Clik here to view.
Peculiar Ground
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, prizewinning biographer and cultural historian, here turns her talents to fiction with a first novel, Peculiar Ground. The story begins in 1663 as the Royalist earl of Woldingham...
View ArticleTime Pieces: A Dublin Memoir
No one has captured Dublin of the 1950s, its griminess and narrowness, so well as John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black. I say this as a person who is only a couple of years younger than he and who,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Sparsholt Affair
The Sparsholt Affair is Alan Hollinghurst’s sixth novel, and like his previous two — the Man Booker Prize–winning The Line of Beauty and, subsequently, The Stranger’s Child — the story travels through...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Convenience Store Woman
You could say that Keiko Furukura, the central character and first-person narrator of Sayaka Murata’s wonderfully strange Convenience Store Woman, suffers from some degree of Asberger’s syndrome,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mr Flood’s Last Resort
It has been a long time since I’ve read a book as peculiar as Jess Kidd’s Mr. Flood’s Last Resort—and I say that with a some consternation. The Mr. Flood of the title is an ancient, unwashed,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Last Cruise
Kate Christensen’s last two books, Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose, were memoirs, and, as you can easily guess, both had food at their hearts. Now comes The Last Cruise, the author’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Life of My Own
Claire Tomalin brings the same scrutiny and forensic intelligence to her own beginnings in A Life of My Own as she brought to the more shadowy aspects of the lives she investigated in her celebrated...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Personality Brokers
Perhaps the two most noteworthy features of the immensely popular and profitable Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are that it is no more scientifically valid a tool for assessing individual proclivities...
View ArticleClik here to view.
5 Favorite Novels of 2018: A Critic’s Choices
I have a big folder of book lists: best, funniest, scariest, bestselling, culturally required, and sadly neglected, as well as lists of books and authors I want to investigate. Recently I have been...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Milkman
Anna Burns’s Milkman, winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize, is narrated by an unnamed 18-year-old woman and is set in an unnamed neighborhood in an unnamed city in the 1970s. To someone who has no...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Binstead’s Safari and Mrs. Caliban
Like most people, I had never heard of the American expatriate writer, Rachel Ingalls, but unlike most people, I was fortunate enough to have a copy of her 1983 novel, Binstead’s Safari, show up at...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Wall
John Lanchester’s two best-known novels had, for their day, an in-the-news feel: The Debt to Pleasure (1996) was about a foodie—a murderous one, as it happens—while Capital (2012) followed a large...
View ArticleClik here to view.
My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You
My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You is Aleksandar Hemon’s second—or, more accurately, second and third—foray into memoir. It consists of two parts bound together head to tail, the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free
The English author Andrew Miller is not especially well known here despite his winning a number of literary awards in Europe, including the Costa Award for Book of the Year and the Irish IMPAC. Four...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Year in Reading: A Reviewer’s Favorites from 2019
I read some exceptionally fine books this year, among them memoirs and biographies, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect...
View Article
