The Vacationers
The New York Times Book Review – Margo Rabb …gorgeously written…the novel's joy and humor are infectious. Straub may be an heir to Laurie Colwin, crafting characters that are smart, addictively charming, delightfully misanthropic and fun…When I turned the last page, I felt as I often do when a vacation is over: grateful for the […]
And the Mountains Echoed
“And the Mountains Echoed opens like a thunderclap. . . . [Hosseini] asks good, hard questions about the limits of love. . . . Love, Hosseini seems to say, is the great leveler, cutting through language, class, and identity. No one in this gripping novel is immune to its impact.â€â€”O, the Oprah Magazine
The Interestings
“Remarkable . . . [The Interestings’s] inclusive vision and generous sweep place it among the ranks of books like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot. The Interestings is warm, all-American, and acutely perceptive about the feelings and motivations of its characters, male and female, young and old, gay and straight; but it’s […]
The Chaperone
Library Journal With her bobbed black hair and strikingly red lipstick, Louise Brooks was a femme fatale in early Hollywood movies. In this latest novel from Moriarty (The Center of Everything), a teenage Louise heads to New York City in 1922 from her home in Wichita, chaperoned by proper Kansas matron Cora Carlisle. Once in […]
Forgotten Country
Publishers Weekly In this beautiful debut novel, sisters Janie and Hannah demonstrate very different reactions to their Korean parents and heritage. The dutiful Janie has carried the weight of having to look after the more manipulative but possibly more lovable Hannah since childhood. Woven with tender reflections, sharp renderings of isolation, and beautiful prose, the […]
No One Is Here Except All of Us
Library Journal When danger threatens, would that we could simply change reality's rules. That's what one little Romanian village tries to do in 1939, as war thunders on the horizon. At the suggestion of an 11-year-old girl and a stranger who's washed into their midst, the townsfolk decide that they can hold danger at bay […]
The Last Nude
In 1927, bold and glamorous Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka encountered 17-year-old Rafaela while in Paris's Bois de Boulogne and took her home, using her as a model for six significant paintings (including Beautiful Rafaela) and briefly becoming her lover. De Lempicka was working on a copy of Beautiful Rafaela when she died in 1980. […]
How to Read the Air
he New York Times – Miguel Syjuco: …deeply thought out, deliberate in its craftsmanship and in many parts beautifully written…In How to Read the Air, [Mengestu] has forged something meaningful from his cultural perspective. The book lingers in the mind as personal—not in the characters’ specifics, but in their frustrated dislocation in the world.
Imperfect Birds
Carol Haggas – Booklist It is sobering to think that Rosie Ferguson is your typical teenage girl. On one hand, she's in the throes of her senior year in high school: concerned with body image and boyfriends, BFFs and boredom, and, of course, the daily trauma of living with parents who are so hopelessly, well, […]
Known to Evil
Publishers Weekly Bestseller Mosley scores a clean knockout in his excellent second mystery featuring New York City PI Leonid McGill (after 2009?s The Long Fall). Still striving to atone for some of the lives he?s ruined, the 54-year-old McGill laments that there are ?no straight lines in the life or labors of the private detective.? […]