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Guapa: A Novel

March 21, 2016

guapa

  At 27 Rasa lives with his grandmother in al-Sharqiyeh, a large city in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. He works as a translator for foreign journalists because he speaks fluent English after going to college in America. The novel Guapa by Saleem Haddad spans 24 hours in Rasa’s life that are an emotional flash point. He has participated in the Arab Spring protests, ... Read More...

6 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, cultural, debut, literary, Middle East, Other Press, social issues

The Madwoman Upstairs

March 16, 2016

the madwoman upstairs

  It’s no secret that Catherine Lowell styles certain elements of The Madwoman Upstairs after Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In fact, the novel’s protagonist, Samantha Whipple, is the last remaining descendant of the Brontë family after her father dies in an unexplained fire at their home. Now she’s at Oxford and her professor, Timothy Orville, is handsome and brooding. ... Read More...

4 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: debut, England, mystery, Touchstone

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

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

Green Island: A Novel

February 24, 2016

green island

  Past, present, and future too swirl together, distinguishable but not delineated by any sort of grammar beyond the one our hearts impose.    The narrator in Green Island is born on the night in 1947 when the tension between the factions in Taiwan explode into civil violence. Her father, a doctor, in attending a community meeting the next night and quietly asking ... Read More...

1 Comment
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, cultural, debut, historical fiction, Knopf, Southeast Asia

The Widow: A Novel

February 19, 2016

the widow

  We’ve all seen the real-life stories of women married to men who have committed heinous crimes and they never knew it. Fiona Barton looks at one such wife in her new novel The Widow. In it Glen Taylor is a delivery van driver whose van is seen in the area where a two-year-old child disappears from her front yard. As he moves from person-of-interest to suspect the police ... Read More...

7 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: debut, mystery, NAL

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