Bruno, Chief of Police of St. Denis, gets a call from his friend when one of guests at the cooking class she hosts, does not show. This story has Bruno recalling his past military experiences, some local IRA terrorists, and the realization that [...]
Paulo Coelho, the internationally popular Brazilian writer, has published 18 books to date ― fiction, non-fiction, and occasionally a mix of both. His most popular titles include The Alchemist, Pilgrimage, Adultery, and a novel entitled Spy. [...]
Waiting for Eden is a powerful book and yet, a reader could be fooled by its simplicity. The reader meets Eden in a hospital room and he is not recognizable as his former self. His war injuries leave him unable to speak or even communicate in [...]
Anne Tyler creates characters easy to identify with, easy to love, and certainly easy to be engrossed by. In Clock Dance, the reader meets Willa Drake at four important points in her life: 1967, 1977, 1997, and 2017. In 1967 Willa watches her [...]
Julian Barnes short new novel, The Only Story, is reminiscent of his previous Man Book Prize winning novel The Sense of Ending in that it is a novel in which an older man looks back on his life. In the case of this book the narrator, Paul, is [...]
Tommy Orange’s debut There There is one of the most lauded books of 2018 and for good reason. Orange, a creative writing teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts, opens this novel with an essay on Native American culture that is fresh, [...]
Essie has experiences way beyond her seventeen years because she is a TV star on her family’s reality show. Her father is an evangelical preacher and her mother carefully presents her perfect family to the world. But, to no surprise, below the [...]
Navin expertly captures the heart-wrenching issue of school shootings through the eyes of a six-year-old. Zach Taylor hides in his classroom closet as a shooting rampage happens in his school. When the shooting storm is over, 19 people are dead. [...]
Within the opening sentence, Lorrie Moore explains that the title of this book – See What Can Be Done – is not a boast but an instruction she received with almost every note from the editor of The New York Review of Books. “It was a [...]
Isabel Archer is a young, naïve, wealthy lady that finds herself deceived. When Isabel inherits a small fortune, the vultures surround her and she unwittingly marries poorly. The marriage is for money, although she is too naïve to realize it [...]
Marion Palm does the unthinkable and embezzles six figures from her daughters’ private school. Marion has no remorse, perhaps because she has been stealing her entire life, with no regret whatsoever. Marion is a difficult character to embrace. [...]
Yajide and Akin meet by chance and marry quickly. Yajide longs for children but although she and Akin have passed their health tests, parenthood escapes them. Yajide tries all sorts of alternative methods to bear children without luck. Although [...]
If one has ever wondered what it feels like to taste freedom and independence and then suddenly lose it, Shreve’s latest novel, The Stars Are Fire immerses the reader in just that scenario. Grace, her husband and two children live in a coastal [...]
Harry Hole is back. I repeat, Harry Hole is back. For everyone out there worried that he wouldn’t return, worry no more. Jo Nesbo is the king of Nordic noir. If one person could be said to have put Scandinavian crime fiction on the map, it [...]
The World To Come is Jim Shepard’s latest collection of short stories that are all epic historical pieces that perform unimaginable feats of storytelling in the small space of a short story. The book is the latest from the author, whose [...]
Saints for All Occasions is not your typical hard-luck Irish immigrant story. Nora and Theresa Flynn leave their quintessential existence in small-town Ireland to move to Boston. They are not penniless or homeless. Nora is set to marry Charlie [...]
Periodically we hear about wealthy multi-millionaires and billionaires establishing foundations in order to give away substantial chunks of their wealth during their lifetime, or after they pass on. Callahan points out that there is nothing new [...]
The South does rise again. With pretty much the same result, but the author has imagined a world quite different from the one we know, as a backdrop for this tale of desperate circumstance and savage people. The war is precipitated by the [...]
Sam Shepard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of more than fifty-five plays and three short story collections. As an actor, he has been in over sixty films and was nominated in 1984 for an Academy Award for his role in The Right Stuff. The [...]
Alexander Pushkin’s great-great-great-granddaughter, Englishwoman Marita Phillips, wrote an opera – Pushkin: Poet and Czar – that just debuted in Moscow on February 4, 2017, according to The New York Times article by Neil [...]
