Even for readers who think they've seen everything, Gillespie and I by Jane Harris is almost certain to be surprising. The novel's setting is Victorian-era Scotland, and its narrator, 35-year-old Harriet Baxter, is a nosy spinster with an interest in art -- Scottish artist Ned Gillespie in particular. Harriet chronicles...

Everyone has them: those friends or acquaintances whose life's peak, and especially whose romantic peak, was in their Ivy League college days. Get in a room with one of these people plus a bottle of wine, and you are in for a long night of recollections of days-of-our-lives relationship dramas...

To arrive at the end of Caitlin Sweet's The Pattern Scars has the feel of awakening from a dream -- one of doing terrible things. It is a novel of intense contradiction: a lush, delicately imagined nightmare; a horror novel about intimacy.

Paradox is the heart of The Pattern...

As a reviewer I try to avoid hyperbolic statements, as it is expected of a critic to maintain an analytic distance. But Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods is designed to shock, and is quite simply the oddest novel I have ever read. "Novel" might be an inaccurate description, since the work...

Anyone who claims the novel is dead has not encountered Kathryn Stockett. The traditional literary tools of plot and character, working skilfully in tandem, make The Help pleasurable to sink into as a warm bath. I'd been wondering why the experience of reading this book evoked a nostalgia for my...

Was it worth the wait? That is likely the most burning question facing readers of George R. R. Martin's mammoth Song of Ice and Fire series regarding its fifth and latest installment, A Dance with Dragons. This book's release was famously delayed for years, drawing a barrage of reader outrage...

For months now, I've been counting the days to April 17th, the release date of HBO's Game of Thrones. As a longtime fan of the books I have high hopes for the TV series as delicious entertainment, which is the chief characteristic of George R. R. Martin's books at their...

What happens after we die? In the half-nightmare, half-comic world of Beyond Black, spirits "airside" are often more concerned about the cakes and marmite sandwiches they miss than with the secrets of the universe and are as likely to reminisce about kitchen fittings as about lost love. Beyond Black truly...

The premise sounds crazy: the significantly named Ignatius Perrish awakens from a drunken stupor to discover that he's the devil. Painfully fleshy horns have sprung from his head, and he is suddenly endowed with powers no sane person would want. Everything that is nasty in people is now an open...

In the life of a reader--and by a reader I mean someone who has always read for pleasure--it is doubtful that any books have as much impact, in the end, as the ones we read as children. Though my memories of their plots and characters are foggy, the stunningly illustrated...

Olive Kitteridge is a big woman: she is described thus many times throughout the short story collection/novel hybrid that is Olive Kitteridge, which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Olive lives in the tiny waterfront town of Crosby, Maine, with a population so small that everyone knows everyone else...

So I didn't go to the beach this summer, but I tend to think of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as my beach read gone wrong. I'll explain.

I've wanted to read this book since before it went mainstream. Yet two weeks into the book and still barely halfway...

In The Fourth Assassin, Omar Yussef, the heroic schoolteacher and detective, is back -- but this fourth installment in the series signifies a major departure from the previous novels. Until now, Matthew Beynon Rees' series was firmly anchored in the dark and often chaotic milieu of the Palestinian territories, ranging...

Concluding a series of posts for Short Story Month, a review of The White Road and Other Stories by Tania Hershman.

Beginning with a café in Antarctica, nothing at first seems more otherworldly than this slim collection of stories. Yet soon it becomes apparent that no matter...

In honor of the last week of Short Story Month, a series of short story posts.

Appropriately (though by no means intentionally) for short story month, in the past weeks I've been consumed by an addiction to short stories that is unprecedented for me. I have always preferred...

In honor of the last week of Short Story Month, a series of short story posts. First up is "The Ladies of Grace Adieu" by Susanna Clarke.

Susanna Clarke is best known for her bestselling novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, an unusual hybrid of Victoriana and fantasy....

The beginning of "Under Heaven," the latest offering by award-winning Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay, can be called deceptive: it is quiet, seen through the eyes of a contemplative young poet on the shores of a remote mountain lake. But Shen Tai, the protagonist in this novel...

Hitting US theaters today is Ajami, Israel's contender at this year's Academy Awards, which has also been garnering praise at Cannes and other international film festivals.

The vast, multi-language epic of family feuds, police detectives and Bedouin revenge squads - in Arabic and Hebrew - portrays the grim realities...

Once upon a time in the winter of this year, I looked at everything my husband and I were dealing with -- work, family tensions, and stress from living in one of the craziest cities in the world -- and said, "We need to get away."

As it happened,...

One of the advantages of living in Israel is that we're located near many of the places we've always wanted to see. So two weeks ago my husband and I zipped over to Greece for a weekend in Thessaloniki.

The...