Starring Lake Superior

November 2025 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking of a very famous freighter in Lake Superior, which is the largest and most northerly of the Great Lakes. Recent nonfiction books about the tragedy include Wrecked: The Edmund Fitzgerald and the Sinking of the American Economy by Thomas M. Nelson and Jerald Podair, and John U Bacon’s bestselling The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I’ve read excerpts from both these titles, and I recommend them to readers who want all the human-interest details and all the speculation about how the sinking could have been averted. Of course, with this anniversary, there’s also been a revival of Gordon Lightfoot’s classic 1976 folk-rock ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which can be heard here.

I offer below a review of a historical novel set on Lake Superior long before the Edmund Fitzgerald went down, with all her crew, on November 10, 1975.

A Lesser Light     Peter Geye     (2025)  I’ve driven and walked for many miles along the shores of Lake Superior, which is more like an inland sea than a lake, with brooding waters and ferocious waves. Lake Superior is this novel’s central character, dictating life and death. The year is 1910, and Theobald Sauer arrives on the south shore of the lake, east of Duluth, Minnesota, to take the post of master lighthouse keeper at a new lighthouse. With him is his bride, Willa, forced into the marriage by financial circumstances and totally unsuited to be Theo’s spouse. Although both Theo and Willa are highly educated, Theo trades in conspiracy theories and religiosity, while Willa looks to science for guidance. Rounding out the cast of characters living near the remote lighthouse are a girl who has “second sight,” her fisherman uncle, the assistant lighthouse keepers and their wives—and wolves. Lots of wolves. The narrative moves very, very slowly, so I’ll admit right here that I skimmed some of the chapters between pages 300 and 400. Still, the novelist’s prose is radiant and his characters, especially that lake, are convincing.  

Revisiting an Old Friend

The Forsyte Saga  John Galsworthy  (1922)    

More than a hundred years ago, John Galsworthy gathered three of his novels (The Man of Property, In Chancery, and To Let) plus two short stories into a volume called The Forsyte Saga. The collection was still going strong in the 1960s, when I first read it. Now, coming up in 2026, PBS plans to air the most recent of many screen adaptations of the story. What is the staying power of Galsworthy’s most famous fiction? To answer this question, I recently re-read all 850 pages of The Forsyte Saga, in an Oxford World’s Classics edition from 2008.

First off, in The Man of Property, Galsworthy hammers hard on the destructive aspects of capitalism—specifically the devotion to the accumulation of wealth and to the development of real estate. He frames his economic views in a tragic love story, in which the main protagonist, Soames Forsyte, loses the love of his life, his wife Irene, because he treats her as property. Yup, that was a spoiler, but hold on. I’m not going to encourage you to read this part of the trilogy unless you’d love the anti-capitalism aspects. The Man of Property was written in 1906 and set in the London of the 1880s, so it’s permeated with a kind of nostalgia and spends too many chapters in stuffy Victorian drawing rooms. It also has numerous archaic local references that I can’t imagine I understood when I read it as a high-school student.

In between The Man of Property and the next novel, In Chancery, Galsworthy places a short story called “Indian Summer of a Forsyte.” This is a delightful interlude, in which an aged uncle of Soames, Old Jolyon Forsyte, befriends Irene, now Soames’ estranged wife. Through an odd twist, Old Jolyon is living in the magnificent house that Soames commissioned for Irene but that Soames and Irene never occupied together. The natural setting of this house, outside of London, is entrancing, and Galsworthy’s descriptions recall the best of nineteenth-century nature poetry. Even if you don’t read the rest of the saga, I recommend this short story to you.

The second novel of the saga, In Chancery, is thus named because it deals with two divorces, which in Britain have to be processed by the Court of Chancery. This component of the saga was written in 1920 and set around the turn the twentieth century, as Soames and his sister Winifred both seek to be freed from their spouses. After Soames fails to reconcile with Irene, he becomes obsessed with divorcing her and remarrying so that he can produce an heir to whom he can leave all the money that he’s accumulated. (Winifred’s spouse, meanwhile, is a wastrel and a lout.) Divorce was not an easy legal process in Britain at this time, usually involving proof of adultery, and it carried considerable social stigma. Galsworthy gets into the heads of his characters in a way that’s very modern, and he explores all the complex emotions of marriage, family, and inheritance. Do read this part of the saga.

The third novel, To Let, written in 1921, is set in 1920. Soames’ daughter, Fleur Forsyte, the product of his second marriage, is now in her late teens. She falls in love with her cousin, Jon Forsyte, who is the product of the union of Soames’ ex-wife, Irene, and a cousin of Soames. Got all that? Obviously, the families on both sides are opposed to the match of Fleur and Jon, and the novel goes on at length in an agonizing back-and-forth as the lovers try to navigate extremely difficult feelings. Seriously, skip this one, as well as the short story called “Awakening,” which precedes the third novel.

In summary, the parts of The Forsyte Saga that I advise you to read are the short story “Indian Summer of a Forsyte” and the novel In Chancery. You might consider reading The Man of Property also. Try to get an edition, like the Oxford World’s Classics one, that provides a family tree of all the Forsytes, so that you can keep the characters straight.

Finally, an anecdote. When I was a freshman in college, I had a meeting with my advisor during which he asked what my favorite novels were. I mentioned The Forsyte Saga, and he guffawed, much to my humiliation. He considered Galsworthy hopelessly old fashioned and steered me toward authors such as Joyce and Hemingway. More than a half century later, I feel somewhat justified that PBS is returning to Galsworthy!

Author Spotlight: Amor Towles

In 2011, Amor Towles debuted as a novelist with Rules of Civility, set in 1930s Manhattan, where a love triangle plays out against a backdrop of jazz clubs and boarding houses, with considerable alcohol. Towles’s impeccable character development is already on display here, and his examination of the power of wealthy New Yorkers is even more meaningful today. Take note of the character Evelyn (Eve) Ross, whose life story will be continued in subsequent fiction by Towles, reviewed below.

