By Joe Cohen Regent Press, $14.00, 102 pages Joe Cohen has taken the story of Cain and Able and constructed from that mystifying story a parable for our time. My heart has always gone out to Cain, when I read again and again that his gifts were rejected and his brother’s fawned over by the [...]
By Emma Campion Crown, $26.00, 450 pages In The King’s Mistress, medieval scholar Emma Campion paints a literary portrait of King Edward III’s 14th century court and all the intrigue that goes along with it. At the heart of the novel is protagonist Alice Perrers, a bride at 14, a mother at 15, and a [...]
By John Norwich Axios Press, $20.00, 432 pages Memoirs can create a variety of responses in a reader; Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich is entertaining, witty, and a plain old-fashioned good read. Norwich is the son of a British politician and his socialite wife, and has lived a supremely enjoyable life. His memoir [...]
By Eli Rill Circle of Life Publishing, $24.95, 403 pages This saga of a struggling Jewish family in Brooklyn centers on high school teacher Norman Schecter, a less-than-affluent liberal activist striving for teacher unionization. Schecter’s efforts are kindled after his star student is permanently disabled at a campaign rally. The book begins as the Nazi [...]
By Lauren Belfer Harper, $25.99, 572 pages This is an overly-long historical novel that starts off well until author Lauren Belfer lets the story get out of her grasp. It is primarily an account of how penicillin was discovered at the beginning of this country’s involvement in World War II. The book also well describes [...]
By Harry Turtledove Del Rey, $16.00, 516 pages Harry Turtledove reckons he has let us in on a military secret. Soldiers curse continuously, moan about their fate, try to get laid as often as possible, despise superiors and try to stay alive. Lest anyone forgets this, he reminds them constantly in the first part of [...]
By Adrienne McDonnell Pamela Dorman Books, $26.95, 432 pages Here is historical fiction at its best. In 1903 Boston, young Doctor Ravell is just starting to make his way in the rapidly changing field of obstetrics. A well-known family approaches him on behalf of a sister and her apparently barren marriage shortly before he hears [...]
By Philippa Gregory Touchstone Fireside, $25.99, 377 pages “Since you were a girl you could only be the bridge to the next generation … the means by which our family gets a boy.” This is what thirteen-year-old Margaret Beaufort was told by her mother in 1457 after her first husband had already died, and she [...]
By Thomas Mullen Random House, $26.00, 398 pages Jason and Whit Fireson wake up one evening in a morgue, where they have apparently been lying dead for the past few hours. After managing to escape and find some clothes, they make their way to their hometown to see their mother and try to figure out [...]
By Laura Joh Rowland The Overlook Press, $24.95, 352 pages “…my journey from Bedlam was different, I felt unadulterated dread.” With the notorious psychiatric madhouse Bedlam as the setting for another in the series of Charlotte Bronte mysteries, the reader is exposed to the devious devices of spies and staff who use this setting to [...]
By Waheed Rabbani YouWriteOn, $13.99, 436 pages A two-track story, Doctor Margaret’s Sea Chest tracks the life of Margaret Wallace and her quest to become a female doctor in the 1850s, and Dr. Wallidad Sharif, a male doctor in the 1960s, who is working in Delhi. At the end of his contract, Dr. Walli is [...]
By John Addiego Unbridled Books, $25.95, 387 pages It’s July 4th, 1876, and as the citizens of Sonoma County prepare to celebrate the centennial of their nation, one man starts his day unaware of the pivotal events in store for him. Jeremiah McKinley looks forward to the festivities and reuniting with old friends but a [...]
By John J. Miller AmazonEncore, $14.95, 446 pages The First Assassin follows a cabal of Southerners plotting murder Abraham Lincoln. Curiously, this isn’t Booth’s conspiracy that ended in tragedy at Ford’s Theatre, but the story of another wholly fictional plot during Lincoln’s first weeks in office. It says something that author John Miller succeeds in [...]
By Henry Roth, Willing Davidson, Editor Norton, $25.95, 283 pages Henry Roth wrote his classic Call it Sleep in 1934, while living with an NYU professor—his lover and literary mentor. In this posthumous novel, set in 1938, Roth’s alter ego, Ira Stigman, drives his Model T to the artist’s colony of Yaddo, where he’s been [...]
By Peter Longley iUniverse, $28.95, 555 pages It is a time of great change and unprecedented prosperity in the Middle East. Romans are settling across the land, raising conflicting feelings of hope and hatred within the Jewish population that they rule over. King Herod’s reign is waning, spurred on by his debilitating illness and the [...]
By Andrea Levy Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.00, 313 pages Historical fiction compels less through plot, which can be culled from any history text, than through atmosphere, the ability to immerse the reader in a particular world. It is this aspect at which Andrea Levy succeeds so well in The Long Song, which concerns the [...]
