Published by BluOne Ink, 2023, 540 pages “We eat our poisons young and then trawl the world the rest of our lives, looking for antidotes.” Humans are intrinsically storytellers, and the stories we tell about ourselves shape who we are. They give form to our world, and each of us carries our own personal world …
Continue reading All Stray Dogs Go To Heaven: Krishna Candeth
Edited by David Stuart DaviesPublished by Macmillan, 2024, 310 pages There is something about reading a well-written horror story: the chills that run down your spine, the fear, and the feeling of being in the story while sitting at a comfortable distance from any actual danger. This collection is guaranteed to make you shiver, with …
Published by Vintage, 2023, 136 pages “Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams—of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in the dark, and of the bright energetic black of space …
Published by One, 2020, 217 pages A girl watches her mother make the perfect peach cobbler every week for her date with the married pastor; a woman writes to her half-sister about whose existence she learns only after their father dies; and two women live together in the cold north, far from their southern roots. …
Continue reading The Secret Lives of Church Ladies: Deesha Philyaw
Published by Allen Lane / Ferrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2020, 348 pages “This dishevelled mass of wood-chip brown regarded us warily with electric-yellow eyes. ... It was clearly an owl, but bigger than any I’d seen, about the size of an eagle but fluffier and more portly, with enormous ear tufts. Backlit by the hazy …
Translated from French by Robin BussPublished by Penguin, 1996, 1276 pages. Original version serialized in 1844-46 and published as a book in 1846. First unabridged translation by Emma Hardy, 1846. France, 1815. Napoleon is in exile, but has escaped from Elba. The Bourbons are on the throne. France is divided between the Bonapartists, who secretly …
Published by No Exit Press / Atria Books, 2023, 338 pages. Shane Collins is a CIA spy, posted in Manama, Bahrain. He is coming to the end of his career and merely wants to see his final posting out. But that is not what happens. He is running an informant—Rashid, who is part of Fourteen …
Have you been wondering why almost all the travel books on this site are by men? That is because, since 2013, I have been writing reviews of travel books by women for the website Women on the Road. Now that Women on the Road has been discontinued, I am moving the reviews, a few at …
Published by Sort Of Books, 1999, 247 pages. In 1988, Chris Stewart and his wife Ana bought an old, remote farm in Las Alpujarras in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Andalucía. This is the first book in his trilogy about living on their farm, El Valero. Chris, a former Genesis drummer, doesn’t pretend that living …
Continue reading Driving Over Lemons—An Optimist in Andalucía: Chris Stewart
Published by Storm Publishing, 2024, 352 pages. Two perfect suburban families: Lorrie and Ed, and their children Knox, Archie and Chloé; and Eden and Witt, and their daughter Summer. Summer and Knox, both seniors in high school, are dating. Lorrie and Eden—who are very close friends—joke about the children getting married and becoming each other’s …
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