***

In 2016, Towles had phenomenal success with his next historical novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, which in 2024 was made into a television mini-series, now on streaming services. Here’s an abridged recap of my 2017 review of this blockbuster work of fiction:

Amor Towles’s fictional foray into Moscow’s elegant Metropol Hotel in the years from 1922 to 1954, A Gentleman in Moscow, is captivating on many levels. Towles posits that high-level Communist Party officials still wined and dined themselves and foreign dignitaries, right through the Depression of the 1930s, and that ordinary Soviet citizens found small bits of happiness despite privations and surveillance. Some people displayed great courage in adversity. Towles’s portrait of the fictional Count Alexander Rostov gives us a glimpse into what might have happened to one of the ousted aristocrats in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The story:  In 1922, the erudite and cultured young Count Rostov is sentenced to permanent house arrest in the Metropol Hotel, just off Red Square in Moscow. This is not exile to Siberia, but if Rostov walks out the door of the hotel, he will be shot. The Count, relegated to a tiny attic room, approaches his predicament with the utmost composure. Since his own family members are all dead, he gradually fashions himself a family from the employees and guests of the Metropol. While chaos and war unfold outside the Metropol, all is grace and style inside. Count Rostov is, to me, a Russian version of Lord Peter Wimsey, from the 1930s British mystery novels of Dorothy L. Sayers. Yes, he can be snobbish at times, but he’s generous, principled, and unwaveringly loyal to his friends.

As the years of Rostov’s life tick by, Towles tosses off details about the Metropol in one witty scene after another. Pay close attention to the most minuscule of these details, which Towles is constructing carefully as he builds toward the denouement of his novel. You can easily get pulled into enjoyment of individual episodes, as friends arrive to visit Rostov, a famous actress becomes his lover, and a young girl takes him behind the scenes to secret places in the enormous hotel. Rostov comes to know every cranny of the hotel intimately, and this knowledge will serve him well as the plot whirls to a conclusion in the final hundred pages of this 462-page book.

“Sophisticated” does not begin to do justice to Towles’s writing style. Here he is describing a clock: “Suddenly, that long-strided watchman of the minutes caught up with his bowlegged brother at the top of the dial. As the two embraced, the spring’s within the clock’s casing loosened, the wheels spun, and the miniature hammer fell, setting off the first of those dulcet tones that signaled the arrival of noon.” (32)

I guessed some but not all of the elements of the caper that caps the plot of A Gentleman in Moscow. The surprises were highly enjoyable.

***

Fans of A Gentleman in Moscow will find much of the same verve and strong character development in Towles’s 2021 offering, The Lincoln Highway. Two teenage brothers set out on the roads and rails of the United States in 1954, searching for the mother who abandoned them, and they have many adventures on their forced detours. I found this novel less satisfying than A Gentleman in Moscow, primarily because of the meandering plot segments (admittedly common in such picaresque tales) and the somewhat weak ending. But The Lincoln Highway is still entertaining.  

***

The most recent publication by Towles is Table for Two, in which he has gathered six of his short stories, plus a 200-page novella. The short stories are delightful vignettes, playing on happenstance and on human greed, set variously in contemporary New York City and in the waning days of czarist Russia. The novella included in this volume, Eve in Hollywood, is a smoky noir that stars Evelyn Ross, one of Towles’s spunky, brilliant characters. Evelyn/Eve was a third of the love triangle in Towles’s Rules of Civility, reviewed above, and the novella picks up her life where that novel left off. Her complex story builds to a shocking conclusion, at which readers may exclaim, “So that’s how it all fits together!” Towles writes classy, clever lines and holds total mastery over his plot.

Historical Fiction Grab Bag

In this post you’ll find reviews of two historical novels—one set in fifteenth-century England and one in early twentieth-century England.

The Pretender     Jo Harkin     (2025)  The provocative premise of this novel is based on historical fact. In the 1480s, one of claimants to the throne of the new English king, Henry VII, was a fair-haired boy, probably named Lambert Simnel. He was championed by the Yorkist faction, who saw the Tudor Henry VII as a usurper. Jo Harkin spins out her story from the viewpoint of this pretender, who was coached in languages and in courtly manners before the Yorkists launched a military campaign against Henry. Since history tells us that Henry VII reigned until 1509, we know in advance that Simnel never became king, but because of his youth he was not executed for his part in the plot. It’s fascinating to follow Harkin’s fictionalized Simnel as he matures from naïve boy to hard-nosed spy in a period of political turmoil and frequent assassinations. I did have some quibbles with the author, however. The random way that she tosses in medieval words and faux-medieval words is distracting. And she has the pretender learning to read Ovid and Horace fluently in less than a year of Latin tutoring. Really? I also doubt that everyone in the fifteenth century was quite as potty-mouthed as Harkin presents them.* Be warned that The Pretender is not only very violent—which is to be expected—but also very bawdy. And if you decide to commit to the 476 pages of this novel, let the names of the many members of the warring royal families just wash over you.  

The Eights     Joanna Miller     (2025)  In 1920, Oxford University began admitting women to its degree-granting programs, and the fictional characters in this novel are four members of that first class of female students. Lodged on Corridor 8 of St Hugh’s College at the university, they call themselves “The Eights.” Beatrice is the daughter of a woman well-known in the suffragist movement in Britain; she’s now seeking her own path by studying politics, philosophy, and economics. Otto (short for Ottoline), a brilliant mathematician, was a socialite before World War I but was traumatized by her volunteer work during the war. Marianne, the daughter of a clergyman, is a scholarship student in English with many secrets. Dora never wanted to attend university but feels compelled to take the place of her brother and her fiancé, both of whom died in the war. The narrative here starts slowly but soon becomes engrossing, as the four women become friends and support each other in a daunting male-dominated environment. Don’t miss the helpful materials at the back of the book, including a glossary and a historical timeline.

* My credentials for these statements: a PhD dissertation on fifteenth-century literature and a stint as an associate editor at the Middle English Dictionary.

London, Right after WW II

Here are two fictional takes on the post-war period in Britain. First, a novel actually written in that period, by the inimitable Barbara Pym, a greatly underrated author. Second, a recently published historical mystery set right after World War II, from a series that is one of my favorites. The similarity of the titles is a bonus! 

Excellent Women     Barbara Pym     (1952)   The novelist’s careful and exacting style and first-rate dialog are at the center of this quiet novel, which focuses on Mildred Lathbury, an introverted single woman in her thirties. The usual post-war difficulties (rationing, bombed-out buildings) are in the background as Mildred goes through her days, working part-time at a social relief agency. She gets herself involved in the domestic dramas of those around her—the neighbors in her building of flats, the members of her local Anglican church, the clergy of that church. Often this involvement, which is unintentional and irritating to her, is quite comical. Mildred is definitely one of the “excellent women” of the title: the unsung females who make the tea at the church bazaar, who defer to men, who sublimate any sexual desires. This is a book to read if you need to calm your nerves after perusing the headlines in 2025.  

An Excellent Thing in a Woman     Allison Montclair     (2025)  Spoiler alert:  You may want to start with #1 in this mystery series, The Right Sort of Man, reviewed here.

