Michelle Collins Anderson’s, “The Moonshine Women,” is a novel full of beautiful  descriptions—the land, the animals, the people, the scents, and even tastes all come to life with her prose. The story has it all, family drama, romance, adventure, and even a Cinderella moment or two. The book is set in the early 1900s when most farmers in the Ozarks made moonshine for their own consumption and trading. Grandma Lidy passed down the Strong family recipe to her son Hiram and he

“How to Survive in the Woods,” by Kat Rosenfield, is a chilling novel fraught with tension. Themes of betrayal, loyalty, and survival, both in nature and in relationships, are imbued in this 300-page book.          Emma is a young, brilliant entrepreneur who has created an international company that develops exercise, health supplements, and behavioral programs based on a person’s genetic profile. She has become one of the wealthiest women in the world in very short order. He

Dr. Hugo Rustin, chief surgeon at the Imperial College Hospital, arrives at work days after top officials have fled the capital city in response to The Emergency, a total collapse of the orderly society he and his family have lived in for years. He was fully expecting to be named director of the institution after the approaching retirement of its current chief executive. He is astonished to learn that, like the whole of society, the hierarchy of the hospital has been upended

The City of El Paso is often referred to as the "Ellis Island" of the United States' southern border. Translated as "mountain pass," El Paso has a twin city across the Rio Grande, Ciudad Juárez. Crossing the Pasa Del Norte Bridge,   from Juárez Avenue to South El Paso Street, immigrants seeking to enter the U.S. leave behind their beleaguered pasts  and embrace opportunity, promise, and hope. Ulloa opens her book by recounting the August 3rd, 2019 mass shooting at the El Pas

Irish author Colm Toibin has published 11 novels, multiple short story collections, screenplays and commentary. He was professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester, and is currently Silverman Professor of Humanities at Columbia University Toibin’s Ellis Lacey novels, “Long Island” and “Brooklyn,” his most recent, follow the story of an Irish immigrant over two decades. Each novel is woven through with themes of love, loss and deep family ties. Toibin’s late

Celia, the protagonist in the novel “Evil Genius” narrates her dramatic, sad story over a period of days. Celia progresses from living a predictable life as a phone operator in San Francisco to that of a woman on the run after being a suspect in two murders that occurred in her own home.       Celia is a naive and innocent 19-year-old when her mentally unstable and dying mother begs the attentive hospital scrub tech to take care of her daughter by marrying her. Celia complies

“The Infamous Gilberts,” by Angela Tomaski, is a dark, humorous novel that spans several decades. The story focuses on the wealthy, yet eccentric, Gilberts, a family who live in a once stately English manor known as Thornwalk. The country manor is now crumbling and has been sold to a luxury hotelier to be transformed, erasing all of its history, character, secrets and memories. The story is narrated by the Gilberts’ neighbor and friend Maximus. He leads readers on a room-to-

January 7, 2025, marked the outbreak of several of the costliest wildfires in the history of the United States. The Palisades fire and the Eaton fire, both in Los Angeles County, burned for 24 days before being confined on January 31. Fueled by underbrush starved for moisture (the area had seen no measurable rainfall for eight months) and Santa Ana winds of epic velocities, the two fires combined to kill more than 30 people and destroy more than 16,000 buildings. NBC TV jour

In Rebecca Fallon’s debut novel, twins Sebastian and Viola, spend their lives from age 7 through their 20s inescapably longing to know their deceased actress mother and resenting their father’s refusal to let them know about her.          “Family Drama” is set mainly in Harvard between 1997 and 2013. When the twins were 7-years-old, they watched as their mother, Susan Bliss, was buried at sea in the Atlantic Ocean following a terminal illness. They are confused; their father

A woman whose family is lost in a tsunami “adopts” a homeless young girl and raises her as a boy. A college-bound young woman commits her special needs older brother to a state institution after the death of their mother. A young man suffers a serious allergic reaction after his girlfriend’s younger sister switches sandwiches at a picnic. These, and other of the six stories in Lauren Groff’s latest short story collection, “Brawler,” involve death or other tragic outcomes l

