book review

Raymond Chandler’s ‘Nightmare’ revealed in rarely seen sketch

October 11, 2025 Hillel Italie

NEW YORK — In his dreams, Raymond Chandler could conjure tales as unsettling as some of his greatest novels, as if haunted by the spirits of Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe. “Nightmare,” a brief and […]

Book review: Literary mystery meets dystopian future in Ian McEwan’s ‘What We Can Know’

October 4, 2025 Jill Lawless

LONDON — When novelists look to the future, the view is often grim. There are a lot more fictional dystopias than utopias. Ian McEwan has good news and bad news about what lies ahead in […]

Book Review: Evidence of historian David McCullough’s curiosity abounds in ‘History Matters’

September 20, 2025 Andrew DeMillo

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough told an audience in 2012 that writing history was like working on a detective case. “And once on the case, you want to know more and more and […]

Book Review: Stranger stalks novelist on book tour in ‘All This Could Be Yours’

September 13, 2025 Bruce DeSilva

Author Hank Phillippi Ryan has written a crime novel titled “All This Could Be Yours” about an author on tour to promote a crime novel titled “All This Could Be Yours.” As Ryan says in […]

Book Review: Renaissance scholar illuminates brief, transgressive life of poet Christopher Marlowe

September 6, 2025 Ann Levin

The English poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe was born in 1564, the same year as his frenemy William Shakespeare. Yet unless you majored in English in college, it is quite possible you never heard of […]

Book Review: Teen girl murdered in paradise in twisty thriller ‘High Season’

August 30, 2025 Connie Panzariello

Katie Bishop finds heart and poignancy at the center of her artfully crafted thriller, “High Season,” setting it apart from other by-the-numbers beach reads. At the center of the story is Nina Drayton, who, 20 […]

Book Review: Debut novelist Aisha Muharrar deftly explores love, loss in ‘Loved One’

August 23, 2025 Rob Merrill

I picked up a copy of “Loved One” based solely on the fact that its first-time author, Aisha Muharrar, was involved in three television comedies that made me laugh: “Hacks, “Parks and Recreation” and “The […]

Book Review: Jason Mott’s ‘People Like Us’ explores struggles of semi-fame, American identity

August 16, 2025 Clare Solly

How does one follow up writing “A Hell of a Book” that wins the National Book Award? If you’re Jason Mott, you write a sort-of, not-really, by all legal terms fictionalized — according to the […]

Book Review: ‘You Belong Here’ explores dangers of going home again

August 9, 2025 Connie Panzariello

Megan Miranda treads overly familiar territory in “You Belong Here,” the story of a woman forced to return to the town that once suspected her of involvement in a terrible crime — a plot that […]

Book Review: ‘The Tilting House’ explores coming of age in Communist Cuba

August 2, 2025 Anita Snow

Yuri is a 16-year-old orphan who lives simply with her religious aunt in a big, old house in Communist Cuba in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yuri’s parents had named her […]