Daughters of Warsaw is a dual point-of-view historical fiction novel, split between the present time in Seattle and World War II Warsaw. Lizzie in the Pacific Northwest has suffered a series of miscarriages and is wallowing in self-pity and grief when she discovers...
I’ve read most of Joe Clifford’s works and found A Moth to Flame to be his best so far. He tells the story of two sisters: Jess, the elder, who had been found dead at the bottom of a ravine twenty-five years earlier, and Lydia, the younger, now an investigator for the...
The Zanzibar Chest was absolutely fascinating. It’s terrific reading, so good it was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. It is far more than a mere memoir or travelogue. Hartley was born in Kenya and still resides there, so he writes about events on the...
Return to Lerici is the second of a so-far two book series, continuing the story of the Greene sisters begun in The Invisibles. Half-sisters Elinor and Saffron are bound by a father who abandoned them as he pursued a near-infinite series of infidelities. After being...
During the recent upsurge in hostilities between Israel and Palestine, I stumbled across Mornings in Jenin by the American-Palestinian author, Susan Abulhawa. After reading its heart-wrenching words and being moved to tears many times, I placed it on my keep-forever...
I got this book thinking it was an art heist story, one of my favorite genres. I enjoyed it, although I didn’t expect the fantasy aspect. Dani Poissant, a superb artist, manipulated into becoming an art forger and accomplice to her mother, Maria, a world-famous art...
Crazy for Trying is a bit of a genre-bending novel: coming of age meets women’s fiction meets feminism meets western romance. I enjoyed it very much. Tulsa Bitters leaves San Francisco after the death of Andrea Firestein, Tulsa’s 1970s lesbian-feminist-activist...
I’ve read several of Paul Theroux’s nonfiction books (having just finished The Last Train to Zone Verde), primarily travelogues with deep insights into his various journeys, but this is my first foray into his fiction. I am delighted that he carries through with his...
Having been interested in Gandhi and India since my twenties and having read a good deal about him, I was eager to read Becoming Gandhi. The author and I are roughly the same age, being in our twenties during the 1970s and seem to have similar thoughts regarding the...
The Fetishist is the story of three people: a young punk rocker named Kyoko; Daniel, a now-middle-aged violinist who finally reconciles with his past; and Alma, a superb cellist, the love of Daniel’s life, who feels she was never truly loved as a young woman. Kyoko’s...
The Bullet Swallower is described as a magical realism western with prose in the vein of Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, and Gabriel García Márquez. Though the breadth of those comparisons seems unfathomable, The Bullet Swallower is a unique novel, a truly quirky...
Diva can no means be considered a biography of the fabulous opera soprano, Maria Callas, as it covers primarily the brief period of time in which she is involved with Aristotle Onassis, then the richest man in the world with only an occasional flashback to her...
Somehow I seem to be reading a lot of books set in the American or Canadian West which truly resonate with me: the works of Richard Wagamese, Peter Heller, and now Kent Haruf's trilogy: Plainsong, Eventide and Benediction. Plain song, for which Haruf’s Plainsong book...
This is the third book I’ve read recently about World War II and the pillaging and looting of Europe by the Germans. The others were the nonfiction Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel and the women’s fiction The Last Masterpiece by Laura Spinelli. Each of them takes a...
The Last Masterpiece is set in 1943 Italy as the Allies try to beat back the Germans and Italian Fascists. The reader meets Eva Brunner, a German photographer, who, to prevent her father from sending her little brother off to war, volunteers to go instead. Her father...
The Monuments Men has been on my to-be-read list pile since it came out, and I finally started it because I finished The Last Masterpiece by Laura Morelli dealing with the same subject. As someone with a lifelong interest in art and a former resident of Italy, this...
Rare book seller Ashlyn Greer has a unique gift: when she picks up a book, she senses the echoes of its previous owners’ emotions. When two custom-bound volumes come into her possession, she begins a bit of detective work to discover who wrote them. There is no author...
I'm a sucker for books about art and books that somehow capture the splendor of nature. Peter Heller’s The Painter wins on both counts, with the added attraction of a stark, precise prose that deftly renders complex emotions, the joy and grief of the human condition....
In The Wolf and the Woodsman, Évike is the only woman in her village without magical powers. The locals claim her corrupted bloodline is the problem: her father was a Yehuli man, a tax collector from the capitol. The king, who is consolidating his powers with pagan...
Face of Greed is the first in author James L’Etoile’s Detective Emily Hunter Mystery series. I’ve read and enjoyed his earlier Nathan Parker and Detective Penley series. Readers who enjoy noir, thrillers, police procedurals, and suspense will enjoy his books. James...
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