Andrew Ross Sorkin chronicles in striking detail the story of greed, corruption, and incompetence associated with the October 1929 New York Stock Exchange crash. His latest book, “1929,” reads like a true crime story, focusing on the lives of 75 key figures who watched as the stock market went into free fall and their fortunes collapsed.   The personal experience of "Sunshine Charlie" Mitchell, the president of National City Bank of New York, sets a recurring theme of the tit

First time novelist Patmeena Sabit was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. As an infant she and her family fled to Pakistan after the Soviet invasion of her native land in 1979. The family immigrated to the United States, where she grew up in Virginia before moving to Canada, where she attended McGill University. Sabit’s debut novel, “Good People,” is based on her experiences as an Afghan native attempting to assimilate into Western culture. The novel tells the story of the Sharaf

American author Joy Williams is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Project. She is the author of five novels published over the span of a half-century. “Harrow,” her most recent novel, appeared in 2021. She is also the author of numerous short stories, twelve of which are included in her recent collection “The Pelican Child.” Williams’s characters are often middle-class, trembling on the brink of losing their status, or often in the process of doing so. In an introductory note i

Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel “The Long Goodbye” features a character based upon Chandler himself: a writer, both successful and alcoholic. Julian Barnes’s most recent publication, “Departure(s),” could be considered the author’s last goodbye. He states, in the first few pages, that “This will be my last book.” And he repeats the statement in the book’s last pages as well, making “Departure(s) ”Barnes’s own “long goodbye.” The book calls itself a novel, but it does not conf

Readers of Mary Kubica’s novel “It’s Not Her” will be hard-pressed to avoid being shocked at the twist and turns happening in Kubica’s newest book.          Two families related to each other vacation at a run-down resort several hours north of Chicago. Elliot, father to Cass and husband of Courtney, vacationed there years ago and he remembers it as being lovely and comfortable. Now, it is not.  Elliot and family are in a small, musty cabin. The playground equipment is rusty,

"Fearless and Free" is a memoir from a black, talented, rule-breaking girl born in 1906 in St. Louis, Mo. It is a compilation of conversations French journalist Marcel Sauvage had over the course of 20 years with American expatriate entertainer Josephine Baker. Born into poverty, Baker made her debut in Philadelphia at age 16. She moved to New York at 17, where she found a better-paying job on Broadway dancing in the Black musical "Shuffle Along." Baker left the US for the P

Edge of your seat thriller, “The First Time I Saw Him,” by Laura Dave, is a sequel to her bestseller, “The Last Thing He Told Me,” published in 2021. In her first book, Dave introduces the reader to the Michaels Family. Bailey is a typical 16-year-old, unhappy with her new stepmom, Hannah. Her father, Owen, seems like any other dad in Sausalito; that is until he disappears leaving behind a duffle bag of money and a cryptic note for Hannah to “protect her.” The FBI comes kno

American author George Saunders, after earning a degree in Geophysical Engineering, worked a series of technical jobs until he entered the M.F.A. program at Syracuse University. In1997 he was appointed to the Syracuse faculty, where he has taught until the present day. Saunders’s first novel, 2017’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction. The novel is set in the Bardo, a Buddhist concept of the status of the soul between death and reincarnation. Sa

“The Seven Daughters of Dupree,” by Nikesha Elise Williams, is a multigenerational story that focuses on the lives of generations of women who share the Dupree name.  As layers of their family history are slowly revealed readers learn that their pasts were full of pain, love and sacrifice. The historical revelations of the story begin in 1995 when 14-year-old Tati begins uncovering the identity of her father, even though her mother Nadia has ignored all of Tati’s previous re

I have rarely read a novel about the exploration of uncharted territory  (in this case Tibet) that so vividly describes the hardships of mapping “a blank space” in the world. At the same time, the descriptions of the absolute beauty and wonders of the country, home of the Himalayas and Mount Everest, made me feel that I was accompanying the explorers on a very trying journey.         In 1869, two explorers set out to map cities and rivers that run through Tibet. They do not k