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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

Gold Fame Citrus

October 7, 2015

gold fame citrus

  Nature refused to offer herself to them. The water, the green, the mammalian, the tropical, the semitropical, the leafy, the verdant, the motherloving citrus, all of it was denied them and had been denied them so long that with each day, each project, it became more and more impossible to conceive of a time when it had not been denied them. Gold Fame Citrus opens in ... Read More...

3 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: debut, dystopia, literary, Riverhead Books, science fiction

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

A Window Opens

September 30, 2015

a window opens

  It seems that I stumbled into a payload of modern American life fiction. Two weeks ago I reviewed Days of Awe and now I’m back with A Window Opens by Elisabeth Egan, a female centric novel that may seem as if it is weighted with an overload of heavy events but it’s not. What it is is real, messy, complicated, and confusing with new jobs, shifting marital ... Read More...

11 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: chick lit, contemporary fiction, debut, Simon & Schuster

Did You Ever Have a Family

September 21, 2015

did you ever have a family

  If you take a major event and separate out all the people involved in that event—whether responsible for it or impacted by it, you get wildly divergent impressions about what actually happened. This is what author Bill Clegg does so soulfully in his debut novel, Did You Ever Have a Family. June’s daughter Lolly, her daughter’s fiancé, June’s ex-husband, and her ... Read More...

6 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary fiction, debut, family, literary, Scout Press

Last Night in Montreal

September 2, 2015

  On a cold snowy night a seven-year-old girl leaves her mother’s house when her father beckons her from the yard, beginning an odyssey that continues into her adulthood. Her birth name is Lilia but as she and her father spend the next decade moving from town to town to avoid capture her name changes so frequently it’s hard to remember. Not that it matters, she does not ... Read More...

14 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, debut, literary, mystery

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