Ringing in at #8 in the Sparks and Bainbridge Mystery Series, this novel, with its title taken from a line in Shakespeare’s King Lear, maintains the high standards of the previous seven. Iris Sparks (retired WW II British spy) and Gwen Bainbridge (war widow with a young son) are once again matching up couples at their London marriage bureau. It’s 1947, and the BBC has ventured into the brand new medium of television, with live broadcasts from Alexandra Palace. Salvatore (“Sally”) Danielli, a friend of Iris from both her university and spying years, is working as a TV stage manager when a body is found in the props room. Iris is determined to clear Sally’s name—as is Gwen, who is Sally’s new girlfriend. What I love about reading these mysteries:  the London ambience, the romances behind the murder scenes, the sparkling dialog, the friendship between Iris and Gwen, and the struggles of everyone in 1947 Britain to come to terms with the many personal devastations of the war.

Rural Tales

Whale Fall     Elizabeth O’Connor     (2024)  Ah, the rustic life on a remote island! Sometimes we long for it, but the reality is harsh. O’Connor’s poignant novel paints a convincing portrait of the inhabitants of a very small fictional island off the coast of Wales in the year 1938. The protagonist is Manod, an eighteen-year-old woman who is trying to decide if she will move to the mainland; she weighs family obligations, personal ambitions, and the international political landscape. The seasonal fishing and sheep-raising routine of the island’s few hardworking inhabitants is interrupted by the arrival of two ethnography researchers from Oxford. At first, as the visitors record folk songs and take photographs, their presence seems benign. Spoiler alert: their presence is not benign. The nature prose of this novel is hauntingly lovely. The story is heartbreaking.

Strange Flowers     Donal Ryan     (2020)  In 2018, I reviewed Donal Ryan’s 2014 collection of linked short stories, titled The Spinning Heart. Ryan’s prose has become even more luminous since then. In his novel Strange Flowers, he once again takes us to his native Ireland, to a family in rural County Tipperary, beginning in 1973. Twenty-year-old Moll Gladney walks away from her parents’ home without a word of farewell, and the novelist plumbs the emotions of her parents, both during the five years that Moll is gone and when she returns with many secrets. Although I thought that the story-within-a-story in the latter part of the book didn’t quite fit, this is still an exceptionally fine exploration of family bonds and of the many varieties of love between humans.

Revisiting Medieval Mysteries

In the early years of this book review blog, I reviewed many mystery novels, especially those set in the Middle Ages. In more recent years, I’ve drifted away from medieval mysteries. This post is a reset! I recently read three of the 17 titles in the medieval mystery series by Priscilla Royal:

Wine of Violence (2003), Sorrow without End (2006), and The Twice-Hanged Man (2019)

To start things off, in 1270, the brilliant and high-born Eleanor of Wynethorpe is selected by England’s King Henry III to be Prioress of Tyndal Priory, near Norwich, on the windswept coast of the North Sea. Tyndal Priory is highly unusual in that it’s a double house, with monks and nuns living in separate but adjoining buildings and ruled by a woman, not a man. Eleanor’s appointment is also highly unusual, in that she’s only twenty years old when she takes up her post. The ensemble cast, solving all kinds of murders, includes Crowner Ralf (kindhearted local coroner), Brother Thomas (reluctant monk who is gay), and Sister Anne (herbalist extraordinaire). The historical elements of these novels are quite accurate, though I didn’t find the daily liturgical obligations of the monks and nuns to be quite prominent enough. The tone is very much like that of Ellis Peters, whose Brother Cadfael mystery series (21 books between 1977 and 1994) is for me the gold standard. Click here to read my essay on medieval mysteries, and click on any series title below to read more reviews.

The Domesday Series by Edward Marston (1993 to 2000) Gervase Bret, a brilliant lawyer, and Ralph Delchard, an intrepid soldier, travel around England investigating disputes related to the Domesday Book, William the Conqueror’s massive survey of properties in the year 1086. Of course, they also solve crimes. 

The Owen Archer Series by Candace Robb (1993 to 2024) In the early 1360s, an archer who has lost an eye in England’s war in France retires to York and apprentices himself to a female apothecary, Lucie Wilton, whom he marries. The mystery part comes in because Owen Archer also works as a spy for the Archbishop of York and the Chancellor of England.

The Roger the Chapman Series by Kate Sedley (1991 to 2013) Roger is an itinerant purveyor of small household goods and haberdashery in late fifteenth-century England. He tells his mystery tales in first-person narrative, looking back, as an old man, on the adventures of his youthful traveling days.

The Dame Frevisse Series by Margaret Frazer (1992-2008)  A fifteenth-century nun at St. Frideswide’s, a small fictional Oxfordshire convent, is a practical and clever sleuth, dealing with murders as well as with the personality clashes and power struggles that are inevitable in a religious community.

The After Effects of World War II

The Great Fire     Shirley Hazzard     (2003)  In 1947, the post-war world is an unsettled place, with bombed cites not yet rebuilt and countless humans left wounded, in body and in spirit. Aldred Leith, a British war hero still in uniform, is traveling in Asia, compiling information for a book about the effects of the global conflict. In occupied Japan, he meets two extraordinarily bright young Australian siblings, Benedict and Helen Driscoll. Benedict is slowly dying from a rare disease, and Helen tends to him. Meanwhile, a friend of Leith’s, military lawyer Peter Exley, is in Hong Kong, prosecuting war crimes. The novelist follows these characters, and many lesser characters whom they interact with, over an eventful and fateful year. Be warned: the prose here is dense, with many multisyllabic abstract nouns to make you stop to reread. But the slog will be well worth your time. Shirley Hazzard vividly illuminates the period and the people, while skewering some Australians for their brashness and some New Zealanders for their provinciality. What of the “great fire” of the title, which recurs in sentences throughout the book? I took it mainly as referring to the cruel destructiveness of war, particularly the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A God in Ruins     Kate Atkinson     (2015)  In Atkinson’s expansive Life After Life (reviewed here), the novelist plays out the many possible life choices of Ursula Todd, with speculative scenarios that are set against the tumultuous history of the twentieth century in Europe. The sequel to Life After Life is A God in Ruins, a novel in much more conventional form but no less mesmerizing, telling the story of Teddy Todd, Ursula’s beloved younger brother. Teddy is a gifted man and a steadying presence to his family. As an RAF pilot during World War II, he fully expects to die on one of his many air raids on the European continent. When, miraculously, he survives being shot down and being imprisoned in Germany, he has to confront the rest of his life. Atkinson reveals the brutal impact of war on one person’s psyche, as well as the wide repercussions of war on his family and friends.

Back in 2017, I posted about The Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck. This is another powerful novel, about three German widows in the time right after World War II. Read my full review here.

