It begins with a short but vividly drawn scene: two lovers alone in a room in Paris in 1917. Sensorily rich and broadly sketched: the reader is immediately engaged. Not only by the substance, but by a couple of unexpected phrases therein: questions arise. Those questions are soon set aside
Take Tanis Rideout's Above All Things or Mary Novik's Muse: history is stuffed with stories begging to be retold. "Fiction and nonfiction both have to be true, but nonfiction has to be fact-checkable as well." So says Phllip Gourevitch. Indu Sundaresan's The Mountain of Light might not be fact-checkable, but
Everything I know about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, which precipitated WWI, I learned from fiction. First, Aleksandar Hemon's short story, "The Accordian", which explores the very moment of the shots' impact, inspired by the presence of a bystander. This man seems to be the author's grandfather, standing in the
A blindfolded woman in labour, in the back of a van that has left Evin Prison in Tehran. It's an un-put-down-able scene. Atria Books - Simon & Schuster, 2013 It's 1983, in the third year of the war with Iraq, but the fierce immediacy of the story pulls
Shivan understands, years later, that his grandmother sees herself as the peréthi from the parable. She lives like a ghost, naked and hungry, surrounded by pleasures that she cannot enjoy. Doubleday - Random House, 2013 "Everything she touched, everything she loved, disintegrated in her hands." Readers benefit from Shivan's
