Eleanor Brown's eponymous "weird sisters" – introduced with a quote from the good Bard's Macbeth: "I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters" – are perhaps the most erudite characters I've encountered in a long time. Trained by a professor father who speaks to them mostly in...
First things first: make sure to go backwards to catch up with the opening three volumes; this is definitely a series that needs to be read in order. Parents, be warned: these kids are going to scare you to distraction. Younger readers, take heed: don't...
Hapa Jordanian American Diana Abu-Jaber established herself with her first three titles – novels Arabian Jazz and Crescent, and memoir The Language of Baklava – as a lauded, award-winning Arab American literary voice. She leaves her own origins off the page in this chilling psychological thriller – her first, but most likely not her last....
"On a busy street in the late afternoon, the rain begins ...
Clearly I waited too long to read this book, even though it sat ready on my shelves and on my iPod for years. Before I lament further, you should know that if you choose to go audible, Firdous Bamji doesn't disappoint; he remains one of the...
* STARRED REVIEW Think of Tash Aw's third novel as an ingenious game called "How To Be a Billionaire." A how-to guide is interspersed with 30 rules that also serve as chapters, e.g., "Move to Where the Money Is," "Always Rebound After Each Failure," "Strive To...
Okay, so Tana French’s website says that she won the coveted Oscar-for-mysteries Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 2007, but if you check the actual Edgars site (which has an 'I've never seen this anywhere else, but every award site should have one!'-database), that...
Having discovered manga/manwha on the verge of being old, I often have these delicious moments of 'gaaaah'-wonder at coming across something original in the graphic industry. So here's a not-quite-three-years-old publishing niche I recently learned about – I know! What took me so long?! Meet GEN...
For fans of Aravind Adiga's unforgettable 2008 Booker Prized first novel, The White Tiger, who were perhaps not as enthralled with his 2011 follow-up, Last Man in Tower, might I suggest you look backward a few more years to his very first book? Introduced to eager readers just after Adiga's Booker...
"All of us have all kinds of friends," author Norma Simon writes. We have friends at school, in our family, friends we see all the time, and friends we can only see once in a while. You can have old friends and new friends who...
Well, I've done it now. I've finished every Edward P. Jones book ever written ...
At 24, Susannah Cahalan, life was just about perfect. She was a budding journalist working for the New York Post, she went home to a tiny but cozy Manhattan studio, and she had just started a promising new relationship. And then the madness set in, starting...
Some years back, during a discussion about what was then the latest tragic news coming out of the Middle East, a friend's mother softly remarked about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, "The absolute worst arguments happen among families." She (the widow of conservative rabbi) was referring specifically...
Here's the seemingly simple story: When her grandmother falls ill, 13-year-old Hayaat decides that a jarful of her ancestral soil – a mere six miles away – will be the very thing that will make her grandmother well, so Hayaat grabs her best friend and goes off...
Ben Bright – popular senior, lead in the school musical opposite both his girlfriend Ariela and best friend Niko, the older son in a warmly bonded family of four – has a secret. Without telling his family and friends, he's bypassed college and chosen the U.S. Army....
It began with a story. I know, I know, that's what they all say. But Jessica Soffer's debut novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, really did begin with a short story she wrote in 2009 for a graduate school assignment. In sharp contrast to the novel's...
If beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, then perhaps bad behavior might be, too. "In this book we are taking a look back through history at all manner of famous female felons," write mother/daughter author-team Jane Yolen and Heidi E. Y. Stemple (who,...
In both content and form, The Wasted Vigil is a book of extremes. For readers who have experienced Nadeem Aslam before (and the apt word really is 'experience'), you'll recognize (and be awed by) his mesmerizing prose ...
So why is it that all good things are supposed to come to an end? I’d be perfectly happy with another 20 more volumes. Really, is that too much to ask? With an enormously huffy sigh of resignation, I moaningly offer a final post for Naoki...
This might be a spoiler of sorts: The advance galley is printed with a March 12, 2013 pub date, but when I went searching for an image of the book's cover to load here, online bookstores list a May date. Hmmm ...