Not My Usual Fare

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet     David Mitchell     (2010)  This is not a novel that I would have thought I’d like at all. Most of the characters are venal, vulgar schemers. There are numerous scenes of violence. Women characters in particular are targets of horrific crimes. And yet . . .  Jacob de Zoet is a clerk—a kind of accountant—serving with the Dutch East India Company in Japan, starting in 1799. Japan at this time is still closed to the outside world, but the authorities allow a very limited amount of trading with the Dutch through the port of Nagasaki, where a few foreigners are allowed to reside in a gated compound. Jacob is trying to make enough money in five years to win the hand of his wealthy girlfriend back in the Netherlands. He’s an honest and devout soul in an outpost of corruption. I wanted to find out how he fared. I also wanted to learn the fate of a Japanese midwife, Orito Aibagawa, who is introduced in the opening scene of the novel and whose story becomes intertwined with Jacob’s. Another motivation for me to keep reading all 479 pages of this book was the luminescent prose on every single page. Here are a few examples:  “The clock’s pendulum scrapes at time like a sexton’s shovel.” (150) “A gibbous moon is grubby. Stars are bubbles, trapped in ice. The old pine is gnarled and malign.” (258-9) “Fallen red leaves drift over a smeared sun held in dark water.” (447) See what I mean?

Life after Life     Kate Atkinson     (2013)  Another novel that I would not ordinarily select based on the dust jacket description, this speculative narrative goes in multiple directions, depending on the random vagaries of human existence. Ursula Todd, the main protagonist, may have died at her birth in England in 1910, or she may have been saved just in time. She may have killed Hitler in 1930, or she may never have encountered the Führer. And so on . . . The novelist lets Ursula’s story play out in many different directions, over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. This time period in Europe had many calamitous episodes (the trenches, the bread lines, the Blitz), during which chance happenstances could take a person one way or another. Although I usually prefer a straightforward narrative rooted in reality, I was sucked in to the 525 pages of Life after Life by the extraordinary cast of characters and the way these characters interacted with the historic events that they bumped up against. To keep track of it all, note the date that the author provides at the head of each chapter. For another novel that presents alternate views of reality, see my review of Paul Auster’s 4321 from 2017, or check out Penelope Lively’s How It All Began from 2011.

Four 20th-Century Historical Novels

These novels vary greatly in style, but all are set in the 1900s, from the aftermath of World War I through to the end of the century.

The Paying Guests     Sarah Waters     (2014)  Mrs Wray and her unmarried daughter, Frances, live in genteel poverty in 1922 London. Having lost her two brothers in the World War and her father to sadness and bad debts, Frances convinces her mother to take in lodgers. They reconfigure their house and rent rooms to a young married couple, Lilian and Leonard Barber. What starts out as a slow burn of a narrative—describing in detail the constraints of this joint tenancy arrangement—turns into an explosive crime novel. Readers witness a murder and know who the murderer is. But will this criminal be caught? Will the romance that has blossomed in the house be uncovered? Are the British barriers of class insurmountable? Can the miseries of wartime be alleviated? Over the course of 564 pages, there are some dips into melodrama, but the novelist kept my attention to the very end, for the resolutions to these questions.

This Strange Eventful History     Claire Messud     (2024)  The title of this superb historical novel is taken from a soliloquy in Shakespeare’s As You Like It:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages . . .      

. . . Last scene of all                                                                   
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion . . .

This soliloquy about the “seven ages” often comes to mind as Claire Messud recounts seven decades of the lives of the members of the Cassar family (from 1940 to 2010, plus an epilogue back in 1927). The Cassars were originally French Algerians, having dwelt for generations in the North African land that was controlled by France from 1830 to 1962. When Algeria won its independence after a lengthy war, the colonizers were forced to leave the country. They were not warmly welcomed back in France. Many of the Cassar family long for a return to Algeria but have to consider career opportunities elsewhere. They end up all over the globe—Toronto, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Paris, Connecticut, the south of France. No matter where they live, love of family binds them: Gaston and Lucienne; their children, François and Denise; their grandchildren, Chloe and Loulou. The novelist based This Strange Eventful History on her own family’s story, as recounted by her grandfather in a handwritten memoir, and the truth of the story shines throughout, with deeply perceptive probings of each character and striking evocations of each setting and time period. Many reviewers have pronounced this novel Messud’s masterpiece.

The Two Hotel Francforts     David Leavitt     (2013)  In the summer of 1940, Lisbon is about the only port in Europe from which those fleeing the advance of Hitler’s armies can hope to board a ship sailing away from the Continent. It’s a crazy place, full of desperate people waiting for passage out of Portugal. At a café, Pete and Julia Winters meet another couple, Edward and Iris Freleng, and sparks fly. Pete is the first-person narrator of this novel that slowly reveals the state of his marriage and of the Frelengs’ marriage: the compromises, the secrets, the love/hate. Always in the background is the looming threat of the war, which, of course, modern readers know the outcome of. Leavitt’s prose is steamy and sometimes seamy; his plot is propulsive.

The Most Fun We Ever Had     Claire Lombardo     (2019)  I always read the Acknowledgments section of a book before I start on the actual text, and I was surprised to find that when Claire Lombardo submitted this novel to her agents it “meandered beyond the nine-hundred-page marker.”  Whew. I found the published version of The Most Fun We Ever Had to be overly long at 532 pages. But, to be fair, this saga of the Sorensen family is complex, with lots of births and deaths, betrayals and lies, successes and defeats. David and Marilyn are the parents of four daughters, each with her own set of neuroses. The narrative skips back and forth between the 1970s, when David and Marilyn meet and marry, and the intervening years between then and 2017. The Sorensen house is also a character, in a way, with much of the action taking place there, on an actual street in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The dust jacket asserts that the author has joined the ranks of novelists Celeste Ng, Elizabeth Strout, and Jonathan Franzen in her chronicling of modern life. I’d say that Lombardo comes close to these three greats.  

For Indigenous Peoples Day

The Berry Pickers     Amanda Peters     (2023)  In 1962, a group of Indigenous Mi’kmaq people from Nova Scotia, Canada, cross the border to Maine as summer migrant workers. When a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq girl, Ruthie, disappears from the berry fields one August day, her family is devastated. Her 6-year-old brother, Joe, is the last to see her; guilt and regret will shape his entire life. Meanwhile, in a town in Maine, a girl named Norma has recurrent dreams that she thinks may in fact be memories of people she once knew. Over the ensuing decades, the novel shifts back and forth between Joe’s life and Norma’s, until their two stories collide. The injustices visited upon Indigenous peoples are woven into the narrative of their existence—the repressive boarding schools, the employment discrimination. But what struck me even more was the author’s portrayal of the contrast between the Mi’kmaq community and the white community—laughter and light versus gloom and closed curtains. Prepare to weep by the end of this moving novel.

