A book-length demonstration of propulsive prose. This is the word that I wrote in capital letters, in the margins of my reading diary about Mark Anthony Jarman's Knife Party at the Hotel Europa (2015), but then I wondered if I had subconsciously (deliberately, even!) lifted it from the cover. It sounds like
Though each segment could be read as a standalone, each is So Much a Part of the Landscape that Polly Dugan's work is best read all-in-a-burst. Little Brown & Company, 2014 More trust is required on the reader's part than, say, with Carrie Snyder's more prominently linked The Juliet
Nothing like a good mystery. Some serial fun, with Giles Blunt, Ian Hamilton, Louise Penny, or my most recent discovery, the Nina Borg series by Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis. But one can find a good page-turner in the standalone novels on the fiction shelves too. Take Claire Cameron's freshly published The Bear, longlisted
Readers can debate whether Etto or soccer or the town of San Benedetto is the main character in The Sun and Other Stars: the novel can reach readers' hearts via more than one route. Simon & Schuster, 2014 And, yet, that suggests that the three can be separated, whereas this
Rupert Thomson's Secrecy is suffused with deliciously disturbing images and scenes. A thin, dark ribbon of sky. Bared teeth with clumps of hair. A dead bird that dangles from a girl’s first like a flower needing water. A snake skin shed in a doorway. A secret passage. A stabbed countess. A
