Nadia Hashimi merges the past with the present in the story of two women from one family. Rahima has the grave misfortune to be yet another daughter born into her family. In Afghanistan the lack of sons is a social and economic disaster. Her father is addicted to opium and does little or no work. Without a son to go out in the world and shop and work for the family their ... Read More...
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932
It’s a testament to author Francine Prose’s prodigious talent that she can bring together a cross-dressing lesbian Nazi spy, a French baroness, and a Hungarian photographer, and not have it read like a bad joke. Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 takes all of the characters listed, adds an American author, the photographer’s French girlfriend, and the Chameleon Club’s ... Read More...
After I’m Gone
Laura Lippman is back with a runaway bookie, the wife he adores, his three daughters, and his stripper girlfriend. In her latest, After I'm Gone, Felix Brewer is indicted in 1976 on gambling charges and decides his constitution is not made for prison so he jumps bail. The novel opens with his escape to an undisclosed location and a private plane. Helping him escape and taking ... Read More...
The Death of Bees
There are times when what is needed is a story so utterly foreign that it plucks us out of our own world and drops us into one for which our background leaves us completely unprepared. I found this with Lisa O’Donnell’s debut novel The Death of Bees: A Novel. Set in Glasgow, it encompasses the world of Marnie and Nelly, two teens left on their own when their parents die. Well, ... Read More...
The Valley of Amazement
Amy Tan is another author returning this year after a multi-year absence. In The Valley of Amazement she weaves a tapestry of the lives of three generations of women, one silken thread at a time. The novel is a portrait of life in a courtesan house in Shanghai at the turn of the century. Violet’s mother, Lucia, is the proprietor. As she is growing-up Violet believes that ... Read More...
We Are Water: A Novel
How a work can be solid and delicate, earthy and of air is a mystery but describes Wally Lamb’s novel, We Are Water. Ostensibly it is the story of Annie Oh—wife, mother, artist and keeper of secrets, secrets that grow and beget other secrets, changing her life and the lives around her. When she is only five, she watches as her mother is swept away by a flood, along with her ... Read More...