For another take on the Native American experience, here’s a reprise of a review that I posted earlier this year:

The River We Remember     William Kent Krueger     (2023)  “In a town where the hatred from wars long past and wars more recent still had hooks set in so many hearts, was anyone safe?” (341) This sentence from Krueger’s latest mystery novel points to the broader themes underlying his text: the untreated trauma inflicted on millions of soldiers by combat, the racism endured by Japanese Americans after World War II, and the racism endured by Native Americans ever since colonizers arrived in North America. And yet, this novel is still a solid mystery, with many twists and turns. It’s set in the fictional small town of Jewel, in southern Minnesota, in 1958, and starts with the discovery of the body of Jimmy Quinn in the Alabaster River. The dead man had numerous enemies, so the job of the sheriff, Brody Dern, is complicated. The novelist takes us deep into the lives of many of the inhabitants of the town, deftly building character through dialog. A warning for the squeamish, among whom I count myself: the concluding chapters have some gory scenes.

Finally, the relation of Indigenous peoples to the forests of the North American continent is beautifully presented in Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (2016), reviewed here.

Three Intertwined Novels by Colm Tóibín

The Irish author Colm Tóibín has an uncanny ability to get inside the heads of his characters, especially the female characters. The three historical novels reviewed here highlight this talent of his, as well as his plot-driven explorations of everyday life in the later twentieth century, both in rural Ireland and in New York City.

Brooklyn     Colm Tóibín     (2009)  Eilis Lacey is a young woman in 1950s Ireland who is persuaded to set off to work in the United States, landing in Brooklyn. The contrast between the straightlaced, hidebound Irish town of Enniscorthy, where she grew up, and vibrant, pulsating New York could not be greater. At a dance, she meets a handsome plumber from a rollicking Italian American family and falls in love. How Eilis then becomes trapped in a heartbreaking love triangle is intricately plotted to the last page of the novel. (The film version of Brooklyn stars Saoirse Ronan as a pitch-perfect Eilis, and the cinematography is stunning.)

Nora Webster     Colm Tóibín     (2014)  For this novel, Tóibín takes us back to Enniscorthy, in rural southeast Ireland. It’s now the late 1960s, and the title character is a recently widowed woman with four children. Having lost her beloved husband, Nora Webster has to make many decisions on her own over the next few years. Tóibín probes her deliberations. Should she sell the family’s summer cottage? Should she get a full-time job or try to rely on her widow’s pension? How should she deal with her grieving children, who range in age from early teens to early twenties? Nora’s daily life is set against the backdrop of The Troubles, the very violent conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, primarily in Northern Ireland but also spilling over into the Republic of Ireland. (I lived in Dublin in this period and found Tóibín’s local color highly accurate.) Tantalizingly, he mentions in passing Eilis and other characters from his novels Brooklyn and Long Island, and the novel Nora Webster fills in much of the community background for those two novels. Some reviewers consider Nora Webster to be Tóibín’s masterpiece. I didn’t want her story to end.

Long Island     Colm Tóibín     (2024)  It’s now 1976, and Eilis is living fairly contentedly with her husband and two teenaged children in a middle-class neighborhood on Long Island. In the opening chapter of the novel, a man comes to her door and announces that his wife is pregnant with a child fathered by Eilis’s husband. The man vows that when the child is born he will drop it on her doorstep. Eilis struggles mightily with this news, deciding to travel to Ireland at the time of the expected birth. This visit, ostensibly for her mother’s eightieth birthday, is her first trip to her homeland in twenty years. Meanwhile, back in Enniscorthy, the characters introduced in the novels Brooklyn and Nora Webster have evolved in their own Irish way. The return of Eilis to Ireland resurrects many secrets and sets in motion a distressing chain of events.

For the most reader satisfaction, do read these novels in chronological order. I hope you enjoy the work of Colm Tóibín as much as I did!

Author Spotlight: Carys Davies

Yes, I know that this author’s given name is a variant spelling of my given name, but that’s not why I’m putting her in the spotlight for this post! Her novels are short, punchy, imaginative, and . . . strange. Her main characters are loners in lonely places or loners who have embarked on problematic journeys. She can set the scene with a few deft sentences, conjuring up the most outlandish sites. Oh, and she’s garnered a number of literary prizes.

Davies’ first novel, West, was published in 2018.

The plot is preposterous, the characters are peculiar, and the language is spare. Yet this book made my post “Favorite Reads of 2018.” Here’s a slightly condensed reprint of my review from that year:

Davies spins a tale that’s akin to ancient myth, set on the North American continent in about 1815. This was an era when the lure of the western frontier was irresistible to some people living in the East. One of these people is Cy Bellman, a mule breeder in central Pennsylvania, who reads in a newspaper about the discovery in Kentucky of the bones of gigantic animals. Cy convinces himself that living exemplars of these animals still roam in the farthest reaches of the continent, driven west by settlement. Cy, who is a widower, leaves his young daughter, Bess, in the care of his unmarried sister and sets off to the west. He hopes to find some amazing creatures if he ventures a ways off the paths that Lewis and Clark traversed in their 1804-06 expedition through the Louisiana Purchase.

The narrative of West alternates between the experiences of Cy in the wilderness (perils: hunger, animal attack, Indian attack, winter) and the experiences of Bess in Pennsylvania (perils: predatory men, clueless aunt, lack of education). Davies builds tension artfully. She pauses in her rapid narrative sweep for descriptions at moments that capture the extremity of the threats to both Cy and Bess. Here is Cy at the end of his first winter on the road: 

“One night he heard the ice booming and cracking in the river, and in the morning bright jewels of melting snow dripped from the feathery branches of the pines onto his cracked and blistered face, his blackened nose.” (21)

Despite the harsh conditions, Cy continues to be obsessed with getting a sighting of monstrous animals. But there’s also a general wanderlust at work. A central theme of European and American literature has always been the journey, the pilgrimage, the hero’s voyage. Cy’s trip is set against the dangers for stay-at-home Bess. And uniting these two stories is a third key character, who signs on as a guide for Cy: “An ill-favored, narrow-shouldered Shawnee boy who bore the unpromising name of Old Woman From A Distance.” (27)

I was hesitant to dip into this little novel because I was suspicious of a Brit writing about early America. Such foolish prejudice I displayed! Carys Davies has produced an amazing portrait of frontier life circa 1815, but that’s only the backdrop to her exploration of ambition, fear, lust, weariness, greed, and familial affection.

