Penguin Review by Walter Cummins Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, published sixty-two years after his first, V, the author having reached age eighty-eight, replicates a number of themes treated…
Category: Fiction
The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis
Holt Review by George Yatchisin Xenobe Purvis can write spooky, but then there are all sorts of haunts, aren’t there? Her debut novel The Hounding, set during the 18th-century in…
A Case of Life and Limb: The Trials of Gabriel Ward by Sally Smith
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay In the second installment of Sally Smith’s captivating series, The Trials of Gabriel Ward, Sir Gabriel Ward, King’s Counsel, is once again confronted with a…
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
Knopf Review by Walter Cummins What We Can Know is divided into two parts, each covering the same events from information available a century apart. Part One, narrated by a…
Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş
Bloomsbury Review by David Starkey The themes in Turkish writer Ayşegül Savaş’s new story collection, Long Distance, are easy to identify: displacement, disillusionment, disquiet. Things don’t go the way we’d…
The Paris Express by Emma Donaghue
Summit Review by Walter Cummins Emma Donaghue succeeds in integrating multiple stories that involve a group of varied individuals on a train ride from Granville, Normandy, to Montparnasse station in…
Playworld by Adam Ross
Knopf Review by Walter Cummins In Adam Ross’s Playworld, Griffin Hurt, the narrator, depicts a collection of situations he lived through during his years from middle school until early high…
Fox by Joyce Carol Oates
Hogarth Review by Walter Cummins I hadn’t read a Joyce Carol Oates’ novel in years, an avoidance I can attribute to intimidation ny her output, which I believe is fifty-eight…
The Etruscan by Linda Lappin
Pleasure Boat Studio Review by Walter Cummins This new edition of Linda Lappin’s The Etruscan marks the twentieth anniversary of the novel’s initial publication in 2004. I reviewed it then,…
The Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler
Hogarth Review by Linda Lappin Anne Tyler’s delightful Vinegar Girl (2016) is often praised as a deliciously witty retelling of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. The novel shares the basic plot of much…