Liana Liu’s second novel, Shadow Girl, is a teenage tale wrapped in a ghost story. Mei’s father has left home a couple of years before the book begins, and since then, she and her Chinese mother have struggled to make ends meet and keep her brother out of trouble. Now that Mei has graduated from […]
The Scots didn’t invent stubbornness, but they perfected it, raised it to a high art where irresistible force and immovable objects are sometimes locked like two neutron stars in a perilous dance. So, it is with American immigrant Johnny MacKinnon and his Scottish son, Corran, in Laura Lee Smith’s second novel, ‘The Ice House’. The […]
Elif Shafak’s Three Daughters of Eve begins sharply, as Peri, a wealthy, middle-aged Turkish woman, makes her way to a dinner party. Suddenly, Peri finds herself face to face with a robber, who takes her purse and shakes free its contents, including a prized Polaroid. Watching the Polaroid flutter to the ground, Peri recalls her […]
Sometimes you can’t see how something works until it breaks, and you can’t see that it’s broken unless you compare it to something that isn’t. In Little Broken Things, while Liz plans one of her classic summer parties, whose standard can’t be beat in Key Lake, Minnesota, her two daughters’ lives unravel at the seams. […]
A tender, surprising story of young love in France
Visions of a midlife crisis
Down these mean streaks a man must go
The stories that make up a life
At a time when it seems like there’s a new psychological thriller released every other week whether it is a book or a movie, it is increasingly difficult to find one that stands out. Anna Snoekstra achieves that in her sophomore novel, Little Secrets. This is a must-read for fans of Gilly Macmillan and Lisa […]
Someone steeped in Islamic traditions may find Elizabeth Bucar’s exploration of style among Muslim women in Iran, Turkey and Indonesia to be a bit simplistic. Indeed, the key message in her book, ‘Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress’, is quite basic: that fashion among Muslim women is diverse, highly individual and different, whether they are […]