Desmond has returned to the island because the prime minister has asked those who went abroad to help rebuild the nation, now that it has gained its independence. Harper Collins Publishers, 2014 Cecil Foster's experience is not unlike Desmond's, but Independence is rooted in the story of a
An engrossing story, a compelling narrative voice: Three Souls is an easy book to recommend. Because of the setting and romantic elements of the story, it's tempting to draw comparisons with the novels of Amy Tan and Ai Mi. Given the readability, one might think of Sue Monk Kidd's The
One might say that the narrator of Margaret Drabble's novel is an anthropologist of sorts. Perhaps that would be misleading, however: "Anthropology is full of strange spirit stories, about shamans and witchcraft and night ridings and animal shape-shiftings, stories which hover between myth and fairytale and religion and tribal memories
Perhaps it's only to give readers an idea of how special it all was to Charlie. "I suppose what I'm trying to say is that the writing of a man's life at least gives you an idea of just how special it all was to him the first time around."
Thanks to Tolstoy, everybody knows that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Maybe that's not quite the same as saying that unhappy families make the best stories? But one could make an argument for that, with Elizabeth Crane's We Only Know So Much. "At the moment, the
