Librarian, velocireader, word nerd.
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In the early years of the twentieth century, Calcutta is grappling with deadly diseases such as the plague, cholera, typhoid, …
In the early years of the twentieth century, Calcutta is grappling with deadly diseases such …
Ashoke Mukhopadhyay’s A Ballad of Remittent Fever is a remarkable book that manages the difficult task of balancing engaging characters with entertaining plots and fascinating, important questions that are impossible to answer. The braided plots tell the tales of three revolutionary men, all doctors and all members of the Ghoshal family, from the late 1800s through to the 1960s. It’s a marvel how Mukhopadhyay’s book manages to contain all this in a little over 300 pages. This book is beautifully translated by Arunanva Sinha, who knows just went to leave a word or two untranslated...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.
In this dazzling thriller, New York Times bestselling author Joseph Kanon gives us his richest setting pre-World War II Shanghai, …
In this dazzling thriller, New York Times bestselling author Joseph Kanon gives us his richest …
Daniel Lohr is a cautious man for three reasons. First, his criminal uncle taught him how to watch his own back. Second, he’s a communist. Third, he’s a Jew and it’s 1938. As Joseph Kanon’s new novel Shanghai opens, Daniel is about to board a ship for the only foreign port that doesn’t require an entry visa and is one of the only places European Jews can find refuge. And he doesn’t know it yet, but Daniel is going to need every skill and trick he ever learned...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
In Avik Jain Chatlani's This Country Is No Longer Yours , a chorus of disparate voices comes together to explore …
In Avik Jain Chatlani's This Country Is No Longer Yours , a chorus of disparate …
In 1980, the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) went to war in Peru. For almost twenty years, Senderistas terrorized anyone who didn’t follow their radical version of communism: urban and rural, rich and poor. Avik Jain Chatlani’s disturbing novel-in-stories, This Country is No Longer Yours, gives us a sense of what living in Peru might have been like in the last decades of the twentieth century. Chatlani shows us revolutionaries, reactionaries, survivors, and victims. Most of all, Chatlani shows us a country in turmoil with itself...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
Linni de Witt is supposed to be retired. She’s definitely earned it, since she worked for the British government during the first and second world wars. And she would be quietly living in her grace-and-favor house in the countryside if people from London hadn’t bothered her new friends, Jim and Rosie Mackie. In The White Lady, Jacqueline Winspear’s protagonist shakes off the (very faint) dust of inactivity to protect the Mackies from the clutches of his criminal family. Alongside this caper, Winspear takes us to Linni’s war years, slowly revealing what drives her strongly protective instincts...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.
Ten years before Nina St. Pierre was born, her mother attempted suicide by lighting herself on fire. During her mother's …
Ten years before Nina St. Pierre was born, her mother attempted suicide by lighting herself …
The way we grow up sets our definitions of what “normal” is. Childhood prepares us for the way we interpret and react to the world around us: with fear, with enthusiasm, with curiosity, with anger, etc. In Love is a Burning Thing, Nina St. Pierre takes us into a childhood where constant motion was normal, with a mother who saw plots and divinity everywhere, when a young girl had to be the parent as often as not. St. Pierre’s long look back is full of questions about mental illness, faith, responsibility, and (maybe) forgiveness...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
There’s a floating aphorism about everyone fighting a battle we know nothing about. This has never been more true in the case of Vesper Wright, the protagonist of Rachel Harrison’s hair-raising novel, Black Sheep. Four years before we meet her, Vesper left her family, friends, and community to scrape together an independent life as a waitress at a TGIF clone of a restaurant...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.
From the author of Indie Next Pick and New York Times Editor’s Choice Goodnight, Beautiful Women comes a transportive and …
From the author of Indie Next Pick and New York Times Editor’s Choice Goodnight, Beautiful …
Anna Noyes’s The Blue Maiden is a strange book, about a strange pair of sisters. Before we meet the Silasdottir sisters, Noyes shows us the darkest chapter in the history of Berggrund Island. In 1675, a priest manufactured a witch hunt, leading to the death of dozens of women. One of the few survivors only avoided being murdered because she was pregnant. Her descendant is Silas, the father of Ulrika and Beata Silasdottir...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
From the international and instant New York Times bestselling author John Connolly, the beloved and brilliant Charlie Parker series returns …