Half of a Yellow Sun
Publisher Weekly Review: Starred Review. When the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria seceded in 1967 to form the independent nation of Biafra, a bloody, crippling three-year civil war followed. That period in African history is captured with haunting intimacy in this artful page-turner from Nigerian novelist Adichie (Purple Hibiscus). Adichie tells her profoundly gripping story […]
Finding Noel
Publisher Weekly Review: On the night that Mark Smart has decided will be his last, his car dies in a blizzard. He enters a closing coffee shop and finds Macy Wood, who literally offers him a shoulder to cry on. The two forge a deep friendship, and after three weeks, Mark proposes marriage. She declines, […]
The Thirteenth Tale
Library Journal Review: A ruined mansion in the English countryside, secret illegitimate children, a madwoman hidden in the attic, ghostly twin sisters?yep, it's a gothic novel, and it doesn't pretend to be anything fancier. But this one grabs the reader with its damp, icy fingers and doesn't let go until the last shocking secret has […]
The Scroll of Seduction
Publisher Weekly Review: How crazy was Juana La Loca, the Spanish queen who allegedly would not stop kissing her husband, Philippe the Handsome, even after he died? A Madrid professor enlists the help of a student and a silk dress to find out in the latest from Nicaraguan poet-memoirist-novelist Belli (The Country Under My Skin). […]
When Madeline Was Young
Library Journal Review: As in her previous novels (e.g., A Map of the World), Hamilton sets her latest work in her native Midwest. Pragmatic, smart, and sensitive Timothy Mac Maciver, a married physician with three daughters, tells the story of his family and upbringing in suburban Chicago and how a tragedy that disrupted his father's […]
Love, Lies, and Liquor : an Agatha Raisin Mystery
When a woman in her hotel is murdered, Agatha's notoriously prickly demeanor soon gets her into trouble as she's pegged the prime suspect. If she can't solve the murder in time, she'll be meddling in all her future cases from inside a prison cell.
A Good Day to Die
Publisher Weekly Review: Kernick (The Crime Trade) blurs the line between the right and wrong sides of justice in his fourth novel, a tense tale about a British cop turned vigilante-for-hire. Det. Sgt. Dennis Milne fled London for the Philippines after murdering innocent men he mistook for scumbags. Three years later, after changing his name […]
Simply Love
Publisher Weekly Review: With more than her usual panache, Balogh returns to Regency England (Simply Unforgettable) for a satisfying adult love story. Twenty-nine-year-old beauty Anne Jewell is an independent woman: an unwed mother who has found contentment, if not happiness, in her life as a teacher at a girls' school. Sydnam Butler, an aristocrat who […]
Theft
Publisher Weekly Review: Starred Review. Two-time Booker-winner Carey (Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang) returns with a magnificent high-stakes art heist wrapped around a fraternal saga. Butcher Boone is an all-id all-the-time Australian painter of enormous talent and renown. Now divorced and bankrupted by his former wife, who tired of his […]
The Night Gardener
Publisher Weekly Review: Starred Review. Pelecanos (Drama City) delivers a dignified, character-driven epic that succeeds as both literary novel and page-turner. In 1985, the body of a 14-year-old girl turns up in a Washington, D.C., park, the latest in a series of murders by a killer the media dub "The Night Gardener." T.C. Cook, the […]