THE STREET is the heartbreaking story of Lutie Johnson, a young, black, single mother trying to raise her son on the streets of Harlem. First published in 1946, THE STREET was Ann Petry’s debut novel and was the first book by a female author to sell over a million copies. THE STREET is as resonant …
RODHAM is a glorious mash up of the real with the imagined. Sittenfeld inserts real-life people, including Donald Trump, into her alternate history with some surprising outcomes. A satisfying read for those of us who wish that we could have a do-over of the 2016 election.
James McBride won the National Book Award for his book The Good Lord Bird, and his newest novel Deacon King Kong is a contender as well. Deacon King Kong may read as a farce, but buried in McBride’s humor and hilarity is a book about grace and second chances. In September of 1969, Deacon Cuffy …
Afterlife is Julia Alvarez’s first adult novel in fifteen years and her timing lands it squarely in the conversations we’re having now about immigration and white privilege. Originally from the Dominican Republic, Antonia Vega has recently retired from her career as an English Professor when her husband suddenly dies. As she navigates through grief, she …
At the heart of Louise Erdrich’s new novel The Night Watchman is the battle over Native dispossession. Thomas Wazhashk is a night watchman at the Turtle Mountain Reservation’s first factory, a jewel-bearing plant. His character is based upon Erdrich’s grandfather, whose letters and personal accounts provided insight and a valuable resource as she wrote the …
In the opening scene of Jane Harper’s, The Lost Man, two brothers stand at the grave sight of an old stockman where they have found the body of their brother, Cameron. Brothers Nathan, Cameron, and Bub Bright grew up on this remote land in the Australian outback; so flat “it seemed possible to detect the …
Peter Geye is back with the third installment of the Eide family story, Northernmost. Like the first in the series, Lighthouse Road, Northernmost alternates between two generations. In 1897, Odd Einar Eide returns home from a harrowing near-death seal hunting expedition in the Arctic to his own funeral. He’s been missing and presumed dead. His …
Olive Kitteridge is back in Elizabeth Strout’s sequel, Olive, Again. It’s been over ten years since we last heard from Olive, and she is still the acerbic, cantankerous, highly opinionated, yet reservedly empathetic Olive that we’ve come to know and love. Strout won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for Olive Kitteridge, a novel in short …
NOTHING MORE DANGEROUS by Allen Eskens is a coming-of-age mystery that reads like literary fiction. Boady Sanden is a fifteen-year-old freshman at Ignatius High School in Jessup, Missouri. If you’ve read Eskens other novels, you may recognize Boady’s name from The Life We Bury and The Heavens May Fall, in those books, he is older …
There are lots of places I would gladly return to, but the totalitarian theocracy of Gilead is not one that I would relish to revisit in real life. But in fiction? Sign me up. Especially, if the regime is about to come down at the hands of a woman. Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s …
