I Was Anastasia by Ariel Lawhon achieves quite a feat—taking a subject about which there is no longer any mystery and making it mysterious. Thanks to DNA testing, it is now known that Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia died with the rest of her family in the summer of 1918, slaughtered by the Communists in the basement of a house in the town of Ekaterinburg. But, for ... Read More...
A Star Called Henry
There may be a lot about the reality of historical Ireland that I don’t like (being a woman and all), but fictionally, male Irish authors are some of the most lyrically gifted I’ve ever read. My longtime favorite was William Trevor (The Story of Lucy Gault, Death in Summer) and then this fall I added John Boyne (The Heart’s Invisible Furies, The Boy in the Striped ... Read More...
The Widow Nash: A Novel
Call me vulgar, but when a book opens with a young woman, a father who’s dying of syphilis, missing money and a murderous ex-fiancé, I’m all in. It’s the early 1900s, the young woman is twenty-four-year-old Dulcy (short of Leda Cordelia Dulcinea) and her father, Walton Remfrey, is an eccentric but brilliant inventor and engineer with a penchant for women (hence the ... Read More...
Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist
Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is one of those novels that runs on pure adrenaline. Author Sunil Yapa drops the reader into the chaos of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle with such force that the fight or flight mechanism kicks in and there is no choice but to keep reading. The stream of consciousness style he employs means full immersion in each of the ... Read More...
Vanessa and her Sister
Virginia Woolf is an icon in the world of literature and much has been written about her life so it is a courageous move on the part of author Priya Parmar to explore not Virginia but her lesser known sister Vanessa, in her new novel Vanessa and Her Sister. The novel begins during the heady years when the Stephen family—Thoby, Adrian, Vanessa, and Virginia—are living on their ... Read More...
Some Luck: A Novel
Some Luck is the first book in Jane Smiley’s The Last Hundred Years trilogy and in it she covers the lives of the Langdons. They are an Iowa farming family and it’s evident by the loving care with which she portrays them that Smiley is happy to return to her roots. In 1920 Walter Langdon is twenty-five and the proud owner of his own farm. He and his wife Rosanna live there ... Read More...
