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Recent Reviews
Caleb Carr
Rave The Washington Post What makes the book so moving is that it is not merely the saga of a great cat ... Sometimes, perhaps, Carr anthropomorphizes too much and exaggerates Masha’s language comprehension, or gives her more human emotion than she had. But maybe not ... Excellent.
Lea Carpenter
Rave The New York Times Book Review While Carpenter knows how to dish out the dread that a spy story needs, what makes Ilium intriguing are the characters ... This is the sort of moral ambiguity that seems to fascinate Carpenter, the way living a double life and every day making your cover, that critical and deeply embedded lie, feels real to everyone around you. It’s also what makes Ilium such an unexpectedly moving novel.
Emma Donoghue
Rave The Washington Post Donoghue is among the most fearless contemporary novelists we have: an immensely talented writer who is a great storyteller and, based on her extensive body of work, unafraid of subjects that give her less-courageous peers pause ... A fascinating story set at an English girls school in 1805 and — wait for it — what we once called an insane asylum in 1815. It has characters with complex internal lives, insights into the human soul, and a wrenching love story that’s both queer and multiracial ... My one quibble with the novel (and it’s a small one) is that Donoghue shares a lot of her research into the routines of school life in the 19th century, and those rituals slow the tale. But this is a small objection. Donoghue offers what I am sure Lister herself would view as a ripping good spin on her remarkable story.
Lawrence Osborne
Rave New York Times Book Review No one else writes \'thrillers\' as languid as Lawrence Osborne’s. His novels tend to be leisurely, slow-burn mysteries that could be mistaken for impeccably observed travel memoirs ... The tale begins to move more quickly ... Human nature and atmosphere will always interest Osborne more than the traditional pyrotechnics of a thriller. The palpable sense of dread that hovers over Hong Kong and Osborne’s exploration of Adrian’s own moral conundrum is what kept me turning the pages ... Osborne skillfully — and with exquisite prose — probes the nexus of community and character, and how where we are shapes who we are.
David Ignatius
Rave The Washington Post That’s the thing about an Ignatius novel: It’s not merely its ripped-from-the-headlines timeliness. Ignatius brings his immense skills as a journalist to his fiction, researching the idea and enriching his plot with both the latest spycraft and the arcane workings of, very often, the CIA ... Ignatius’s unsettling novel reminds us that we have created a world where facts have \'alternatives\' and the \'news\' on social networks can’t be trusted. It’s a page-turner, but it’s also a chilling story of the way the Internet has been weaponized.
Josh Malerman
Positive The Washington Post \"A novel whose premise is also claustrophobic and unsettling, but more ambitious than that of Bird Box ... The fact that the children are referred to by letters, instead of names, makes it difficult to differentiate all of them ... rich with dread and builds to a dramatic climax ... Malerman reminds us the real horror is not the blood that will splatter the towers. It is not the loss of innocence precisely, but something subtler and more poignant — the malevolence that could see yearning and love as something negative in the first place ... The children are not in cages in Malerman’s eerie new book. But they are lab rats.\
George Pelecanos
Rave The Washington Post Among Pelecanos’s gifts as a storyteller is that he understands the appeal of moral ambiguity and authentically flawed characters. That skill is on full display here. So is his sense of humor ... In many ways, The Man Who Came Uptown is a book about books ... So while much of this story is classic crime noir...I found myself also reading the book for the Proustian madeleines that Pelecanos serves us.
David Wroblewski
Mixed The Boston Globe The plot moves ahead in the manner one familiar with Hamlet might expect, especially if Shakespeare had had access to old cars, baseball on the radio, and dog breeding. Wroblewski is a terrific writer and has an unerring ear for dialogue — both spoken and signed — and his scenes involving Edgar and his dogs are both authentic and moving … A little bonding goes a long way, however, and there is a lot of bonding in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. There are scenes once Edgar has fled into the woods with his dogs that last an eternity. There are his encounters with a ghost (not his father's) that slow the novel for no apparent reason. And there are those lengthy transcripts from old letters about dog breeding that seem to belong in a science fiction novel.
Paul Harding
Positive The Boston Globe The novel is less about the details of one man's life than about the labyrinthine journey all of our lives will take at the end. There are certainly the precisely rendered specifics of George's boyhood, as well as lengthy sections about his father, Howard, a tinker who sold odds and ends to rural New Englanders from his horse-drawn wagon. Harding's interest, however, is in the universalities: nature and time and the murky character of memory. He is focused on the formative moments when the clay is still damp, not those long periods when we are already hardened statues … The small, important recollections, however, are rendered with an exactitude that is poetic.
Eleanor Catton
Rave The Washington Post ...astoundingly complicated and almost defies explanation … The 12 parts of the novel...wane like the moon: Each part is roughly half the length of the section that preceded it. Part 1 is 358 pages long. Part 12? Two … Throughout the novel, Catton shifts perspective among the dozen luminaries — as well as her other characters. She has created an erudite, omniscient 19th-century sort of narrator … Everyone in The Luminaries is hoping to get rich quick, and it’s a dog-eat-dog world where almost no one can be trusted and almost no one is telling the truth. At least not the whole truth. But the key to following the story is to try to follow the money. The result is a finely wrought fun house of a novel. Enjoy the ride.
Eowyn Ivey
Positive The Washington Post Perhaps because of my preference for heartbreak and dread in fiction (a personality disorder, I admit), on occasion I wished that Sophie and Allen weren’t so relentlessly good. The colonel is, mostly, patient, forward-thinking and resourceful. Sophie is a plucky feminist with a sense of humor. I craved a little of the tension that marked the behavior of that couple coping with the loss of a baby in Ivey’s first novel. The new book could also be shorter; I know from experience how often I have fallen in love with my research and bogged down a narrative. Nevertheless, To the Bright Edge of the World is a moving, surprising story.