Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
★★★★☆ Before we moved out west, my wife and I lived in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn for three years. It was a strange, beautiful neighborhood, an oasis of massive, single-family Victorian homes nestled between busy...
Category: Literature
Winter by Ali Smith
★★★★☆ The second volume of her seasonal tetralogy, Ali Smith’s Winter is a hazy Christmastime tale about a family reuniting over the winter holiday. Like Autumn before it, Winter uses a relatively simple plot to...
Katalin Street by Magda Szabo
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Centered on the 1944 occupation of Hungary and spanning nearly thirty-five years over a handful of chapters, Katalin Street follows three neighboring families during World War II and the...
The Library at the Edge of the World by Felicity Hayes-McCoy
★★☆☆☆ Felicity Hayes-McCoy’s The Library at the Edge of the World is a feast of the senses for the middle aged female reader. Bonus points if: you love comfortably safe prose, you can juggle...
Mrs. Osmond by John Banville
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ With Mrs. Osmond, John Banville has achieved an unthinkably bold feat: adopting the sumptuous prose of Henry James, Banville has penned a sequel to James’ celebrated masterwork The Portrait...
Immortal Life by Stanley Bing
★★★☆☆ Stanley Bing’s Immortal Life attempts to carve a niche within the already-crowded company of cultural staples like Westworld, iRobot, Black Mirror, and any number of works in which advances in artificial intelligence and...
In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes
★★★★☆ The name “Dorothy B. Hughes” may not be one that elicits immediate recognition from casual readers of noir fiction, though that should change with the release of a new edition of her much...
Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
★☆☆☆☆ In Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich suggests the entirety of humanity is God’s afterthought. What if mankind’s creator got bored and moved his attention elsewhere? Would any value or purpose...
Hope Valley by John Manuel
★★★★☆ Regional novels published by small presses face great difficulty gaining traction in the massive world of publishing. Tens of thousands of books are published each year, most of them by major publishers who...
