How It All Began, the new novel from Booker Prize Winner Penelope Lively can be read as a clever and fun romp, where we the reader get to play peeping tom, peeking into ordinary lives turned sideways by one incident. Charlotte, the eye of the storm, recovers from...

The World We Found by Thrity Umrigar is a sparkling and sharp slice of life that, in presenting four personal stories, reflects and illuminates universal truths. Four women have been friends since their student days in Bombay, during the heady but dangerous years of the 1970s when protests...

In the New York Times Sunday Book Review of December 18th, Geoff Dyer bemoans this year's Man Booker Prize winner, The Sense of an Ending, written by Julian Barnes, as an averagely-written novel which carries on (or plods on) with what has become a particular English ("nationalized") mode...

The final line of John Banville's review of Joan Didion's Blue Nights in the New York Times Book Review states: "the author comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life's worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art." I have...

A Soviet-Era dictatorship still exists, as the people of Belarus understand too well. The oppressive regime of President Lukashenko is truly a hold-out from the days of the old USSR, with a KGB that takes care of dissent and a ruling government that brooks no opposition to its economic directives...

On Halloween, I saved the tricks for my kids and sent out treats of one hundred paperback and hardcover books to three different APO and FPO addresses, here and abroad. Who needs -- and deserves -- the comfort, escape, and pleasure of books more than our United States troops?

I have three cats and would have five more if my husband Jack could stand the drifting clouds of hair, the scratched furniture, the meowing, and the brawling. A dog he would not even consider, with its extra requirements of walking, drool wiping, and accident clean-ups (what he doesn't know...

When asked by Steve Berntson, a farmer from Paulina, Iowa, to discuss books that had shaped his life, Rick Perry turned the question back to the economy and failed to name even a single book that influenced him, or cheered him, or inspired him. (New York Times, "After...

The novel A Gift Upon the Shore by M.K. Wren is weirdly (and I hope not completely) accurate about the forces of intolerance that exist today. Published over 20 years ago, Wren did not foresee either the globalization of information or the tentacles of surveillance under which we live,...

I came late to the Jack Reacher thrillers written by Lee Child. I have heard so much about Reacher and Child but with so many -- fifteen to choose from -- I didn't know where to start. Lee Child to the rescue: he just made it easy for me, with...

There But For The by Ali Smith is a marvel of a novel, sweeping in purpose (what is the meaning of life, of history, of our presence or our absence) and magnetic in both the presentation of its cast of characters and the unfolding of its deceptively simple plot (a...

Two recent novels illustrate the wild and deep beauty of Irish fiction-writing today. Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor is a breathtaking and mesmerizing novel, one of the best books I've read all year. Chosen by the city of Dublin as a citywide shared read ("One City, One Book"),...

The most common question I am asked during my book tour for Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading, is: what was your favorite book of the year? I can understand the question. For one year I read a book a day and wrote about...

For those of us waiting with bated breath for the next installment in C.J. Sansom's marvelous Matthew Shardlake murder mysteries set in Tudor England, heed my words: Phil Rickman and his John Dee have arrived! Our cravings for craven Tudor-esque crimes can be satisfied! After all, the agitated times of...

One of my earliest memories is of going to the library bookmobile that stopped just a few blocks from our house. I can still see it, a silvery boxy mirage glowing above the heated asphalt street of a Chicago summer. Inside the bookmobile the air was miraculously cool. It was...

Where I live in the Northeast summer has finally arrived, hot and humid and sunny. For months, people have been gearing up for the summer season by working out, putting in extra sessions at the gym or on the treadmill to get their body ripped and ready for beach or...

Think writing a query letter is hard? Or the synopsis for a book that you hope to have published? Or the copy for the inside flap of the book? Welcome to the next task in presenting your book to the world: the video book trailer. A few years ago, this...

Pop-up bookstores are an international phenomenon, from New York to Chicago to Honolulu to London to Berlin -- and now one has come to Pittsburgh and it's the biggest one ever. Twenty-four thousand square feet of vacant space has been turned into a temporary bookstore -- exactly where a Borders...

I loved Geraldine Brooks' latest historical novel, Caleb's Crossing. Set in mid-seventeenth century New England (Martha's Vineyard and Cambridge, Massachusetts), Brooks uses what is known of the true story of Native American Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, Harvard grad of 1665 and son of the leader of the Wampanoag tribe, to weave a...

In his marvelous book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, Adam Goodheart presents a rich and vivid portrait of what Americans of the time were all about at the start of the Civil War; he explores what ordinary people and extraordinary people, from east to west, north to south, from shopkeepers...