S. M. Goodwin pulled me into Absence of Mercy immediately with her descriptions of Jasper Lightner, a Crimean War hero with post-traumatic stress syndrome and a traumatic brain injury. The second son of a duke, Jasper inherits enough money to become independent of his...
Chip Jones is a Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist who brings to life an amazing story. A succinct synopsis is drawn straight from the subtitle of his book: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South. To give readers some background into...
Nowhere Near Goodbye, released August 4, 2020 by Red Adept, is Barbara Conrey’s debut novel. It delves deeply into the age-old challenge women face: career versus family. I read this book because it looks at some of the same choices I, as a physician, had to make....
For years, Caitlin Bergman has told everyone that her mother is dead—it's a simpler explanation than the truth that, after giving Caitlin up for adoption, the woman dropped out of sight. When Caitlin receives word from a police department in Oregon that her mother has...
In her debut novel, In the Canyons of Shadow and Light, author Emily Donoho transports the reader into the psyche of a jaded middle-aged Manhattan police detective. Though the book frequently references a popular police procedural television program, Law & Order,...
The author of The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir, Sara Seager, is a pioneering astrophysicist and a professor at MIT. She also led NASA’s Probe Study team for the Starshade project and earned a MacArthur grant. Since childhood she’s loved astronomy and the...
After Elias is one of the most beautifully-written books I’ve read recently. It’s also a genre-breaker, gracefully combining a fractured romance with elements of a thriller and psychological drama. One week before their wedding, Coen Caraway loses Elias Santos, the...
The Song of Achilles retells the story of Achilles from the point of view of his lover, Patroclus. With all the verve of Mary Renault, Miller gives new life to The Iliad as well as developing a sweet, tender love story between the two men. As a child, I read the Greek...
After Kilimanjaro is Gayle Woodson’s debut novel, and one I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Her descriptions of the wilds of the Serengeti and the cities of Arusha and Dar Es Salaam are so accurate I sensed we’d stood in one another’s footsteps, particularly in parts of...
Wild Land is Rebecca Hodge’s debut novel. I read it in part because I had read parts of it in a writing class some time ago and wanted to see how the novel had turned out. Also, I was intrigued that Hodge had chosen a middle-aged female with breast cancer as her...
When the Coin Is in the Air is John Young’s debut novel. It reads like a coming-of-age memoir. The protagonist, Jason Blake, grows up caught between a mercurial father who is often violent and emotionally abusive, and an older brother who is very competitive yet...
Mirador is set in the United States and Mexico. The time is 1993. The North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is waiting to be ratified by the three countries involved: Canada, Mexico, and the US. To open the way to the potential economic expansion, Mexico has...
Rashi Rohatgi’s literary debut is Where the Sun Will Rise Tomorrow. It is set in 1905 which is the early Edwardian era of Great Britain and her colonies. Britain still occupies India, and that colors everything in Indian life. Years ago I read An Autobiography or the...
Master Class takes a dark look at how a near-future America slides into totalitarianism and eugenics. The system relies completely on a system of Q scores which encompass each person’s intelligence, economic status, etc. The higher one’s Q score, the more privileges...
Concealed is an amazing memoir. So often I find that memoirs are really authors’ ego trips, and they never derive any life-changing conclusions from their stories. Concealed avoids that trap quite nicely. Of Persian Jewish descent, Esther grows up in Queens, New York...
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