Category: FICTION

March 17, 2013

HHhH by Laurent Binet **** (of 4)

Reinhard Heydrich, The Blonde Beast, ruled Czechoslovakia for the Nazis until he was assassinated in 1942. One of Hitler’s favorites — how is it I...

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February 21, 2013

The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler ** (of 4)

The first in a series about a rough and tumble journalist, Christopher Marlowe Cobb, who in this episode finds himself covering a delicate series of...

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February 3, 2013

Code Name Verity *** (of 4) by Elizabeth Wein

This is the tale of a irrepressible friendship between two women doing very unusual jobs. It is World War II and England is barely holding its own...

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January 24, 2013

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers *** (of 4)

The war is Iraq. Young men are sent to fight an unseen enemy. No, not fight them, but kill them. Over and over. For the...

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January 12, 2013

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz **** (of 4)

A series of connected short stories about Yunior, a semi-autobiographical doppleganger for the author, Junot Diaz. Yunior is a streetwise Dominican immigrant in a poor...

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December 18, 2012

Dissolution by C.J. Sansom ** (of 4)

In the 1530s, Thomas Cromwell, working for a surly King Henry, is in battle with the Roman Catholic church. The Pope’s monasteries have dominated rural life for...

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November 30, 2012

Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon ** (of 4)

Very rarely is an author’s style so obstructionist that it interferes, but sadly, Kanon’s frequent indecipherability kept me from finishing. Too bad. I was in...

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November 15, 2012

The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak *** (of 5)

Jozef Ondrej is taken by his father as an infant, after his mother dies, to the mountains of central Europe on the eve of the...

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November 15, 2012

Home by Toni Morrison *** (of 5)

An African American soldier returns from fighting in Korea with his mind in tatters. The army was integrated and ordered, but his experience was profoundly horrifying....

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October 28, 2012

A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers *** (of 4)

In this rewrite of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, aptly named Alan Clay, a former salesman of Schwinn bicycles finds himself in Saudi Arabia trying...

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