Davies’ next novel was The Mission House, in 2020.

The Mission House is set in contemporary India and features more of Davies’ unconventional characters:  a disabled orphan, a barber who aspires to be a country-Western singer, and a depressive British librarian taking a rest-cure. The Briton, Hilary Byrd, takes up temporary residence with a missionary in a remote hill station and interacts with locals in the household and in the neighborhood. The modern independent India becomes blurred with the old India, under the former British imperialist rule. Hilary seeks to escape England and yet ends up in a place with many British trappings. Beneath the surface, politics seethe.

Davies’ most recent novel is Clear, which came out in 2024.

For this one, I recommend reading the Author’s Note at the end of the book before starting the fiction. Davies explains the “Clearances” of the 18th and 19th centuries in Scotland: “Whole communities of the rural poor were forcibly removed from their homes by landowners in a relentless program of coercive and systematic dispossession to make way for crops, cattle, and—increasingly as time went on—sheep.”

The novel is set in the year 1843, when the Clearances coincided with a major upheaval in the Presbyterian Church in Scotland. A middle-aged clergyman, John Ferguson, unemployed and desperate, takes a fee-for-service job: evicting a lone tenant from a (fictitious) remote Scottish island in the North Sea, as part of the Clearances. The tenant, Ivar, is an unlettered recluse who speaks only Norn, a Germanic language nearly extinct at the time. Soon after being dropped off by a ship passing by the island, John falls down a cliff and is seriously injured. Ivar finds John and cares for him while he recovers, and the two form an uneasy bond, as John struggles with his assignment to remove Ivar from the island.

Meanwhile, back in mainland Scotland, John’s wife, Mary, who was never too keen on his taking the job, gets more and more uneasy. As with Davies’ other two novels, Clear comes rushing to a startling conclusion.

All of Carys Davies’ novels are best read in one sitting, so set aside a few hours to be swept away.

Author Spotlight: Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott has won so many literary prizes that the list would take up this entire post, so I’ll just mention that her novel Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction in 1998. Her novels have often been on the New York Times bestseller list, and her short fiction has been featured in such publications as the New Yorker.

McDermott can conjure up New York City in the early-to-mid twentieth century better than any other author I know, and within this area of historical fiction she specializes in creating characters who are Roman Catholic. She isn’t trying to convert her readers to Catholicism but rather to tease out complex ethical questions. How does an ordinary person pursue virtue and decency? How does a adopting a religious framework for one’s life affect this pursuit, for good or for ill? McDermott will make you think hard about questions of morality.

Here are two examples of McDermott’s work set in New York City:

Someone     Alice McDermott     (2013)  In this novel, McDermott gives us an intimate portrait of an Irish Catholic woman’s conventional life, from youth to old age. The beauty here lies in the simplicity and the lovely language.

The Ninth Hour     Alice McDermott     (2017)  This book appears as a favorite of mine in several categories. With wonderfully resonant prose, McDermott presents the pros and cons of being Catholic in early twentieth-century Brooklyn. The neighborhood nuns are often heroines. Click here for my full review.

McDermott’s latest novel departs from her usual locale, with great success.

Absolution     Alice McDermott     (2023)  At the start of the war in Vietnam, the United States sent “advisors”—some of them civilian engineers and some of them military personnel—to southeast Asia. Those in the higher ranks of advisors brought their families with them to Saigon. (Even though I remember the Vietnam era vividly, this possibility had never occurred to me.) Absolution is a fictional story about those wives and children in Saigon in 1963. Tricia/Patsy is a naive young bride who is befriended by Charlene, a mother in her thirties. Charlene is a manipulative woman who dabbles in the black market, among other unsavory pursuits, and she pulls Tricia into her circle. Their story is narrated, looking back from the present day, first by a very elderly Tricia and then by Charlene’s daughter, Rainey. The racism and sexism of the period are presented in unvarnished and realistic detail, as the women muddle along on the edges of a momentous period in the history of both the United States and Southeast Asia. Alice McDermott is at the top of her game, so don’t miss Absolution.  

Category Novels, Part Four: Family Sagas

In my continuing series of posts about various categories of novels that I review on this blog, I’m turning to Family Sagas. In the Family Saga category are novels focused on the lives of characters who are related to each other and who interact over a long period of time. Family Sagas also fall into my category of Historical Novels, since they span multiple generations. They tend to be lengthy novels, suitable for reading on a long weekend or a vacation trip.

Here are four Family Sagas, published between 2016 and 2019, that I especially loved. Click on the title to go to a full review.

Barkskins     Annie Proulx     (2016)  An expansive account of two French Canadian families and their relationship to the forests of North America over three centuries. Love all those trees!

Pachinko     Min Jin Lee     (2017)  A sweeping saga about the struggles of Korean immigrant families in Japan throughout the twentieth century.

Peculiar Ground     Lucy Hughes-Hallett     (2018)  A densely layered novel set on a fictional Oxfordshire estate in 1663, 1961, 1973, and 1989. Features walls—border walls, the Berlin Wall, walls of inclusion, walls of exclusion, and many others. 

The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna     Juliet Grames     (2019)   A boisterous Italian family’s 20th-century immigration saga, starring the women.  

And here is my brand-new review of a very recent Family Saga:

The Covenant of Water     Abraham Verghese     (2023) Take a deep breath and plunge into this sprawling, 715-page family saga. Don’t be daunted by the huge cast of characters and by the many words in the Malayalam language of southwest India. The river-rich, fertile Malabar coast is the glorious backdrop for the story of a girl who, in the year 1900, marries into a farming family in which, for centuries, someone has died from drowning every generation. The novelist is a physician who slowly uncovers the mystery of these drownings. He also weaves in numerous other medical matters by including among the characters a Scottish surgeon employed by the Indian Medical Service and a Swedish surgeon who oversees a colony of lepers. The narrative occasionally sags under its own weight, and under the weight of tragedies, but there’s also plenty of joy and love as the years roll on to 1977.

Three Adventure Tales

The Romantic     William Boyd     (2022)  I had enough of picaresque novels when I taught eighteenth-century British literature decades ago—think Moll Flanders, Joseph Andrews, and Tom Jones. So I wasn’t keen on reading a novel that seemed to land in this genre. Never fear! Cashel Greville Ross, the star of The Romantic, is not a scalawag, and his adventures are seldom sordid. This tale of a fictional man who lived from 1799 to 1882, skips merrily from the west of Ireland to Oxford, to India, to Italy, to Massachusetts, to Zanzibar. The author establishes the story in the history of the period by having Cashel survive the Battle of Waterloo, spend a summer with the great poets Shelley and Byron (plus Shelley’s wife, Mary), and make a dangerous trek to the source of the Nile River. There’s also a grand love affair. William Boyd’s prose has just enough of a nineteenth-century tone to give the novel flavor and not so much as to render it tedious. One chapter bounces to the next for 446 pages of outrageous storytelling.

