’s lives into oblivion. Author Audrey Magee does not go the route of the victim or the innocent bystander. Instead, in her novel The Undertaking we meet Peter Faber, a German soldier stationed on the Russian front who decides to take ... Read More...

11 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, debut, Grove Press, historical fiction, WWII

Tender: A Novel

February 22, 2016

tender

  There are few things more exhilarating or frightening than college. Old enough to know there is more out there but young enough to have no idea what it is. Into this world comes eighteen-year-old Catherine who has, amazingly, managed to convince her conservative parents that she should live at school in Dublin rather than commute from home. Quiet and shy she is soon ... Read More...

11 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, coming-of-age, Ireland, Lee Boudreaux Books, literary

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

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