Maile Meloy (Madame Lazarus) makes her narrating debut with this disturbing thriller that showcases a parent's worst nightmare – the disappearance of children. Best friends and cousins Liv and Nora take their husbands and two children (each) on a holiday cruise. The families bask in...
Just as the audiobook of Fiona Barton’s hair-raising debut, The Widow, got the full-cast treatment, so, too, does her equally unnerving sophomore effort. Mandy Williams returns as Kate Waters, the tenacious newspaper reporter introduced in Widow, who again won’t stop sleuthing until she has all...
*STARRED REVIEW Swedish author Fredrik Backman’s novels tackle serious subjects – isolated aging in A Man Called Ove, death and responsibility in My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She's Sorry, abandonment in Britt-Marie Was Here, dementia in And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer...
'Nine Continents' is Chinese author Xiaolu Guo’s resonant memoir about leaving her past Audiences familiar with Chinese-born, British-transplanted Xiaolu Guo’s prolific output know she’s alchemized elements of her own life to produce her fiction and films. Her remote village upbringing and Beijing education inspired Twenty Fragments...
*STARRED REVIEW For such a vulnerable, raw memoir, no one but the author could voice the breathtaking revelations, brutal truths, and profound knowledge contained here. “Every body has a story and a history,” Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist, Difficult Women) begins. Gay stands 6'3"; at her heaviest, she...
*STARRED REVIEW Experienced narrator Robin Miles is the ideal proxy for Gay's difficult women, many of whom are not so much difficult as living lives that have been made difficult, onerous, or tragic by others. Embodying various ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds, Miles refreshes and adapts her...
Accused of brutally murdering her husband, Zeba lands in jail. A mother of four, wife to Kamal, and obedient to Kamal's family, Zeba can't remember what happened. She remains silently resigned, realizing that in contemporary Afghanistan, just being a woman is enough to threaten not...
Already the star of an ongoing, bestselling series in Japan (on both page and screen), Det. Reiko Himekawa makes her English-translation debut, outsmarting her arrogant male colleagues by listening to the dead. At 29, Reiko is young to be a lieutenant in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police's...
Kate has always been a liar – out of necessity rather than malice. She's smart and savvy and knows how to be a good friend. She's also the best scholarship student Manhattan's tony Waverly School has ever had. Olivia, by contrast, has grown up with every...
While the titular widow is the character around which all others circle, she’s certainly not alone in holding secrets. Jean Taylor (read with unnerving control by Hannah Curtis) stood by her husband, Glen, through the heinous accusations leveled against him, until a week ago when...
*STARRED REVIEW Richard Chapman – husband, father, businessman – hosts a bachelor party in his Westchester, NY, home for his younger brother. Two strippers are hired to provide the expected entertainment, until the debauchery ends abruptly when the girls murder their bodyguards and flee. Richard must...
*STARRED REVIEW "This, reader, is a mother-daughter story," the American writer-who-is-also-the-mother insists in the latest from Lidia Yuknavitch (Dora: A Headcase). The mother-writer has battled debilitating bouts of depression but she's survived thus far, until her daughter's stillborn birth spirals her into silent withdrawal. In an...
Originally published in 2004, then 23-year-old Uzodinma Iweala’s debut novel – which began as the author's Harvard senior thesis under the direction of Jamaica Kincaid – reappears 11 years later in two additional incarnations: as an acclaimed film directed by Cory Fukunaga and this mesmerizing...
Multiple narratives swirl around Alma Belasco, a Polish teenager who escaped the Nazis in 1939 and arrived in San Francisco to share a privileged life with an indulgent aunt and uncle. Now 73, Alma is a favorite resident in a senior facility, devotedly looked after...
Sweden's Stieg Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004, but his internationally famed, mismatched hacker/journalist duo are proving to be immortal. Yes, Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist are back in a fourth installment of what is now the Millennium series (a 'trilogy' no more) with a new writer, Swedish journalist and...
Death by Water takes readers on a wild ride of epic proportions In addition to being noted for his prodigious literary accomplishments, 1994 Nobel Prize-winning Kenzaburō Ōe is known for being politically outspoken. He made international headlines again during this year’s 70th anniversary of the Nagasaki/Hiroshima...
How surprised was I to hear earlier this month that Oprah's latest Book Club 2.0 pick just happened to be on my iPod! I suppose the fact that I always have no fewer than a couple dozen books on my phone at all times makes...
If I were to choose the one book that affected me most this year – the one that ran the entire spectrum from giddiest to maddest, from eye-opening in wonder to eye-scrunching in horror – this is it. Bad Feminist has forever changed the way I read,...
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." "Frailty, thy name is woman." "Women always have the last word." All manner of pithy, less-than-admirable aphorisms about women come to mind after reading Samrat Upadhyay’s recent novel; such words as shocking, disturbing, wrenching, shattering also seem quite appropriate. And in case you...
To not stick this one in your ears would be such the missed opportunity. At just over four hours, this is undoubtedly longer than your usual theater performance, but with Eve Ensler herself so passionately narrating, her memoir transforms into a spectacular aural extravaganza. At 57, the woman...
