Review by Brian Tanguay When I began reading Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer who won the Nobel Prize for…
Category: Fiction
A Little Hope by Ethan Joella
Review by Walter Cummins The pages of Ethan Joella’s A Little Hope abound in death and loss. The novel, which opens with the question of whether a central character will…
Bewilderment by Richard Powers
Review by David Starkey Richard Powers’ new novel, Bewilderment, is—despite its portrayal of a mother and son who are capable of ecstatic connection with the natural world—one of the most…
The Last Gift by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Review by Walter Cummins Although The Last Gift (2011) is not 2021 Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah’s most acclaimed novel—the Booker Prize short-listed Paradise is—it illustrates his many strengths as…
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Review by David Starkey The first half of Patricia Lockwood’s new novel, No One Is Talking About This, feels something like reading an uber-contemporary update of David Markson’s This Is…
Bedtrick by Jinny Webber
Review by Kimberley Snow Bedtrick by Jinny Webber is her third novel about Alexander Cooke, a stage actor in Elizabethan England. The first book, The Secret Player, chronicles how a…
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Review by David Starkey Like the narrators of Kazuo Ishiguro’s two most famous novels—Stevens of Remains of the Day and Kathy H. of Never Let Me Go—Klara of his latest…
Phase Six by Jim Shepard
Review by David Starkey Right about now, probably the last thing most readers are looking for is another book about pandemics, and Jim Shepard’s new novel is a pandemic book…
How Icasia Bloom Touched Happiness by Jessica Bell
CRB Brief Review by Peter Snell How Icasia Bloom Touched Happiness is a tale of ordinary people and their struggles to have a happy and satisfying life. It is set…
Ladies Who Lunch: a satirical taste of L.A. by Josef Woodard
Review by George Yatchisin It’s 1990-something, and although fabulous Danielle Wiffard’s marriage is about to blow, fortunately for her (and this book’s readers), all of L.A.’s eligible bachelors, not to…