When he steps outside his usual formula (feisty young attorney battles corrupt law firm/insurance company/government agency), John Grisham often achieves something singular.
Brazilian author Paulo Coelho is the author of “The Alchemist,” a book I haven’t read but understand is a book that many embraced.
The Brat Prince is back, heaven help us.
Barry is, of course, searching for the American Dream, searching for “Lake Success.”
There’s an intense, austere moment at the end of Elliot Ackerman’s “Dark at the Crossing,” a finalist for last year’s National Book Award. It occurs as two people journey to their “crossing” in the Middle East. We experience it through the eyes of someone peering through a seam in the tarpau…
The literary prototype for this important and moving novel from Canadian author Esi Edugyan — her most recent work is “Half-Blood Blues” — is very much the picaresque: A naive youth wanders the world, observing its errant idiosyncrasies while coming of age. Think Candide. Think Huckleberry Finn.
“Cherry” is a remarkable and fierce coming-of-age novel.
Truth and understanding are at the heart of every moment of this devastating and disturbing novel.
When it was first published back in 1939, “The Big Sleep” was instrumental in developing the tropes for a different type of crime novel. In fact, Raymond Chandler’s name often appeared alongside Dashiell Hammett’s (“The Maltese Falcon”), for both writers rejected the civilized “drawing room …
There are two genres working simultaneously in “Safe Houses,” a new novel from Dan Fesperman. One is an edge-of-your-seat spy thriller. The other is a baffling murder mystery.
You’re going to really hate yourself for liking this book as much as you do.
In “A Spool of Blue Thread,” her splendid 2015 novel about a family and their house, Anne Tyler writes about the human inclination to set a home — both edifice and family — in order. The night before they move into their house, a husband tells his wife: “I’m just trying to pass muster.”
Christopher Buckley has treated readers to satirical looks at Washington politics in novels such as “Thank You for Smoking” and “No Way to Treat a First Lady.” Now he has delved into colonial history to produce “The Judge Hunter,” an eventful and often funny tale depicting the clash of compe…
The title of this shattering and original first book from Tommy Orange references a phrase found in a couple of places. Gertrude Stein said famously, and with a kind of “painful nostalgia” about her hometown of Oakland, Calif., “There is no there there.”
Stephen McCauley is still as incisive as he’s always been. From “The Object of My Affection” on, he has commented on our middle-class foibles with an acuity that in some hands might have become caustic, but in his remains affecting and compassionate.
Early in “The Opposite of Writing,” the introduction to this winning collection of occasional pieces, Michael Chabon recounts a conversation he had with an author “at a literary party the summer before my first novel was published.” That author tells Chabon the key to being a successful writ…
Richard Russo is one of our American treasures. His books come as close to the truths of modern living as any contemporary writer gets. His writing is vivid, graceful and wise. He quickly invites us in, making us as comfortable as he can, while he shows us the worst and the best of modern life.
Richard Flanagan’s “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” won the Man Booker Prize in 2014. This new novel, his first since that time, appeared in Australia last year and has just recently been published in this country.
“Aetherial Worlds” is the first collection from Tatyana Tolstaya to be translated into English in more than 20 years. Therefore, the 18 stories that comprise the volume will surely be new to most readers, even though the author is regarded as one of contemporary Russia’s preeminent writers.
A rich mixture of history, artistry and creativity is offered this month for those who are interested in learning more about church’s architectural features or reading an historical fiction set in the War Between the States. Stephanie Bain, Oxford author of “The Girl I Left Behind,” centers …
Julian Barnes wrote in “The Sense of an Ending,” his novel that won the Man Booker Prize in 2011, “How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that ou…
“The Sandman” is the fourth of the Joona Linna series of Nordic noir by an author who doesn’t really exist. Lars Kepler, it turns out, is “the pseudonym of the critically acclaimed husband-and-wife team Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril and Alexander Ahndoril.”
“You’re out there on your own playing guessing games with a smart, highly unpredictable man. When you hit just the right spot, there will be no guards to rush in and remove his hands from your throat. And when he hits your raw spots — and he will — are you ready for it?”
Jo Nesbo's “Macbeth” seems, like his Harry Hole series, is ferociously complex, unrestrained and altogether ruthless.
