Classics Reissued: The Homesman
/A strong woman and a weak man must make a perilous journey from the Western frontier to the East Coast in Glendon Swarthout's newly-reissued classic novel
Read MoreBook Review: Like a Mighty Army
/Armies clash and the technological stakes are raised in the latest installment in David Weber's rip-roaring "Safehold" series
Read MoreKooks, Spooks, and Gadzooks in the Penny Press!
/Last week’s London Review of Books started out with a dollop of crazy and just kept barreling along! The nutty topping came first, from a letter-writer out of County Tipperary who felt the need to do a little proud confessing: I once sold a pigsty, which is now a disguised dwelling, and built a cabin [...]
Read MoreMystery Monday: The 12.30 from Croydon!
/Our book today is The 12.30 from Croydon, a 1934 thriller (its boring American title was Wilful and Premeditated) by Freeman Wills Crofts, who was both a member in good standing of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction and also that much rarer bird, an Irishman with absolutely no ear for telling a good [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The Deliverance of Evil
/A young woman is murdered on the eve of Italy's tumultuous win in the 1982 World Cup - and then 24 years later, on the eve of another World Cup victory, more bodies start turning up, and it's up to one haunted, damaged cop to piece the mystery together (hint: it's not hooligans)
Read MoreBook Review: My Name is Resolute
/The life of one remarkable woman - told against the backdrop of American colonies boiling toward revolution - forms the narrative of Nancy Turner's sumptuously old-fashioned new historical novel
Read MoreWarm Winter Mornings in the Penny Press!
/It’s not often, especially nowadays, that the cover of The New Yorker is better than any of the contents of the issue, but that certainly happened last week. The issue had an infuriating piece by Tad Friend about a family of irresponsible Nantucket knuckleheads whose ordeal at sea only momentarily distracts the reader from [...]
Read MoreBook Review: James & Dolley Madison
/A new dual-biography of James Madison and his wife Dolley sees them through some of fledgling America's most trying times
Read More1812!
/Our book today is 1812, a meaty, fantastic 1996 historical novel by David Nevin, who wrote a string of first-rate books in the fifteen years before his death in 2011. 1812 is the dramatic story of fledgling America’s second fight with the British Empire, and it centers on President James Madison and his strong-willed wife [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Lincoln's Boys
/The image of Abraham Lincoln - the saintly, martyred Great Emancipator - is a permanent fixture of human culture … but a fascinating new book takes a detailed look at the men who carefully crafted that image
Read MoreMystery Monday: The Laughing Policeman!
/Our book today is The Laughing Policeman, a 1968 police procedural mystery from the phenomenally popular Swedish husband and wife team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo that got translated into English in 1970 and quickly racked up more critical and popular success than all the authors’ previous novels combined and is still considered something [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Who Thinks Evil
/Sherlock Holmes's legendary nemesis Professor Moriarty returns - as super-sleuth hero of a new thriller involving a threat to Queen Victoria's throne and the nation itself
Read MorePenguins on Parade: Landscape with Figures!
/Some Penguin Classics claim only the flimsiest of excuses for their existence, and one such recent example would have to be the new reprint of Landscape with Figures, the selected prose writings of the great Victorian author and nature-writer Richard Jefferies, who was born in 1848 and died in 1887 and yet managed to cram [...]
Read MoreBook Review: An Unnecessary Woman
/In chaos-plagued Beirut, a voracious reader lives an oddly fulfilling secret life
Read MoreFebruary 2014 Issue
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