If I Could Tell You by Elizabeth Wilhide
★★★☆☆ If I Could Tell You by Elizabeth Wilhide seemed to be the perfect book: a romantic story that’s set in England during World War I, that stars a brave, young woman, and is written...
Category: Historical Fiction
Death and Mr. Pickwick by Stephen Jarvis
★★★★☆ Charles Dickens is dead; long live Charles Dickens. Stephen Jarvis has channeled the Great Man in his superb retelling of how The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club came to be and the...
And the Sun Stood Still by Dava Sobel
★★★☆☆ Dava Sobel is a remarkable writer of scientific biography; she is a serviceable writer of drama. And the Sun Stood Still is a two-act play that captures the meeting between Nicolaus Copernicus and...
The Yid by Paul Goldberg
★★★★☆ Chto, nachalos’? is the sinister question that hangs in the air in 1953 Russia, before Stalin’s final pogrom meant to answer the Jewish Question. Has it begun? Pochti chto is always the response....
And After Many Days by Jowher Ile
★★★★☆ Jowher Ile’s And After Many Days opens upon an unremarkable day like so many others filled with the humdrum minutiae of quotidian life. The incessant rain had finally stopped, and the older brother,...
Silence by Shusaku Endo
★★★★☆ Originally written in 1966, Shusaku Endo’s Silence is a timeless classic of faith and the challenges of remaining true to oneself amidst hardship. Set in Japan in the mid-17th century, Silence tells the...
The Big Green Tent by Ludmila Ulitskaya
★★★★★ Ludmila Ulitskaya’s The Big Green Tent is an essential new addition to the two-hundred-year-old Russian literary canon and may be the best novel about 20th-century Russia since Boris Pasternak’s 1957 classic Doctor Zhivago....
The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley
★★★★☆ Dismas, Swiss ex-mercenary turned monk turned connoisseur of holy items, is beholden to two patrons: Frederick the Wise of Saxony, protector of Martin Luther, whose collections of relics is rivaled only by the...
Carrying Albert Home by Homer Hickam
★★★★☆ It is not irrelevant that Homer Hickam grew up in the 1950s and watched “The Adventures of Davy Crockett” on television. That Disney series popularized tall tales, the wildly popular stories, some of...