The Vaster Wilds     Lauren Groff     (2023)  Imagine a Robinson Crusoe tale, but set it in early 17th-century Colonial America. Make the hero a teen-aged female servant who runs away from a settlement of Europeans that is beset by famine and disease. Of course, famine and disease are also what this teenager encounters in the raw and gorgeous wilderness. I kept thinking that the plot of The Vaster Wilds would develop more in the present tense of the story, but instead what plot there is consists of flashbacks to past events in the runaway’s life. This is not a novel that you should read if you are prone to depression, but two elements make the grim adventure tale palatable:  Lauren Groff’s marvelous way with words and the inventive survival tactics that she describes. (I’ve reviewed two other excellent Groff novels: Fates and Furies and Matrix.)

Late Nights on Air     Elizabeth Hay     (2007)  Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories of Canada, sits at 62 degrees north latitude, where the short summers are glorious and the winters are very, very dark. Late Nights on Air starts out slowly, introducing readers to the staff of Yellowknife’s sole radio station, in 1975. The adventure comes in when four of the staff decide to take a six-week canoe trip through the Arctic wilds in the summer of 1976. The adventurers are always on the edge of disaster, facing ice-jammed rivers, back-breaking portages, and a bear attack, but the natural wonders that they encounter leave them in awe every day. Woven through the narrative are romances among members of the ensemble cast, plus a regional controversy over an oil pipeline. I lived in Toronto in the 1970s, so I appreciated many of the cultural and political references in this novel, but even I had to look up a few words. “Dene,” for example, is a general term for native peoples of the Canadian Arctic, who face many of the same issues today that they faced in 1975.

Author Spotlight: Allison Montclair, AKA Alan Gordon

• The First Book in the Sparks and Bainbridge Series

I’ve gobbled up all five books in the Sparks and Bainbridge historical mystery series by Allison Montclair. To catch you up, here’s a re-post of my review of the inaugural book, which you should be sure to read first!

The Right Sort of Man     Allison Montclair      (2019)  In the wake of World War II, women who had taken on substantial roles in the war effort were often expected to walk away from stimulating, remunerative work to become housewives. Recently, a number of nonfiction titles, novels, and films have been exploring the ramifications of this cultural shift. For example, in the PBS series The Bletchley Circle a cast of brilliant (fictional) female codebreakers become freelance detectives, solving murders after the war. On this blog, I’ve reviewed several novels treating the issue of women adjusting to wartime and to the post-war economy and society; see links at the end of this post.

In the novel The Right Sort of Man, Iris Sparks can’t reveal her wartime work because of Britain’s Official Secrets Act, but she clearly was a spy for the Allies. The story starts in 1946, and Iris demonstrates her chops through her contacts in high places, her sharp intellect, and her ability to wield a knife against an aggressor. She has met Gwen Bainbridge, a wealthy widow who was so devastated by the loss of her husband in the war that she was confined for several months to a mental institution and lost custody of her young son. Iris and Gwen decide to become partners in establishing a marriage bureau—Iris to have gainful employment as a single woman, and Gwen to reclaim her place in the world. The services that Iris and Gwen offer are in demand as Britons return to civilian life and seek the comforts of home and family.

Alas, after only a few months of operation, The Right Sort Marriage Bureau loses one of its female clients to murder, and a man whom the bureau has matched her with is charged with the crime. Iris and Gwen have vetted their clients thoroughly and are convinced that the wrong person has been arrested. To see justice done and save the reputation of their firm, they set out to find the real perpetrator. In the course of their investigation, they run into black market gangs finding ways around Britain’s strict war-related rationing laws, which were not fully phased out until 1954.

The action moves forward, and the personalities develop, primarily through dialogue, and that dialogue is quick-witted, reflecting Iris and Gwen’s intelligence and perceptiveness.  These two women have Sherlockian powers of observation and deduction as well as skills in subterfuge and in the discernment of the truthfulness of those they are interviewing. Some complex sub-plotting centers on Iris’s sex life, which is, to use Gwen’s descriptor, “adventurous.”

Who is the novelist? Allison Montclair is a pseudonym for an experienced fiction writer who’s venturing into the 20th-century-mystery genre with The Right Sort of Man. It’s a highly successful venture, capturing the immediate post-war period in London and unveiling the lives of two women who survived and thrived.

For other excellent fictional treatments of women’s roles in Britain in World War II and afterwards, see my reviews of Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs mysteries (2003-present) and of Anthony Quinn’s Freya (2017). On the American side of the Atlantic, check out Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (2017), and for women in post-war Germany see Jessica Shattuck’s The Women in the Castle (2017).

• The Next Four Books in the Sparks and Bainbridge Mystery Series

Although each of these titles has a separate murder mystery for Iris and Gwen to solve, there are through-lines that develop over the course of the series. Iris tries to figure how her espionage experience will fit into the post-war world, and her romantic life gets more and more complicated. Gwen keeps struggling to have her commitment as a “lunatic” legally reversed, so that she can regain custody of her young son and become independent from her in-laws. In each of the books, post-WWII London is the vivid backdrop. For best results, read the novels in order of publication.

A Royal Affair     Allison Montclair     (2020)  Iris and Gwen are hired to investigate a potential problem with the engagement of Princess Elizabeth to her prince.

A Rogue’s Company     Allison Montclair     (2021)  In another rollicking, intricately plotted mystery, the two protagonists end up in back alleys with desperate criminals.

The Unkept Woman     Allison Montclair     (2022)  Iris’s past associations as a spy for Britain during World War II intrude on her postwar job at the marriage bureau.

The Lady from Burma     Allison Montclair     (2023)  A woman dying of cancer contracts with the marriage bureau to find a second wife for her husband, a renowned entomologist. But is her subsequent death a suicide or a murder?

• About Allison Montclair/Alan Gordon

How did author Alan Gordon became Allison Montclair? Here’s the story: https://www.jungleredwriters.com/2022/07/introducing-real-allison-montclair.html

Under his own name, Alan Gordon has published the eight delightful medieval mysteries in the Fools Guild series. Theophilos and Claudia, a married pair of jesters and acrobats, travel widely and solve crimes in the time of the Crusades. 

