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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

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

Infinite Home

November 9, 2015

infinite home

Edith and her husband Declan bought their Brooklyn brownstone 66 years ago and have been living in it and renting out its apartments ever since. Now Declan has been gone for decades and the brownstone is host to the elderly Edith and four tenants. Infinite Home by Kathleen Alcott is the story of this odd collection of souls. There is the artist, Thomas, who suffers a stroke ... Read More...

11 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary fiction, literary, Riverhead Books

Slade House

October 26, 2015

slade house

  At least once in every reader’s life a book comes along where they think ‘I wish the author had written more about that.’ For fans of David Mitchell that wish often comes true, thanks to his ability to resurrect characters in different iterations and insert them in subtle ways from one novel to the next. In his last novel, The Bone Clocks, there was a supernatural ... Read More...

16 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: horror, literary, paranormal, Random House, science fiction

City on Fire

October 21, 2015

city on fire

  If you follow the publishing world then you know that Garth Hallberg was paid 2 million dollars for his debut novel, City on Fire, a story of NYC, wrapped around a wealthy family, an attempted murder, and the blackout of 1977. The Hamilton-Sweeneys are the family, and are as dysfunctional as one would expect in a work of literary fiction. There are secrets, bad ... Read More...

11 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: contemporary life, debut, historical fiction, Knopf, literary, Manhattan

Under the Udala Trees

October 5, 2015

under the udala trees

  In Under the Udala Trees Ijeoma is only twelve years old when the civil war in Nigeria begins and her mother must leave her behind while she tries to establish a life for them in the north, a safer part of the country. It is 1968 and they live in Biafra, a southern state that has seceded from the nation. The war has already claimed her father and now her mother asks a ... Read More...

6 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: Africa, book clubs, cultural, debut, historical fiction, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, literary, nigeria

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