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Paris 1992: An existence based on want. Of pure gluttony and desire. Cultivating a life of art, sex, drugs, and writing. A hard-driving frenetic love of Katerina. Los Angeles 2017: Stability. Boredom. Guilt. Commercial success. Deep self-hatred. Selling out. A love defined by partnership of wife, mother of children. Katerina is the story of Jay,... Continue Reading →
Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier is a strongly-written novel of a field hospital on the Eastern front of World War One. Lucius is a young man from a family of means who finds medicine as an escape from the obligations of his birth. And when war breaks out with only a couple of years of... Continue Reading →
The Pharaoh Key picks up Gideon's story right after his last mission with Effective Engineering Solutions. Two quick twists jump-start the plot: Gideon's trip to the doctor confirms a prior diagnosis of an inoperable brain disorder and he is given only months to live. And his employer stops payments on his salary and mysteriously closes its... Continue Reading →
“Here, we’re privileged. There, we’re nobodies.” - A white expat husband tells his black Rwandan wife the stark reality of their life in Burundi as opposed to his native France in the 1990s. But the underlying message is that she needs to turn her back on the lower class Burundians and to 'know her place.'... Continue Reading →
"I’ve made corpses before but never loved it." Alma Rosales can be many things: a Pinkerton agent, a naive young Scottish girl, a gruff dock worker, a poor Southern worker woman. A shape-shifter, a chameleon, one who is willing to play any angle to get the information she needs. Now in Townsend, Washington working for Delphine... Continue Reading →
Steve Kistulentz’s ambitious debut Panorama traces the story of a New Year’s Day plane crash at the Dallas airport. The novel follows several of the people connected to the crash in the day before the tragedy and those following it. Washington pundit Richard who specializes in free speech fisticuffs. A single mother returning to Dallas... Continue Reading →
Today a college friend sent a screenshot on our ‘College Dude’ thread of his music app playing Daft Punk’s Around the World, one of our favorite songs from our days of drinking Natural Light. My ten friends on the thread live all across the country and work in a myriad of professions. We graduated from... Continue Reading →
For me, the mark of a good historical novel is how quickly and deeply I care about the author’s depictions of the issues of the past. Therese Anne Fowler’s A Well-Behaved Woman had me immediately engrossed in the world of monied NYC society during the Gilded Age. Based on the life of suffragist, socialite, and... Continue Reading →
Michelle Jana Chan’s novel Song tells the inspirational saga of a young Chinese boy’s struggle to defy class and racial lines in colonial British Guyana in the late 1800s. After a flood in his village in China takes his father and siblings, Song finds his way to Guangzhou and boards a ship that eventually takes... Continue Reading →
