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Reviews

Reviews

by Bret Anthony Johnston - Fiction

Since Justin Campbell's disappearance four years ago, his family has been stuck in the grooves of grief. They are unable to comfort themselves, let alone one another. Then the impossible happens: Justin has been found only miles away, completely okay. Though the reunion is a miracle, Justin’s homecoming exposes the deep rifts that have diminished his family, the wounds they all carry that may never fully heal.

by George Prochnik - Biography, History, Nonfiction

By the 1930s, Stefan Zweig had become the most widely translated living author in the world. Yet, after Hitler’s rise to power, this celebrated writer plummeted into an increasingly isolated exile, where, in 1942, he killed himself. THE IMPOSSIBLE EXILE tells the tragic story of Zweig’s extraordinary rise and fall while also depicting the gulf between the world of ideas in Europe and in America, and the consuming struggle of those forced to forsake one for the other.

by Peter Matthiessen - Fiction

In the winter of 1996, more than a hundred individuals gather at the site of a former concentration camp for a weeklong retreat. They will offer prayer and witness at the crematoria, while eating and sleeping in the quarters of the Nazi officers who sent more than a million Jews to their deaths. Clements Olin, an American academic of Polish descent, is forced to abandon his observer’s role and embrace a history his family has long suppressed.

by Ward Just - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Harry Sanders is a young foreign service officer in 1960s Indochina when a dangerous and clandestine meeting with insurgents --- and a brief but passionate encounter with Sieglinde, a young German woman --- alters the course of his life. He marries the captivating May, who is fleeing her own family disappointments. On the surface, they are a handsome, successful couple --- but the memory of Sieglinde persists in Harry’s thoughts, and May has her own secrets.

by Kevin Brockmeier - Nonfiction

Over the course of one school year --- seventh grade --- 12-year-old Kevin Brockmeier sets out in search of himself. Along the way, he happens into his first kiss at a church party, struggles to understand why his old friends tease him at the lunch table, becomes the talk of the entire school thanks to his Halloween costume, and booby-traps his lunch to deter a thief.

by Tova Mirvis - Fiction

Nina is a harried young mother who spends her evenings spying on the older couple across the street, drawn to their quiet contentment. One night, through that same window, she spies a young couple in the throes of passion. In the coming weeks, Nina encounters the older couple, their daughter and her fiancé, and many others on the streets of her Upper West Side neighborhood, eroding the safe distance of her secret vigils.

by Walter Kirn - Nonfiction, True Crime

In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn set out to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. Thus began a 15-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper and brutal murderer.

by Molly Antopol - Fiction, Short Stories

THE UNAMERICANS, a stunning exploration of characters shaped by the forces of history, is the debut work of fiction by Molly Antopol, a 2013 National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree. Again and again, Antopol’s deeply sympathetic characters struggle for footing in an uncertain world, hounded by forces beyond their control.

by Rebecca Mead - Nonfiction

Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's MIDDLEMARCH. After gaining admission to Oxford and moving to the US to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread MIDDLEMARCH, which offered her something that modern life and literature did not. Here, she leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written.

by David R. Dow - Nonfiction

In THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EXECUTION, David Dow enraptured readers with a searing and frank exploration of his work defending inmates on death row. But when Dow's father-in-law receives his own death sentence in the form of terminal cancer, and his gentle dog Winona suffers acute liver failure, the author is forced to reconcile with death in a far more personal way --- both as a son and as a father.