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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

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

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

The Good Liar

February 8, 2016

good liar

  Roy Courtnay has been working one scam or another all his life. Now in his mid-70s he’s turned his hand to internet dating as a way to prey on wealthy widows. When he meets Betty she seems just his type—pretty and a bit ditzy. He provides her with welcome companionship and even opens up with his own concerns about his pension and how to stay financially afloat in ... Read More...

3 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, debut, Harper, mystery

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