From the Middle Ages to 1946 London, Alan/Allison is an author all historical-mystery lovers will want to take a look at.

Historical Fiction Set in the Early 20th Century

This Other Eden    Paul Harding     (2023)  Prepare yourself to be mesmerized by the lyrical language of this short (221 page) novel by a former winner of the Pulitzer Prize (in 2010, for Tinkers). The beauty of Harding’s words contrasts with the sometimes grim plot. Although the book is fiction, it’s very loosely based on an actual historical event: the expulsion of a mixed-race community from a small rocky island by officials from the state of Maine in 1912. Harding paints a picture of life on the island that has idyllic moments but is also hardscrabble, and he doesn’t shy away from describing the genetic consequences of inbreeding and the arguments of the eugenicists of the period. His characters are unconventional but endearing.

The Summer Before the War     Helen Simonson     (2016)  As I’ve noted elsewhere on this blog, I try to avoid historical novels that present graphic scenes of World War I trench warfare. The title of this novel led me to believe that I’d be safe from nightmares. The novel starts in East Sussex, England, in the summer of 1914 (with the best summer weather that anyone can remember), but, alas, toward the end there are disturbing scenes set in 1915 France. By that point in the book, however, I was hooked—and anxious to know what would happen to the characters. Beatrice Nash is an independent, highly educated young woman who comes to Sussex to teach Latin at the grammar school. Hugh Grange and Daniel Bookham are cousins, visiting their Aunt Agatha there—Hugh is a surgeon in training, and Daniel is an aspiring poet. Snout is a local ruffian who is also a brilliant Latin scholar. Surrounding them are an array of often comical English village stereotypes. The descriptions of the far southeastern coast of England are rhapsodic, and the dialog, a la Edith Wharton, conjures up the era.  

The Trackers     Charles Frazier     (2023)  The journey story has been a part of Western literature since The Odyssey, and Charles Frazier is a master of American journeys. (See my review of Varina, and there’s also Frazier’s award-winning Cold Mountain.) The Trackers is set in 1937, with the Great Depression dragging on. Val Welch is a young East Coast painter who, by good fortune, is commissioned to create a mural for a post office in Wyoming. Val’s hosts for his stay in the West are a wealthy rancher and art collector, John Long, and his wife, Eve. Val is busy with the laborious process of painting in the ancient fresco style when he’s enlisted to help find a missing person, and he leaves his art work to travel to Seattle, to Florida, and to California. Trackers feature in Val’s mural, and he himself becomes a tracker. In first-person narration, he recounts getting beaten up (caveat: violence) and also acquiring an education in human greed and passion and struggle. The characters in this novel are exquisitely drawn, and the scenes of the American West are breathtaking. Example: “Wyoming felt clean and brittle, the light fragile as a flake of mica, the high air rare enough to be measured in the lungs and appreciated in its thinness, its lack of substance.” (188) As a bonus, the jacket art, by Tom Haugomat, beautifully evokes the travel posters of the period.

More Historical Novels

Four novels, set in four different periods of the twentieth century. (To read additional reviews of historical novels, click here and here.)

• The World War I Era

The Bookbinder     Pip Williams     (2023)  I’ve been avoiding novels set in the trenches of World War I because the blood-and-guts horrors are just too much for me. But The Bookbinder takes place in placid Oxford, England, focusing on the women left behind, with a few letters from a nurse in France. Peggy and Maude are twin sisters who work in the bindery of Oxford’s highly respected university press. Maude has disabilities that make this repetitive work ideal for her, but Peggy is bored, wishing for much more intellectual stimulation. When Belgian war refugees arrive in Oxford, a romance element to the plot emerges, to intersect with the story of Peggy’s quest to attend university. The pace of this novel is slow, with descriptions of the minutiae of daily life and details of hand bookbinding, but hang in there. The action picks up, and weighty themes (women’s rights, the morality of war, the treatment of the disabled) emerge. A companion novel to The Bookbinder is Pip Williams’s bestselling The Dictionary of Lost Words. Watch for a review of the latter in an upcoming post on this blog.

• The World War II Era

Beyond That, the Sea     Laura Spence-Ash     (2023) First, my minor quibbles: a few language inaccuracies and a lot of coincidences. Those noted, I really liked the unusual plot and the well-drawn characters in this novel. At the start of World War II, Beatrix Thompson, age 11, is evacuated from war-ravaged London. Unlike some British child evacuees who ended up in rural England with exploitative farmers, Beatrix is sent to Boston to live with the kind and welcoming Gregory family. One of the Gregory sons is two years older than Beatrix, and one is two years younger. Can you foresee a love triangle forming?  She ends up staying with the Gregorys until the end of the war, when she reluctantly returns to her London family. The story travels on until 1977, as Beatrix (“Bea” in the US, “Trixie” in the UK) tries to find her place in the world.

• 1959/2018

Homecoming     Kate Morton     (2023)  You either love Kate Morton’s novels or you gasp, “No way am I slogging through 544 pages!” I slogged through Homecoming, letting myself become fully immersed in the exceedingly complex plot, chock full of Morton’s characteristic flashbacks and secrets and instances of doubtful paternity—and more secrets. Here is the basic outline: In December 2018, Australian-born Jess Turner-Bridges, who has long lived in London, receives word that her beloved grandmother has been hospitalized in Sydney. Jess flies to Australia and accidentally learns about a terrible family tragedy that occurred on Christmas Eve of 1959. We’re off and running! Morton often anchors her novels’ extravagantly wide-ranging plots in spectacular landscapes and/or houses—here it’s the Adelaide Hills and magnificent houses there and in Sydney. Most people have room for at least one Kate Morton novel in their lives. You could read this one, or you could check out my reviews of two of her other family-saga mysteries: The Clockmaker’s Daughter and The Lake House.

• The Turn of the (Most Recent) Millennium

Attachments     Rainbow Rowell     (2011)  Remember the Y2K scare back in 1999? Media hype had us all worried that computers around the world would crash on January 1, 2000, because of the use of two-digit abbreviations for years. Attachments takes place in the years 1999 and 2000, with this Y2K angst as a backdrop. Lincoln, an introverted computer security specialist at a newspaper in Nebraska, is charged with following up on employee emails that have been flagged as possibly inappropriate. He reads lengthy personal exchanges between the newspaper’s copy editor (Jennifer) and entertainment writer (Beth), and he falls in love with Beth, whom he has never met. The pop culture references from the turn of the millennium are nostalgic, and the circuitous route by which Lincoln and Beth eventually get together is hilarious. As I raced through this novel, Rainbow Rowell had me laughing out loud at hundreds of witty emails.