Summit Review by Walter Cummins I was more than half way through The Kindness of Strangers before I realized Emma Garman’s real subject in this novel, the uncertainty of identity.…
Category: Fiction
Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive: Stories by Alison Gadsby
Guernica Review by Brian Tanguay Competitive or recreational swimming is a tableau for most of the nineteen stories in this collection, along with family conflict, failed love and humanoids with…
Python’s Kiss: Stories by Louise Erdrich
Harper Review by David Starkey Louise Erdrich occupies one of those rare and coveted positions among contemporary authors: like Ann Patchett, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Franzen, the late Hilary Mantel, and…
Land by Maggie O’Farrell
Knopf Review by David Starkey When I finished reading Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel Land, I thought of an Aboriginal Australian proverb that roughly translates as “Land is the story of…
Talking to the Wolf by Rebecca Chace
Red Hen Review by Walter Cummins The inseparability of past and present permeates this novel through the lives of the four women friends whose stories alternate in the telling. It…
Body Double by Hanna Johansson, translated by Kira Josefsson
Catapult Review by Walter Cummins Although I read a translation of this novel, I assume the English sentence structure replicates that of the original Swedish, a series of flat statements…
Agnes Lives! by Hallie Elizabeth Newton
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay I have never read a novel in which the protagonist searches for someone to take their life. Meet Agnes Maurer, follow her over the course…
Crocodilopolis by John Manuel Arias
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay Is it inevitable that the sins of fathers be visited upon their sons? Perhaps not, but sons haunted by their fathers is one of the…
Five Weeks in the Country by Francine Prose
Harper Walter Cummins Readers can fantasize the meeting of two literary titans as an opportunity for an exchange of legendary brilliance. But it doesn’t always work out that way. When…
White River Crossing by Ian McGuire
Crown Review by David Starkey If you were thinking it would be a good idea to send a group of mismatched and underprepared people to Canada’s far north in search…