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Reviews

Reviews

by Lynn Cullen - Fiction, Historical Fiction

In TWAIN'S END, Lynn Cullen reimagines the tangled relationships between Mark Twain, his private secretary Isabel V. Lyon, and his business manager Ralph Ashcroft, as well as the little-known love triangle between Helen Keller, her teacher Anne Sullivan Macy, and Anne’s husband John Macy, which comes to light during their visit to Twain’s Connecticut home in 1909. Add to the party a furious Clara Clemens, smarting from her own failed love affair, and carefully kept veneers shatter.

by Rosie Thomas - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Nancy Wix, daughter of the stage impresarios Eliza and Devil, must find a way to keep London’s Palmyra theatre afloat, and to entertain audiences who have lost husbands and sons in the first World War. Nancy is a born performer, but she is set apart --- even from her beloved brothers --- by her psychic gifts. As another war begins to threaten the world, Nancy is forced into a final, fateful confrontation with her demons, and must marshal both her ingenuity and her mysterious talents to fight for the survival of friendship, independence and family.

by Meg Waite Clayton - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Opening in Normandy on June 29, 1944, THE RACE FOR PARIS follows two American female war correspondents on their quest to document (and make) history by covering the Allied liberation of Paris. Jane is a young, single journalist for the Nashville Banner. When she’s assigned to cover a field hospital, she meets Olivia, “Liv,” an Associated Press photographer. However, due to their gender, Liv and Jane are constantly confronted by red tape. Reluctantly accompanied by Fletcher, a male British military reporter, the two women go AWOL and chase their story through gunfire, carnage and death scarring the French countryside. 

by Natasha Pulley - Fantasy, Fiction, Historical Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Mystery

1883. Thaniel Steepleton returns home to his tiny London apartment to find a gold pocket watch on his pillow. Six months later, the mysterious timepiece saves his life, drawing him away from a blast that destroys Scotland Yard. At last, he goes in search of its maker, Keita Mori, a kind, lonely immigrant from Japan. Although Mori seems harmless, a chain of unexplainable events soon suggests he must be hiding something. When Grace Carrow, an Oxford physicist, unwittingly interferes, Thaniel is torn between opposing loyalties.

by Tatiana de Rosnay - Fiction, Romance, Short Stories

What takes place in Paris when husbands and wives tangle with infidelity? In this compulsively readable collection, Tatiana de Rosnay paints a portrait of forbidden loves in many shades --- sometimes tragic, sometimes humorous, sometimes heartfelt, always with a dry wit and unflinching authenticity. A PARIS AFFAIR will take you on a vacation overseas, into the hidden lives of husbands, wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, where illicit desire wars with duty, and where a French take on romance will surprise you every time.

by Alex Grecian - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

When London discovered that Jack the Ripper was back, it sent Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad into chaos. But now it is even worse. There are two of them. When the Harvest Man begins killing, carving people’s faces off their skulls, the men of the Yard know they need Inspector Walter Day to find him before more families are murdered. Meanwhile, Saucy Jack is playing his own games --- and when the two killers come together, the men of the Yard may never be the same.

by Bruce Holsinger - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

When 16 bodies turn up in London riddled with small puncture holes, everyone is stumped and seems to be hiding something. That’s when John Gower, a poor poet but excellent trader of secrets, is at his best. Summoned to investigate these strange murders, Gower finds only treachery and the possibility of a very real threat to the city and its inhabitants: a terrifying new weapon very few know of --- the handgonne.

by Susanna Kearsley - Fiction

Jacobite exile Mary Dundas is filled with longing --- for freedom, for adventure, for the family she lost. When fate opens the door, Mary dares to set her foot on a path far more surprising and dangerous than she ever could have dreamed. Meanwhile, amateur codebreaker Sara Thomas faces events in her own life that require letting go of everything she thought she knew. Though divided by centuries, these two women are united in a quest to discover the limits of trust and the unlikely coincidences of fate.

by C. W. Gortner - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Coco Chanel was a woman with a vision who fought every convention of her time to become the most iconic fashion designer the world has ever known. She hit her stride in the 1920s with a style that freed women and money that brought her a freedom she had never known. As her reputation and business reached new heights, Chanel became the woman every man wanted and every woman wanted to be.

by Tom McCarthy - Fiction

U., a “corporate anthropologist,” is tasked with writing the Great Report, an all-encompassing ethnographic document that would sum up our era. Yet at every turn, he feels himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in buffer zones, wandering through crowds of apparitions, willing them to coalesce into symbols that can be translated into some kind of account that makes sense. As he begins to wonder if the Great Report might remain a shapeless, oozing plasma, his senses are startled awake by a dream of an apocalyptic cityscape.